Bill McKibben on Project 2025:

They also promise to reach back to 2009 to reverse a crucial finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much federal environmental regulation. Their plan would even abolish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which measures the damage we’re doing to air and water—because those findings are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

[…]

And it’s even worse than that. The climate crisis—unlike most of our political woes—is a timed test; past a certain point, we can’t repair the damage. Once you melt the Arctic, no one knows how to freeze it back up again. And that “certain point” is approaching: Climate scientists have made it clear that emissions need to fall by half by 2030; Trump’s term would end in January of 2029, giving his successor… 11 months. Good luck.

The Planet Could Bear the Scars of a Second Trump Term… Forever

Project 2025: Roadmap to Venus.

What’s so sad is that, much like tobacco companies before them, they really don’t care about the externalities of their products. “Climate change alarm industry” :lol:

The World Will Be Swimming in Excess Oil by End of This Decade, IEA Says

Global oil markets are headed toward a major glut this decade, a global energy watchdog forecast, citing surging supplies and slowing demand growth for crude thanks to lower-emissions energy sources.

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/global-oil-markets-to-tip-into-surplus-by-end-of-decade-iea-says-c85688fa?mod=mhp

Coal is dead. Good riddance.

The first time Donald J. Trump ran for president, he slapped on a miner’s helmet and told coal workers they would be “winning, winning, winning” when he entered the White House.

Now, as Mr. Trump campaigns for another chance at the presidency, he rarely mentions America’s coal miners and has stopped making grand promises about their future.

The shift reflects political and economic realities, experts said. Top among them: Mr. Trump oversaw coal’s decline, not its salvation. Despite the fact that Mr. Trump gutted climate regulations and appointed a coal lobbyist to lead the country’s top environmental agency, 75 coal-fired power plants closed and the industry shed about 13,000 jobs during his presidency.

“Not a single coal miner went back to work or power plant saved,” said Erin E. Bates, a spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers of America, the labor organization representing coal miners.

“I think he’s realizing those promises were not met during his term and they’re probably not going to be met now,” she said. “Politically, it probably doesn’t pay for his campaign to make more broken promises.”

Two decades ago, coal produced about half of all the electricity in the United States. Today, it accounts for just 16 percent of American power generation. The industry employed nearly 180,000 people at its peak in the 1980s, but now that figure is about 44,800, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Coal began its slide around 2005 as the fracking boom started to produce large quantities of cheap natural gas, which proved attractive to utilities. In the last few years, the cost of power generated by wind turbines and solar farms has plunged, replacing natural gas as the cheapest source of electricity. Last year, power generated from onshore wind turbines and solar farms was about one-third of the cost of the electricity produced by coal, on average.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/climate/trump-coal-politics.html

‘Inconvenient truths’ for greens

There is a danger environmentalists “get into a bubble of clear-sighted, righteous agreement that if only other people had sufficient political will and shared our views, we’d be well on our way to the promised land”

Environmentalism is much harder than a few slogans and he listed what he called five “inconvenient truths” that need addressing

The first inconvenient truth is that closing polluting industries will in most cases result in imported replacement goods unless there is an equal focus on curbing consumption. Telling consumers they can’t have stuff is an altogether more difficult conversation to have.

The second inconvenient truth is that society must entertain some environmentally damaging activities like mining or the provision of infrastructure. “The question is how much damage? If we are not prepared to examine trade-offs critically, we will be dismissed as the dog that barks at every passing car.” Environmentalists oppose extractive industries but in the transition to zero emissions energy, demand will increase for metals needed for batteries, wind turbines and solar panels.

The third inconvenient truth is the call for green growth, which he said isn’t the easy economic and environmental win some people imagine. Tourism is not environmentally benign and renewable electricity is usually far more efficient and therefore less damaging than fossil fuels but will result in ecosystem damage. “The green growth vision of the future will continually trade one environmental issue for the next. We can’t escape that.”

The fourth inconvenient truth is that change is costly and not the win-win it is pitched as. “Environmentalists have to be conscious of the social impacts of these sorts of transitions.”

The fifth inconvenient truth is that arguing for degrowth is not an easy sell. “As a student of human nature, my hunch is that if we tell people that they can’t have the stuff they’ve grown to expect, they will turn to thinking about how they can take it from others.”

Just a reminder that this weather is indeed extreme. For anyone who can feel, and can read a graph, the pattern is alarming:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/climate/extreme-summer-heat.html?unlocked_article_code=1.000.e-Vm.9B61_NeAn8_Z&smid=url-share

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/landmark-supreme-court-ruling-throws-doubt-on-new-uk-fossil-fuel-projects

tldr: fossil fuel extractor have been claiming their projects are carbon neutral because the product will be used by someone else somewhere else. Someone likened it to tobacco companies saying their product did not cause cancer as long as it was not burned. The law has decided otherwise. A small hurrah!

Congress Just Passed The Biggest Clean-Energy Bill Since Biden's Climate Law

Some good news on nuclear power. And the best news is that since it's bipartisan then it should be immune to partisan politics (assuming that Trump doesn't arbitrarily dismantle it like the Iran Nuclear Deal or the oil lobbyists change their tune once they start seeing nuclear power as a legitimate short-term threat to their business).

Interesting— I haven’t followed the news in a couple days and must have missed this. Not sure what to think about it— I hear Sanders and Markey were No votes, which gives me pause, although I’m generally pro-nuclear.

Not sure about Markey but Sanders is stubbornly anti-nuclear which is one part of his energy policy I recall disagreeing with back in 2020. Part of me suspects it is because he's an old fashioned environmentalist.