Climate Change Thread

[Montmorency]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/c...newables.html/

In just the first four and a half months of this year, America’s fleet of wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric dams have produced more electricity than coal on 90 separate days — shattering last year’s record of 38 days for the entire year. On May 1 in Texas, wind power alone supplied nearly three times as much electricity as coal did.

The latest report from the Energy Information Administration estimates that America’s total coal consumption will fall by nearly one-quarter this year, and coal plants are expected to provide just 19 percent of the nation’s electricity, dropping for the first time below both nuclear power and renewable power, a category that includes wind, solar, hydroelectric dams, geothermal and biomass.

Natural gas plants, which supply 38 percent of the nation’s power, are expected to hold their output steady thanks to low fuel prices.

The decline of coal has major consequences for climate change.

Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, and its decline has already helped drive down United States carbon dioxide emissions 15 percent since 2005. This year, the agency expects America’s emissions to fall by another 11 percent, the largest drop in at least 70 years. While the pandemic has made these projections uncertain, the decline is expected to come partly because Americans aren’t driving as much, but mainly because coal plants are running less often.

The United States is not yet at the point reached in Britain, which now goes for weeks at a time without using any coal power at all. But some parts of the United States are now getting an early preview of life where coal is on the decline and renewables are soaring. “In some parts of the country, we’re now seeing renewable penetration hit 60 or 70 percent on some days,” said Nat Kreamer, chief executive of Advanced Energy Economy, a clean-energy business group, “and no one’s screaming that they can’t do that.”

But -

Republicans urge Trump to bar banks from shunning fossil fuel loans

A group of Republican lawmakers from energy-producing states on Friday called on President Donald Trump to prevent banks from halting loans and investments with companies that produce oil and other fossil fuels while they have access to federal assistance programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Wall Street’s big banks ... should not be able to reap the benefits of participating in federally guaranteed loan programs laid out in the CARES Act, such as the Paycheck Protection Program or the trillion dollar Federal Reserve facility lending programs, while simultaneously targeting American energy companies and workers,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Trump.

Democratic lawmakers like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who want an economic recovery featuring investments in conservation and alternative energy to fight climate change, have been calling on Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to bar oil and gas companies from accessing loans through the Main Street facility.

Many energy companies have been struggling to stave off bankruptcy due to a meltdown in global crude prices after governments around the world issued stay-at-home orders that obliterated demand for motor and jet fuel.

For years, environmental activists have pressured banks and financial firms to drop support of fossil fuel companies.

The Republican lawmakers, led by Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and Representatives Don Young of Alaska and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, accused some major U.S. financial institutions of halting fossil fuel investments to “placate the environmental fringe.” They specifically cited BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest asset manager, which has been given a central role in the COVID-19 corporate recovery as a fiduciary to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

BlackRock announced in January it was divesting from coal burned in power plants. Its global head of sustainable investing, Brian Deese, was a White House climate official under former President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

“Considering BlackRock’s central role as a Federal Reserve fiduciary for the distribution of CARES Act credit facilities, its hostility towards the American energy sector is unacceptable and should be closely scrutinized,” the lawmakers wrote.

The lawmakers urged Trump to use “every administrative and regulatory tool” to prevent those institutions from participating in federal lending programs while “discriminating” against investments in parts of the energy sector, but did not specify what measures could be taken.

A spokesman for BlackRock said the company will execute its mandate as a fiduciary to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York “at the sole discretion of the bank, and in accordance with their detailed investment guidelines, in order to provide broad support to credit markets and achieve the government’s objective of supporting access to credit for U.S. employers and supporting the American economy.”

Obviously we need central planning to rescue Coal and Oil, the pillars of American greatness.

[CrossLOPER]

Obviously we need central planning to rescue Coal and Oil, the pillars of American greatness.

Can't they just invest in something else to make money? It seems like a lot of effort to prop up a technology that is dying by itself.

[Tuuvi]

It seems like the Republicans have swallowed their own propaganda and they're too ideologically invested in fossil fuels to give up on them, even if it doesn't make good financial sense.

[CrossLOPER]

It seems like the Republicans have swallowed their own propaganda and they're too ideologically invested in fossil fuels to give up on them, even if it doesn't make good financial sense.

Possibly. They seem genuinely surprised that reopening the economy wasn't just a matter of an "on" switch. I guess the question is what the tipping point is, or if things are set for a massive disaster to wipe away several world powers. Based on their behavior now, I don't think that China, Russia, the US or Brazil are capable of a concentrated effort and the collapse of any one of these would cause considerable problems.

[edyzmedieval]

I've been following the daily updates prompted out by Bloomberg - if you want you can subscribe here -> https://www.bloomberg.com/green - and a lot of the reports are focused on the demise of coal. Despite it having a slight resurgence in the past 4 years, coal is definitely on the way out and most likely will be phased out fully in the next 15-20 years.

Furthermore, significant economic growth & rebounding can be done with green investments, something which a number of wealth funds are betting on.

[Montmorency]

Uh-oh.

For a decade, her team had been sampling the air from sensors on aircraft flying over the world’s largest rainforest. Their collating of recent results showed that, perhaps for the first time in thousands of years, a large part of the Amazon had switched from absorbing CO2 from the air, damping down global warming, to being a “source” of the greenhouse gas and thus speeding up warming.

[edyzmedieval]

So in other words, the goose is no longer cooked, it's close to being burnt?