A helicopter surveyed the area with a searchlight during the Lake Fire in the San Bernardino National Forest near Big Bear Lake, California, in 2015 .Mariana Mazzucato March 15, 2021 Capitalism is facing three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out …
Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales: Tech change without political, economic, and social change that supports
Richard York, October 25, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117739217 Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century served to increase the intensity of whaling. The connections between fossil fuels and whaling are an example of the unanticipated consequences that frequently come with technological change. I draw on …
Some Colorado Oil Workers Can See The Shift Away From Fossil Fuels Coming — And They Say They Need Help Navigating It
By Miguel Otárola, CPR, February 26, 2021 Trucks come and go from the EVRAZ Rocky Mountain Steel mill, a massive facility south of Pueblo. One of the main products workers make here are casings used for oil and gas wells in Texas and North Dakota. Production of the casings stopped last spring when the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices halted …
A primary justification for fuel-dependent generation is its theoretical ability to generate regardless of the weather but over 40% of the coal, gas, & nuclear fleet are offline due to the cold in TX
Excerpt, RMI, 2/18/21… Wind turbine icing is the “least significant factor” in driving the outages, according to an ERCOT spokesperson. Additionally, it is notable that this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve. For example, in Canada “cold weather packages” allow wind turbines to operate in very low temperatures. Moreover, grid planners know and expect that wind power is often unavailable during system …
50 years after Earth Day we’ve learned that big steps and rapid system change are essential
By Gustav Speth, Truthout, Feb 2021 – The New Environmentalism Must Demand Systemic Change BYJames Gustave Speth, Truthout ebruary 7, 2021 Fifty years ago, my young daughter and I were on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day. A group of us were then launching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since then, the NRDC and other …
U.S. regulates vehicle greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of an automaker’s average fuel efficiency across its entire catalog
The U.S. regulates its greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of an automaker’s average fuel efficiency across its entire catalog, rather than setting hard caps on the allowable emissions for individual automobile models. In practice, that means that every electric vehicle that GM introduces will give it a little more room to release a high-polluting vehicle that could erase the …
Systematizers
While everyone has a Systemizing Mechanism, it’s tuned especially high in people who are inventors and in those drawn to fields like science, engineering, music, competitive sports, high-level business and often, too, in people with autism. By Christine Kenneally, NY Times Book Review, Dec 2020 THE PATTERN SEEKERSHow Autism Drives Human InventionBy Simon Baron-Cohen At the end of the 20th …
CU Boulder’s Renewable & Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) Dec 2020 report outlines solutions for curbing U.S. carbon emissions
Published: Dec. 16, 2020 • By Julie Poppen Researchers at CU Boulder’s Renewable & Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) on Thursday released a report outlining key steps the U.S. can take to drive carbon dioxide emissions to zero. Download the full report The report, Accelerating the U.S. Clean Energy Transformation: Challenges and Solutions by Sector, explains why urgent and comprehensive action is needed to avoid the worst impacts …
DOT Transition
Agency transition teams are in charge of reviewing current projects and ongoing initiatives, meeting with career federal employees and preparing the members of the incoming cabinet for their roles and priorities, according to Federal News Network. The rest of the DOT transition team is: Dave Barnett, United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters of the U.S. and Canada Austin Brown, Policy Institute at …
Great ideas…
Great ideas: Rights of streams, nature, all… Universal health care and right to healthy food…Universal Child Care: The Scandinavian country was one of the first to adopt the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it now offers universal child care to all families with children from ages 1–12. Subsidized in part by national and municipal taxes, …