Month: January 2021

Politics and Policy

Prioritizing environmental justice, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday establishing a White House interagency council on environmental justice, created an office of health and climate equity at the Health and Human Services Department, and formed a separate environmental justice office at the Justice Department.  Other actions were also taken, causing immediate pushback from the fossil fuel industry and its allies in Congress.  Among those actions was a commitment to an ambitious conservation goal and a redetermination of the social cost of carbon.  Greentech Media noted that Wednesday’s orders centered on directing federal agencies to shift existing spending because passing new legislation will be difficult.  Biden also said climate change should be regarded as “an essential element of US foreign policy,” while Defense Secretary Llyod Austin announced that climate change “is a national security issue, and we must treat it as such.”

Greentech Media staff writer Julian Spector considered how budget reconciliation could be used to pass a bill requiring electric utilities to produce 100% clean energy by 2035.  A FEMA proposal could free up funds to support infrastructure such as seawalls and relocating homes prone to flooding.  At her Senate confirmation hearing, Biden’s nominee for energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, defended the administration’s push for a clean energy transition.  Meanwhile, opposition against Biden’s Interior Department nominee, Deb Haaland, became more vocal.  A new report from Americans for a Clean Energy Grid called on FERC to launch a new rulemaking effort aimed at boosting an interregional electric transmission buildout, a goal shared by both former and current FERC chairs.  However, S&P Global pointed out that opponents to infrastructure projects for renewables may be able to deploy some of the same legal tactics that upended the pipeline sector.

The Federal Reserve announced the creation of a new committee to deepen the central bank’s understanding of the risks that climate change poses to the financial system.  Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to eliminate subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, but it included a key phrase, “as consistent with applicable law.”  Grist unpacked this phrase and its implications for what can be done.  Twitter accounts run by machines are a major source of climate change disinformation that might drain support from policies to address rising temperatures.

The UN Development Program questioned 1.2 million people in 50 countries about climate change and found that two-thirds think it is a “global emergency”.  Climate envoy John Kerry made it clear that the US wasn’t just increasing its own efforts to reduce oil, gas, and coal pollution, but that we intend to push everyone in the world to do more, too.  World leaders met at a virtual summit to discuss the need for rich nations to spend more on helping developing countries adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.  Global supply chains, remittances, and migration mean global warming risks in one place can hit others — but improving efforts to adapt can bring shared benefits, researchers say.  The leaders of two UK environmental charities have written to Mark Carney, the UN climate envoy, to raise concerns over a blueprint for carbon offsetting that could result in billions of new carbon credits being sold around the world.  Australia will effectively be abandoning the Paris Climate Agreement unless it makes at least a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reaches net zero well before 2050, according to an analysis by policymakers and scientists.

Climate and Climate Science

In a commentary in the journal Nature, climate scientist Richard Betts argued that because scientists have developed techniques to attribute disasters to human-caused climate change, they should be applied routinely to help governments act on their responsibilities and improve resilience to extreme weather.  A new study in the journal Nature Sustainability incorporated the damages that climate change does to healthy ecosystems into standard climate-economics models, leading to the conclusion that the standard models have been underestimating the cost of climate damages to society by a factor of more than five.

Emphasizing that the point of recognizing existential threats is to avoid them, ecologist and MacArthur Fellow Carl Safina discussed the stark “perspective” article by 17 of the world’s leading ecologists in last week’s issue of Frontiers in Conservation Science.  The New York Times published an interesting infographic that showed the vulnerabilities of countries all over the world to climate disasters.  Nearly a half-million people, mostly from the world’s poorest countries, died over the past two decades from conditions associated with climate disasters, according to this year’s “Global Climate Risk Index” report.  In 2020, Earth was besieged by a record 50 weather disasters costing a billion dollars or more, the most such disasters ever recorded, said insurance broker Aon in its annual report issued Monday.

Earth is hotter now than it has been for at least 12,000 years, a period spanning the entire development of human civilization, according to research published in the journal Nature.

The melting of ice across the planet is accelerating and is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the IPCC, according to a paper published in the journal The Cryosphere.  Furthermore, NASA-led research showed that the undercutting of glaciers by relatively mild ocean waters explains why so many of Greenland’s glaciers have sped-up their movement into the ocean.  Scientists have determined that the blooms of algae on the surface of the ice in Greenland are triggered by wind-blown dust containing phosphorus, a limiting nutrient for the microbes.  Last week, for the first time, three liquified natural gas tankers travelled the Northern Sea Route to Asia without icebreaker escorts.  The decline of sea ice in the Bering Sea is changing almost everything about the region.  Peter Sinclair’s latest “This is not Cool” video is about the ice jams at the entrance to Nares Strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, through which the Arctic’s oldest and thickest sea ice flows to the Baffin Bay, the Labrador Sea, and then the Atlantic Ocean. 

An area the size of Israel was deforested in the Amazon biome last year as destruction surged 21% in the region, suggesting that without a reduction in deforestation, the Amazon rainforest will reach a tipping point in 10 to 20 years, after which it will enter a sustained death spiral as it dries out and turns into a savanna.

Energy

Biden signed an executive order to “Buy American”, which he says will include replacing hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the federal government fleet, including the Postal Service, with US-made electric vehicles  (EVs), raising the question of how he will achieve it.  General Motors announced Thursday that it will end the sale of all gasoline- and diesel-powered passenger cars and light sports utility vehicles by 2035.  Nissan Motor Co said all its “new vehicle offerings” in key markets would be electrified by the early 2030s, as part of its efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.  Toyota Motor Corp. is increasing the manufacturing of parts for hydrogen fuel call vehicles, following the December unveiling of its second generation Mirai, a hydrogen-powered sedan.  National Geographic examined the question of whether all of this means that EVs’ moment has arrived.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called on all companies “to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net-zero economy.”  Over 400 companies across some of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitting industries — from shipping to steelmaking — have agreed to work together on plans to decarbonize by 2050, according to a coalition of climate advocacy groups that set up the partnership.

Rating agency S&P has warned 13 oil and gas companies, including some of the world’s biggest, that it may downgrade them within weeks because of increasing competition from renewable energy.  BP’s oil exploration team has been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney.

According to a new report, EU countries generated more electricity from renewables than from coal and gas for the first time ever in 2020, but the pace of deployment through the 2020s will need to more than double that of the 2010s if the EU is going to hit its target of a 55% reduction in emissions by 2030.  A new report from the Sierra Club found that almost no U.S. utilities, including Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power, are on track to reduce CO₂ emissions by 80% by 2030 compared to a 2005 baseline; rather, most utilities’ plans put them on a path to much more modest carbon reductions.  Not surprisingly, the utility sector defended its approach to the decarbonization process.

RMI’s newest report, Seeds of Opportunity, addresses the question of what the growth of the renewable energy industry means for rural America.  Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) called on the state legislature to implement a 10-year moratorium on offshore wind projects in state-managed waters, citing a need to keep the fishing industry engaged in ongoing talks about such development.

Potpourri

In “The Shortlist” at The New York Times, Tatiana Schlossberg presented three books that offer new ways to think about environmental disaster.  At Literary Hub, Amy Brady recommended five inspiring books for 2021.  Maxine Joselow interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann about his new book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.  Jeff Masters reviewed it at Yale Climate Connections.  The 36-year-old Canadian musician Tamara Lindeman’s piercing new album, “Ignorance,” explores the emotional impacts of climate change.  Climate scientists are dealing with a strange new feeling now that Biden is president: optimism.  Kate Yoder argued at Grist that the way we talk about science makes it a polarizing topic.  Salla, Finland, has released a video promoting its bid for the 2032 Summer Olympics!  Enjoy.

Closing Thought

For our “Closing Thought” this week, watch and listen to Amanda Gorman’s December 2018 recitation of her poem “Earthrise.”

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Politics and Policy

During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Joe Biden returned the US to the Paris Climate Agreement (PCA) and ordered federal agencies to review scores of climate and environmental policies enacted during the Trump years and, if possible, quickly reverse them.  (An article without a paywall is here.)  He also revoked the construction permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, prompting indigenous leaders to call for him to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline.  The new administration also reestablished an interagency working group and ordered it to update the social cost of carbon within 30 days.  Inside Climate News presented a compilation of the major actions on Day One, but legal experts warned that it could take two to three years to put many of the old rules back in place.  In addition, Biden is expected to announce a second round of executive orders focused on combating climate change next Wednesday and to convene an international climate summit in April to help accelerate emissions cuts.  The Washington Post has started tracking the Biden administration’s unwinding of Trump’s climate change “legacy.”  For example, Biden elevated Richard Glick, a Democrat, to chair of FERC.

On Tuesday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy rule, paving the way for the enactment of new and stronger restrictions on power plants.  In a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen said she planned to start a new Treasury “hub” that would examine financial system risks arising from climate change.  The new administration will likely use the Congressional Review Act to reverse some of the Trump administrations rules, but they must jump through several hoops to do so.  President Biden wants to use an infrastructure bill to simultaneously boost the economy and act on climate, but there will be obstacles to such an effort.  The Interior Department took swift action to block oil and gas drilling on public lands, freezing such leases for the next 60 days.

By interviewing more than 20 officials and advocates around the globe, Politico sought to determine what the world wants from John Kerry on climate.  Meanwhile, Kerry vowed during an appearance at an Italian climate conference that the Biden administration would make up for the past four years of climate inaction.  Environmental advocates want the Biden administration to use US trade agreements to fight climate change by conditioning future agreements on partners’ ability to meet their targets under the PCA.  Coal mining will continue to generate wealth for Australians for decades to come, Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared in a statement fending off calls to phase out fossil fuels and toughen action on climate change.  However, pressure from the US and Australian states could cause him to change his tune.  China’s coal output rose last year to its highest since 2015, despite Beijing’s climate change pledge to reduce coal’s consumption.  The president of the European Investment Bank announced that the bank intends to end all funding for fossil fuels before the end of the year.  Along with promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, under the PCA world leaders also agreed to prepare for the unavoidable and mounting impacts of climate change, but adaptation efforts are lagging.

On its final full day in office, among other things, the Trump administration finalized lease sales to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The US Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday on whether a lawsuit brought by the city of Baltimore against oil and gas companies belongs in state courts, where the plaintiffs want it, or the federal courts, where the oil companies want it.  Amy Coney Barrett was among the justices who heard the arguments, despite her father’s longstanding ties to Shell Oil Company, one of the defendants in the case.  In a change of position, the US Chamber of Commerce said Congress should pass laws pushing companies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, declaring “We believe that durable climate policy must be made by Congress.”  They also endorsed a market-based approach.  The clean energy sector in the US lost 429,000 jobs last year due to the economic impacts of COVID-19 and 70% have yet to be recovered.

Climate and Climate Science

A paper in Communications Earth and Environment presented an integrated approach to accounting for uncertainties in estimating the remaining carbon budget associated with a given temperature rise.  For a 1.5°C rise above preindustrial temperatures they estimated the remaining budget to be 230 Gt CO₂ for a 66% chance of staying below a 1.5°C rise and 440 Gt CO₂ for a 33% chance.  An attribution study published in Nature Climate Change found that greenhouse gas emissions released by humans accounted for the vast majority of global temperature rise observed from pre-industrial times to today, while natural factors had a “negligible” effect.  Methane leaking out of the more than 4 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the US and Canada is a far greater contributor to climate change than government estimates suggest, according to a new paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

The World Economic Forum published a surprisingly frank essay by Peter Giger, Group Chief Risk Officer of the Zurich Insurance Group, in which he said humans were playing a game of Jenga with Earth’s climate system.  Because of the importance of modeling in charting a course through the climate crisis, a team of climatologists, oceanographers, and computer scientists on the East and West US coasts has launched a bold effort to develop a new generation of climate models.  For those who like to keep up with how well current models are doing in projecting Earth’s temperature in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, RealClimate has updated its model-observation comparison page with an additional annual observational point for 2020.

Heat-related illnesses are soaring in Arizona and Florida as the planet warms and poor communities are bearing the brunt of the impact.  A paper in Nature Climate Change found that climate change will dramatically shift the globe’s tropical rain belt, threatening the food security of billions of people.

Research, published in Nature, found that lake heatwaves could become between three and 12 times longer by the end of this century – and between 0.3°C and 1.7°C hotter.  Of the 14 species of salmon and steelhead trout in Washington State that are endangered, ten are lagging recovery goals and five of those are considered “in crisis.”

A new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that beneath the surface layer of waters circling Antarctica, the seas are warming much more rapidly than previously known, and this relatively warm water is rising toward the surface at a rate three to 10 times previous estimates, endangering the stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Energy

In a 9% increase over 2019, the world spent a record $501.3 billion in 2020 on renewable power, electric vehicles (EVs), and other technologies to cut the global energy system’s dependence on fossil fuels.  Global sales of EVs accelerated in 2020, rising by 43% to more than 3 million.  Unfortunately, the reduction in CO₂ emissions associated with those EVs was more than cancelled out by the increased sales of SUVs.  A team at MIT calculated both the CO₂ emissions and full lifetime cost for nearly every new car model on the market.  They found that EVs were easily more climate friendly than gas-burning ones and were often cheaper, too.  Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been manufactured on a production line in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step toward EVs becoming as fast to charge as filling up gasoline or diesel vehicles.

A venture part-owned by Toyota Motor Corp. and Air Liquide SA, plans to persuade 10,000 Paris taxi drivers to switch to hydrogen fuel cell powered cars by the time the Olympic Games come to town in 2024.  The MIT Startup Exchange showcased five startups developing emerging hydrogen production technologies.  According to a new report by Deloitte, hydrogen will be the key energy source for heavy-duty and long-route medium-duty freight vehicles in Europe, but battery electrification will be the most economic and environmental solution for smaller delivery vehicles.  South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group has announced its intentions to build its first overseas fuel cell factory in China.  The green hydrogen production division of Thyssenkrupp Uhde Chlorine Engineers will install an 88 MW water electrolysis plant for Hydro-Québec.

A growing number of corporations are pouring money into direct air capture of CO₂ to offset emissions they can’t otherwise cut.  Elon Musk has promised a $100 million prize for development of the “best” technology to capture CO₂ emissions.

China added 71.67 GW of wind power capacity in 2020, along with 48.2 GW of solar power.  Unfortunately, it also added 56.37 GW of new thermal power capacity.  Meanwhile, Germany increased its offshore wind capacity in the North Sea.  Data from the US Energy Information Agency revealed that natural gas will supply just 16% of new power capacity this year in the US as cheap wind and solar power take over the market.

Energy company Total and solar-plus-storage developer 174 Power Global have formed a joint venture to develop utility-scale solar and storage projects in Texas, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, and Virginia with a total capacity of 1.6 GW.  Hawaiian Electric won regulatory approval for a $25 million plan to harness solar and batteries at 6,000 homes across the islands of Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu to form a virtual power plant.  The lion’s share of new funding announced this week by the DOE’s ARPA-E program to help scale-up potentially disruptive technologies will go to battery and smart grid technologies.

Potpourri

Michael Svoboda provided descriptions of twelve new books that explore scientific, economic, and political avenues for climate action.  The Biden administration has the largest team of climate change experts ever assembled in the White House, but there will be pressure from multiple directions by members of the coalition that got Biden elected.  In his regular weekly newsletter at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer laid out a primer for watching the Biden administration’s first 100 days, while in his weekly New Yorker column, Bill McKibben argued that humans need to stop burning things.  The Washington Post had a feature article on Friday about regenerative agriculture and the controversy around its ability to sequester carbon in the long term.  Grist examined the latest research on how to lessen public opposition to the placement of wind farms.  Ivy Main summarized all the climate- and energy-related bills that have been filed in the Virginia General Assembly.  At FERC’s meeting on Tuesday, a request from the developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline to bore under streams in West Virginia failed to get a majority vote, causing the matter to die.

Closing Thought

In response to Biden’s inauguration, Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute wrote: “…our nation can now return to the international community where major countries are shifting into high gear on the clean energy transition.”

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

I’m sorry, but this Roundup is incomplete.  Just as I was in the final stages of working on the document, I did something that caused me to lose the previous two hours of work and I was unable to recover the document, even though I am a compulsive “saver”.  As a result, there are no articles from early in the week.

Politics and Policy

President-Elect Joe Biden added more than a half-dozen climate staffers to his White House team on Thursday, drawing from the ranks of green groups, environmental justice advocates, and former Democratic administration officials.  Dino Grandoni provided background on several of them.  At The Conversation, former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr., now Director of the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, provided a comprehensive analysis of how Biden proposes to attack the climate crisis.  At Inside Climate News, reporter Marianne Lavelle wrote of the opportunities provided on climate legislation by the 50-50 split in the Senate.  One outcome of that split will be the elevation of the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, to the chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a reality that will influence what can be accomplished on the climate.

Two controversial Trump officials, David Legates and Ryan Maue, have been dismissed from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) after they published papers that claimed to be from the OSTP and promoted skepticism about climate change and its impacts.  On Wednesday the EPA unveiled a climate rule that will effectively prohibit the future regulation of greenhouse gases from any stationary source other than power plants.  The Trump administration agreed on Tuesday to an auto industry request to delay the start of dramatically higher penalties for companies that fail to meet fuel efficiency requirements.  In a speech on Wednesday, the head of the American Petroleum Institute said that the oil and gas industry was prepared to fight back against policies that Biden promised as a candidate, including a halt to new drilling on public lands and the elimination of billions of dollars in industry tax breaks.

A coalition of progressive groups, called the Green New Deal Network, is organizing a sweeping network to mobilize around climate change, racial justice, and environmental justice; it will invest in partner organizations in 20 key states to mobilize grassroots power to pressure elected officials to support the groups’ goals.  Because of the mob attack on the Capitol Building last week, climate activists are reflecting on what climate advocacy will look like in the future.  The organization that oversees building energy code updates is taking steps that would sideline thousands of public sector members from voting on future updates, a move that critics charge would give outsized influence to the National Association of Home Builders and other industry groups and make it more difficult to incorporate stricter efficiency requirements into future model energy codes.  A study by MIT researchers concluded that the US can fully decarbonize its power sector through the use of existing technologies and that tackling decarbonization through a federal policy framework, rather than individual states setting clean energy goals, can significantly lower the costs.  New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the largest-ever award of offshore wind contracts by a US state on Wednesday as part of a broader plan to scale up renewable power over the next decade.

China will promote large-scale carbon capture projects and track methane emissions from coal, oil, and gas extraction, as part of its contribution to global efforts to limit temperature rises, the environment ministry said on Wednesday.  Poland’s PGG, one of Europe’s biggest producers of coal, does not expect to accelerate its timetable for closing its coal mines by 2049, despite tougher EU climate targets agreed to in December, the state-owned company’s boss said on Wednesday.  The UN Environment Program’s fifth Adaptation Gap Report warned that while the vast majority of nations have bolstered their plans for adapting to the effects of global warming, there remains a vast funding gap for developing countries.  In updated climate plans submitted to the UN, poor and island states, whose total CO₂ emissions are negligible, have called on rich nations to provide more funding to help them recover from climate-related disasters such as storms, flooding, and drought.

Climate and Climate Science

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe, 2020 tied 2016 as the hottest year on record.  A notable difference between the years is that 2016 experienced a strong El Niño, whereas the second half of 2020 experienced La Niña conditions.  NASA agreed, while NOAA, Berkeley Earth, and Britain’s Met Office said 2020 fell shy by a mere 0.02-0.04°F.  Jeff Masters compiled lists of various records for the year, while Zeke Hausfather provided a comprehensive look at a broad array of climate data.  Research published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences found that the world’s oceans contain more heat than at any time in recorded history.

Increased precipitation resulting partially from climate change has caused an additional $2.5 billion a year in US flood damage, according to a new study that pinpoints the effect of changing weather on the cost of natural disasters.  A new study published in Science Advances found that if temperatures continue to rise, terrestrial ecosystems will approach a “temperature tipping point”, beyond which they could release more CO₂ to the atmosphere than they take up.

US greenhouse gas emissions fell 10.3% in 2020, the largest drop in emissions in the post-World War II era, as the coronavirus crippled the economy, according to a report released Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.

In a “Perspective” article in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, 17 scientists warned that people still haven’t grasped the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises.  The Colorado River Basin is transitioning to a more arid climate, challenging longstanding practices of water sharing in it.  A study by WWF examined 24 “deforestation fronts” across 29 countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and found that 166,000 square miles of forest and habitat were destroyed between 2004 and 2017.

A study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that the young of egg-laying sharks emerge into the world small, exhausted, and undernourished when incubated at elevated ocean temperatures.  Research, published in Environmental Research Letters, suggested that the negative impacts of climate change on child malnourishment could outweigh the positive effects of economic development in low- and middle-income countries.

Energy

A new report from Grid Strategies pointed out that because of FERC Order 2003, attempts to decarbonize the US electricity system may be stymied by a lack of transmission to carry wind and solar power from where it’s most cheaply generated to where it’s most needed.  Connecticut energy officials have concluded that eliminating CO₂ emissions from their electricity supply by 2040 is feasible and affordable, but will require changes by grid operator ISO New England.

The US Energy Information Administration has projected that wind and solar will provide 70% of new power plant capacity built this year, while natural gas will only account for 16%.  On Wednesday, the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service and the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy launched an online information dashboard to help track Virginia’s progress toward its clean energy goals.

United Airlines will become a partner in 1PointFive, a joint venture designed to finance and deploy a large-scale direct air capture plant using technology created by Carbon Engineering.  At Energy Monitor, Sonja van Renssen examined the proposition that CO₂ removal will be necessary to meet temperature goals and reviewed the role of direct air capture in doing so.  Meanwhile, at Bloomberg Green, Kate Mackenzie argued that too many companies are counting on carbon capture to reach net zero emissions.

The South Korean company SK Group has announced a $1.5 billion investment in the American hydrogen fuel cell maker, Plug Power, with the intent of providing hydrogen fuel cell systems, electrolyzers, and fueling stations in South Korea, as well as other parts of Asia.  Siemens Gamesa and Siemens Energy are developing a commercial offshore wind turbine that integrates hydrogen production via electrolysis into the turbine, marking a breakthrough for the mass production of green hydrogen.

General Motors is launching a new subsidiary, BrightDrop, that will deliver “an ecosystem” of products and services to speed up the shipping and delivery process, including an all-electric delivery van, for which Fed-Ex has placed a large order.

Potpourri

Carbon Brief provided its annual assessment of the scientific papers related to climate change that were most featured in the media.  Book reviewer Amy Brady called Felicia Luna Lemus’s Particulate Matter “…a slim, exquisitely crafted memoir about living in California during 2020’s record-setting wildfire season and how the state’s atrocious air quality made her spouse very sick.”  Ben Deacon of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had a very interesting photo-essay about the Arctic, the changes that are occurring there as a result of Earth’s warming, and the people studying them.  National Geographic explored things that might be done to reduce the impacts of flying on the climate.  If you live in Virginia and have been frustrated in your attempts to buy an EV or plug-in hybrid, then you might want to read this article. 

Closing Thought

Katharine Hayhoe, along with five fellow climate scientists who are also mothers, has teamed up with Potential Energy, a nonprofit marketing firm, to launch Science Moms, a $10 million campaign to educate and empower mothers to do something about climate change.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.