Renewable Revolution

 
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July 26, 2018





Not sure if you've heard, but there’s a new cult in town. It’s run by teenagers who want climate justice and a livable future. Sounds scary!

Zero Hour 🌎 is a climate group led by youth of color from different parts of America. Understanding that combating climate change requires urgent action, they recently released an ambitious platform of demands that outlines what different levels of the government must do in order to safeguard their future. Last Saturday, they held marches across the country, which received overwhelming support from parents, scientists, celebrities, politicians and other climate groups.

But not, surprisingly from the shrinking tribe of climate deniers 🙉 🙊 🦕🦖 . The planet's actually really cold, schooled a few anonymous experts. It’s a hoax, yelled others. What snowflakes, said some others who clearly like being original.

In response to the youth's brave stand last weekend, the denier blogger community mainly screamed back that teenagers are being brainwashed, exploited and indoctrinated to believe lies about climate change. (We’ve heard those talking points before. Remember the shameful piece in the Federalist about children victimized by gun violence?)

Watts Up With That featured a guest post (or rather two lines followed by copy-pasted content) complaining that “climate indoctrination” begins at a very young age.

Ed Straker 🦕 from American Thinker wrote a blog post to share his belief that Zero Hour is a doomsday cult with a “militantly brainwashed doomsday leftist” leader. Apparently, Straker is very scared of 16-year-old founder Jamie Margolin. Margolin, Straker writes,"may seem young, but never forget that many of the Red Guards in Mao's China who committed unspeakable atrocities were young, too.” Straker never gets around to really explaining how Zero Hour is a cult, but does complain that Margolin doesn’t smile enough. (Again, very original stuff.)

Fire up your tiny violins for Straker's next complaint: he notes that the group doesn’t appear to be led by men, especially white men. “Are boys not as easily brainwashed as girls?” he wonders. (We're...not going to touch that one.)

But easily the most prolific hater of the youth climate march was blogger Tom Nelson 😈, who repeatedly barraged the Zero Hour teen team with denier tweets, calling them brainwashed, a scam and BS, anti-science, and so much more. He 🦖 even gloated that there was low turnout as videos showed the youth resiliently rallying and marching in the pouring rain. We've got a sneaking hunch Nelson might have been a big old bully in high school the way he keeps attacking these teens.

Unfortunately, 2018 seems to be the year of militant attacks from the right 😈🦖 against young people doing their best to preserve their future. At least there are school kids like those in Zero Hour giving us hope.

Union of Concerned Scientists

Aug. 31, 2018 03:39PM EST



By Elliott Negin

A decade after pledging to end its support for climate science deniers, ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million last year to 11 think tanks and lobby groups that reject established climate science and openly oppose the oil and gas giant's professed climate policy preferences, according to the company's annual charitable giving report released this week.

Nearly 90 percent of ExxonMobil's 2017 donations to climate science denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and three organizations that have been receiving funds from the company since it started bankrolling climate disinformation 20 years ago: the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, which—in a surprise move—ExxonMobil recently quit. (More on that later.)

The other ExxonMobil denier grantees last year were the Center for American and International Law ($23,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000), National Taxpayers Union Foundation ($40,000), and Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

ExxonMobil's funding priorities belie the company's purported support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related policies, which it reaffirmed in a January blog post by its public affairs director, Suzanne McCarron. If, as McCarron claims, ExxonMobil is "committed to being part of the solution," why is the company still spending millions of dollars a year on groups that are a major part of the problem?

ExxonMobil's History of Deceit

There is ample evidence that Exxon was fully aware of the danger its products pose to the planet since the 1980s and likely even earlier. Nonetheless, the company helped initiate a fossil fuel industry-backed climate disinformation campaign in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil.

The company's behind-the-scenes role went largely unnoticed for nearly a decade, but in early 2007, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) revealed that it had spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to fund a network of more than 40 think tanks and advocacy groups to manufacture doubt about climate science under the guise of being neutral, independent analysts.

In response to the negative press generated by the UCS report, ExxonMobil vowed in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report to "discontinue contributions [in 2008] to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner."

Note that the company only promised to stop funding several policy groups, not all, and it did in fact drop some high-profile grantees, including the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Institute for Energy Research. But it never completely ended its support for the disinformation network. From 1998 to 2007—the year of the pledge—it spent nearly $23 million on it. From 2008 through last year, it spent another $13.17 million, for a total of $36.13 million over the last 20 years. As far as anyone has been able to determine from publicly available data, only Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries, have spent more to deceive the public about climate science and block government action on climate change.

Last year, $1.35 million of the $1.5 million ExxonMobil spent went to the following four organizations:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce 😈: Sponsoring Slanted Studies

In 2014, ExxonMobil committed to give $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Capital Campaign in $1 million-a-year increments on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group's history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in another $15,000 for the Chamber's Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total donation to $1,015,000.

If one takes ExxonMobil's climate policy claims at face value, the Chamber's positions are polar opposite.

ExxonMobil has been very vocal about its support for the Paris climate agreement, for example, and during its former CEO Rex Tillerson's brief stint as U.S. secretary of state, he reportedly implored President Trump to keep the U.S. in it. What did Trump cite last year when he announced he was pulling out of the accord? A widely debunked report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Cosponsored by a former ExxonMobil grantee—the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF)—the report maintained that the Paris accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades and eliminate 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040.

According to analyses by the Associated Press (AP), Politifact and The Washington Post, however, the Chamber and ACCF cooked the books. As the AP put it: "The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects."

American Enterprise Institute 😈: Undue Faith in the Market

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an 80-year-old free-market think tank in Washington, DC, has received more from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2017, ExxonMobil gave AEI $160,000, bringing its total to $4.49 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, the only AEI staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, rejects mainstream climate science, insists a carbon tax would be "ineffective," and has called the Paris agreement an "absurdity." He not only disagrees with ExxonMobil's professed climate policy positions, he has attacked the company for taking them.

Zycher's colleague Mark Thiessen, a regular contributor to The Washington Post, also dismisses the Paris accord, maintaining that "free enterprise, technology, and innovation—not pieces of parchment signed in Paris and Kyoto—will revolutionize how we produce and consume energy." Never mind that it often takes regulations to drive innovation and force corporations to adopt cleaner technology. Without federally mandated air pollution controls, for example, power plants and other industrial facilities would be emitting considerably more toxic pollution than they do today.

Manhattan Institute 😈: Propaganda Masquerading as News

Another free-market think tank, the Manhattan Institute, received $115,200 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, it has received $1.25 million. Like Zycher and Thiessen at AEI, Manhattan Institute fellows oppose a carbon tax and the Paris accord.

Earlier this year, the New York City-based organization hired longtime TV newsman John Stossel, former host of Fox Business Network's Stossel and ABC's 20/20, to interview Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass for a slickly produced, 4-minute YouTube segment titled The Overheated Costs of Climate Change.

Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, told Stossel that the Paris climate agreement "was somewhere between a farce and a fraud." Stossel wholeheartedly agreed. "The Earth is warming," Stossel intoned in his wrap-up. "Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn't to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing. Well, pretend to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty."

Waste billions while other countries do nothing? Besides the fact that it is now cheaper to produce electricity from utility-scale solar and wind energy in the U.S. than nuclear, coal and even natural gas, as of last November—a year after the Paris agreement officially went into effect—China, India and other major carbon emitters were already making significant progress in meeting their Paris accord commitments.

The other glaring problem with the segment is it's a prime example of fake news. With a former network news show host playing anchor, viewers could easily mistake the piece as a clip from of a legitimate newscast. At least one member of the conservative echo chamber treated it that way. The Washington Free Beacon, an online news organization funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer, ran a news story about the Stossel-Cass interview on March 19.

American Legislative Exchange Council 😈: Fossil fuel Industry 'Bill Mill'

On July 12, ExxonMobil announced it had ended its longtime membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council after a disagreement over the corporate lobby group's climate policy. From 1998 through last year—when Exxon Mobil reported it gave the group $60,000—ALEC 😈 received $1.93 million from the oil company.

Over the last two decades, ALEC has routinely featured climate science deniers at its conferences and supplied state lawmakers with a range of fossil fuel industry-drafted sample legislation, including bills that would restrict investment in renewables, eliminate incentives for electric vehicles, and hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to residential and business customers.

Since 2012, more than 100 corporations, including BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas & Electric and Xcel Energy, have severed ties with ALEC, in many cases because of its regressive policy positions.

ExxonMobil's exit from ALEC came just months after the company fought to defeat a draft resolution sponsored by the Heartland Institute—an ExxonMobil grantee from 1998 through 2006—calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to "reopen and review" its "flawed" conclusion that climate change poses a threat to human health. The EPA's "endangerment finding" requires the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions as hazardous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

After ExxonMobiland the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a utility trade group, objected to the resolution, the Heartland Institute 😈 withdrew it and accused the two of being in league with the likes of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

"Big corporations like ExxonMobil and trade groups like EEI have long been members of the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement," Heartland's president, Tim Huelskamp 👹, said in a Dec. 7 press release. "They've put their profits and 'green' virtue signaling above sound science and the interests of their customers."

Huelskamp's ludicrous assertion notwithstanding, some might construe ExxonMobil's exit from the American Legislative Exchange Council as a welcome change in direction. The company's money trail, however, clearly shows that it is still financing climate science denier groups that denigrate any and all climate policy options and provide cover for Congress and the current administration to do nothing. Until ExxonMobil stops funding these groups, its avowed support for a carbon tax, the Paris agreement and other climate initiatives can't be seen as anything more than a cynical PR ploy.

https://www.ecowatch.com/exxonmobil-still-funding-climate-science-denier-groups-2600817476.html

 

 
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September 17, 2018


California’s recent passage of a 100% clean energy bill, coupled with Jerry Brown’s 100% carbon-free executive order, certainly make California a climate leader. But in terms of public opinion, it’s hardly a radical position. Even polling commissioned by the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group, shows overwhelming public support for clean energy. EEI is a group that’s been working on its renewables-related messaging for years now--it hired a crisis communications manager back in 2016, and shortly after issued messaging guidance we used as the perfect example of how propaganda emulates ideals to undermine them.

Two years later, and EEI is still at it. Polling and message testing presented at the group’s recent board meeting was shared with Dave Roberts at Vox, and provides some surprising insight into renewable energy’s incredible popularity. According to the testing, 74% of Americans support using solar “as much as possible,” while 70% support a 100% renewable grid “in the near future.” And when presented with the utility industry’s weak excuses that  renewables aren’t up to the job or require too much land, respondents were unswayed. One participant said simply that they “don’t want to hear him complain about how much work it will take” but rather “how the work would get done.”

Part of getting it done means paying for it, and cost is definitely the issue deniers used to attack California’s recent renewable policies. But according to the polling, that’s probably not going to be effective: 51% of participants said they think 100% renewables is a good idea even if it means a 30% increase in energy bills!

The energy issue isn’t the only place deniers are running into public opposition. Over at the EPA, the unpopularity of Trump’s deregulatory agenda is starting to make folks rethink some things.

No, they’re not rethinking the desirability of policies that kill Americans, but instead how to convince Americans that those policies are fine.

According to InsideEPA’s Dave Reynolds, Andrew Wheeler 😈 and Trump’s 🦀 EPA 🐉 will attempt to distract Americans from deadly regulatory rollbacks by focusing on “risk communication”  and highlighting the EPA’s success in the past few decades (you know, before the Trump crew came into power).

Per Reynolds, this desperate bid to reframe a polluters-first agenda comes at least in part as a result of Gallup polling from March that shows 62% of people think the government isn’t doing enough to protect the environment, and that for the first time since the year 2000, over half of us are upset about the state of the environment.

Similar to EEI’s message testing, Gallup found three-quarters of Americans support stronger pollution controls and more government spending on solar and wind, while a majority say environmental protection should be a priority, even if it means risking economic growth. The jobs vs environment dichotomy may be false, but most people don’t care anyway--more money is useless if you can’t breathe. This certainly complicates the right wing message of justifying regulatory rollbacks with economic concerns.

In light of these stats, top agency officials at last month’s Environmental Council of the States suggested shifting their messaging to improvements made over the last 25 years. Instead of bragging about what great new steps the federal agency, and its state-based incarnations, will be taking, they’re instead going to turn to the past to remind people how far we’ve come in cleaning up pollution.

Apparently, since the Cuyahoga River is no longer regularly catching fire, people should be fine with the EPA backtracking on regulations, demonizing the exact sort of regulatory agenda that helped stop the river from catching fire.

Urging people to remember how bad things used to be before there were EPA regulations is only going to be a winning message if it’s not followed by “well, now we’re rolling back regulations like that!”

 
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October 9, 1018




A pair of studies on wind power published last week are proving irresistible to mainstream reporters and deniers alike because of a seemingly counterintuitive conclusions: widespread use of wind power will cause warming.

But--and this will surely come as a shock--this isn’t really all that true.

Despite the headlines reflecting one of the press releases which claimed that “US wind power would cause warming,” the obvious fact is wind power doesn’t cause climate change.


What it might do, according to the study, is mix up the air around the turbine and cause some localized warming as the turbines pull warmer air down.

Now, the study in question makes a ton of unrealistic assumptions, namely by modeling the impacts of what it would be like if %100 of US electricity is generated by wind. Considering that no one, anywhere, is calling for %100 wind, this is clearly not a “real-world” sort of modeling exercise.

But deniers, who loathe models when they say fossil fuels cause warming and that’s bad, were all too eager to promote this model-based study and decry the “major drawbacks” of the 100% wind system that literally no one is arguing in favor of.

Even still, 📢 greenhouse gasses trap heat, so the more we burn the warmer it gets. The warming from wind discussed here, though, isn’t adding any additional heat to the system.

Instead, it’s just moving it around from one place in the sky to another. Sort of like how a fan doesn’t exactly provide as much cooling power as an air conditioner, but it moves the air around in a way that makes it feel cooler. It’s like that, only in reverse. Turbines pull the warm air from higher up down, and push it around, displacing the cooler surface-level air and causing temperatures at ground level to rise.

This really isn’t all that complicated, but apparently is complex enough to lead to a bunch of unhelpful sounding headlines.

Now, sometimes, researchers are caught off guard when deniers distort their papers. In this case though, one of the authors told Business Insider that he had “no doubt that these results will be misconstrued and misinterpreted.”

So what’s the point? Well, as we look to moving off of fossil fuels, we do absolutely need to be aware of what potential pitfalls await in a renewably powered world. Knowing that there might be some additional warming around wind farms, then, is helpful for that long term planning.

And the study also points out that wind’s impact in this respect is 10 times larger than solar, suggesting that if we don’t take the ridiculous 100% wind path which no one thinks we will anyway, then the warming winds probably won’t make much of a difference. 🕵️

The wind breaking up layers of warmth in the air may not be pleasant, but they’re no reason to keep passing gas off as the best energy source.

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October 21st, 2018 by Joshua S Hill

It should come as no surprise that the fossil fuel industry has many defenders 🐵 🐒 🦍 willing to step up to the plate and bat for them — it is, after all, a multi-billion-dollar industry with long-standing relationships and a desire not to collapse into infamy and oblivion.


The simple reality is that, for a large part of the planet, the fossil fuel industry is on its last legs. Developed nations are wholesale turning to renewable energy — either by federal impetus or through the work of sub-national players such as local governments and corporations — and developing nations are looking to renewable energy as a means to jump over the fossil fuel step altogether, avoiding the need to build up costly nationwide infrastructure and preventing further emissions increases.


This new reality, however, is apparently difficult for some people to comprehend. Most recently, BP CEO Bob Dudley, speaking as the “Petroleum Executive of the Year” at the Oil & Money conference in London, raised his fears of the global divestment and disclosure movements that are impacting the fossil fuel industry, suggesting that they “could lead to bad outcomes.” His rationale, however, was based on faulty assumptions and blind ignorance of the realities.


However, Dudley can at least be given credit for admitting the need for change, and presenting a path forward which he claimed was “not a call for business as usual” and one that “requires significant and rapid disruption to our industry.”

The same credit cannot be given to Lawrence Solomon, however, a columnist for Canada’s National Post section (which bears the name Financial Post after the business newspaper of the same name) and the Executive Director of Energy Probe, the consumer and energy research team of Canada’s Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Writing an op-ed recently for the Financial Post, Solomon set aside any dignity or professional integrity he may once have grasped to and penned what can only be described as a hit-piece on the renewable energy industry with all the internal consistency of a wet tissue. Solomon’s article — entitled “Trudeau stands alone as Canada — and the world — abandons green energy” — ran with the witty lede, “Wind and solar have become the fossils of the energy industry; oil, gas and coal remain the fuels of the future.” An entire fact-check article could be written about the opening paragraph on its own — not bad, considering it boasts only 109 words in four sentences.

Solomon’s article was brought to our attention here at CleanTechnica by a frustrated reader who asked that we investigate the claims Solomon made in his piece — described by the reader as “so untruthful and so far from reality that I think it deserves to be called out.”

More than simply “calling out” Lawrence Solomon, however, I think it’s worth being completely upfront and honest about Solomon and his opinions — and opinions they are, make no mistake about it, in the true spirit of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word — “A view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge” — for, it would appear that Solomon’s opinions have never even heard of the concept of “facts” and “knowledge.”



To be fair, the issue is not so much with Lawrence Solomon in and of himself, rather, he is simply representative of a number of such pundits who occupy their own little space of real estate in magazines, newspapers, and on television the world over.


Solomon is in no way particularly special for the absurdity of his views, but he serves as a convenient example of the types of lies that are spread, and the way in which people opposed to renewable energy and in denial about global warming make their arguments.

In his opinion article, Lawrence Solomon attempts to make the argument that renewable energy is not only on the back foot around the world, but that it is in full retreat. To support this argument, Solomon refers to several pieces of so-called evidence which he has pulled kicking and screaming out of context. I’ll handle them one at a time.





Solomon claims that China has “begun to throw in the towel by cutting subsidies to renewables, an augur of the demise of investment in its renewables sector.” Solomon also points to recent reporting from green campaigners CoalSwarm which claimed that 259 gigawatts (GW) of new coal capacity are currently under construction.


While Solomon accurately reported the findings from CoalSwarm’s new satellite imagery report — which showed construction ongoing at coal plants across the country, the result of a permitting surge between late-2014 and early-2016 — he incorrectly blames the reason for China’s decision to cut subsidies to renewables.

It’s important to remember the context of China’s current reliance on coal. The new capacity currently under construction is the result of local authorities approving new projects, and actually flies in the face of China’s Central Government’s decisions to halt construction of new coal-fired power plants. Toward the end of 2016 and over the first few months of 2017, China announced the cancellation of 30 large coal-fired power plants amounting to 17 gigawatts (GW), followed soon after by the cancellation of 104 more under-construction and planned coal projects amounting to 120 GW. In March of this year, a report showed that the development of new coal plants in 2017 had declined in China, thanks in part to the Central Government’s decision to suspend construction across hundreds of projects.

Unfortunately, CoalSwarm’s recent report might suggest that China’s Central Government no longer has the control it once had to make these sweeping cuts, but a report published earlier this month by Carbon Tracker shows that 40% of China’s coal plants are already losing money and that the country could save nearly $390 billion by closing plants instead of keeping them operational.

Further, it’s important to look at the whole of what is happening in China. In September, China’s National Development & Reform Commission (NDRC) wrote a draft policy that paved the way to increase the country’s renewable energy target from 20% to 35% by 2030.

Later that same month, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) issued draft guidelines that would look to phase out power generation subsidies — just as Solomon highlighted, except, the intention of the decision was to provide the country’s renewable energy sector with further technological and policy support so that those technologies can compete against other technologies on their own. Specifically, the draft guidelines seek to incentivize renewable energy technologies in regions where they can operate without help from government subsidies.

“The reason China’s cutting subsidy is mainly because of the huge deficit in the national renewable subsidy fund,” explained Yali Jiang, a solar analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, who spoke to me via email. “By the end of 2017, the deficit amounted around $19 billion including those for wind and solar projects. As a result, the government expects to, for instance, restrict new solar installations that require national subsidy immediately.”

“China’s solar installation contracted in 3Q due to the policy change,” Jiang added. “The grid-connected PV capacity halved in July and August compared with last year. But the country remains to be the largest investor in clean energy in 3Q ($26.7 billion), a fraction above the same period of 2017.”

Far from being “an augur of the demise of investment in its renewables sector,” as Solomon so dramatically put it, China’s decision to cut subsidies is actually based in a desire to minimize the financial strain caused by subsidizing new power generation, while at the same time providing technological and political support that will help renewable energy compete on its own — much as it does in other parts of the world, such as throughout Europe and North America.



Lawrence Solomon, far from being happy with one example, decided to add another to the mix, explaining that, “With the cutting of subsidies to renewables in the [European Union], investment last year dropped to less than half of its peak six years earlier.”

Again, Solomon correctly looked at the chart, sourced from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and highlighted by the World Economic Forum in May of 2018 — an article, mind you, which highlights the success of the investment in China’s renewable energy sector, and betrays Solomon’s contention that China has suffered a decline in investment in its renewables sector (made literally the sentence beforehand).


While it is true that investment in Europe’s renewable energy industry has fallen off in recent times, it’s doubly important to look at the region’s capacity installations over the same time. Between 2011 and 2017 — the six-year period Solomon highlighted — generation from renewable electricity across the 28 Member States of the European Union skyrocketed.



The share of renewable energy sources in the final consumption of energy has also steadily increased over the past decade, as can be seen in the table below.


Complete renewable energy capacity additions for Europe are difficult to come by — unsurprising, given the nature of a supranational governing body — but we can mitigate that somewhat by looking specifically at the two dominant renewable energy technologies, wind, and solar.


Annual wind energy installations across Europe have steadily ticked up each year, declining only once since 2011, in 2013.


It’s worth noting, though, that new capacity additions for 2018 are on a worrying downward trend, as seen by half-year figures published by WindEurope in July.

Europe’s solar industry has similarly suffered from recent investment figures, as can be seen in the graph below, published by SolarPower Europe in June (as part of a global outlook).



So while from a certain point of view, Lawrence Solomon can claim that Europe’s clean energy investment has fallen, resulting in lower solar capacity additions and moderate wind additions, it’s worth seeing this in light of the whole. Solar has begun growing again across Europe — with a total of 9.2 GW worth of new capacity added in 2017, a 30% increase on the year before — and offshore wind continues to increase its share. Europe was also one of the first regions to double-down on solar, and accounts for 28% of the global total, with a total of 114 GW worth of installed capacity.

Additionally, even though investments have decreased, this does not necessarily speak to a larger fall-off for the renewable energy industry. Rather, as technologies such as solar PV and onshore wind mature, their costs have decreased, which means that less money is needed to build even more capacity.

Lawrence Solomon may have struck closer to the mark with this particular example, but it does not serve to bolster his argument any, considering the impact of Brexit and the UK’s shift away from solar towards wind, the declining cost of mature technologies, and natural market dynamics and political malfeasance from politicians who share Solomon’s point of view.



Investment in Japan’s clean energy industry has indeed slowed since 2016 — essentially falling off a financial cliff at the end of 2015. Much like China, however, Japan’s situation is not as clear-cut as a graph might show.


“After years of record-breaking investment driven by some of the world’s most generous feed-in tariffs, China and Japan are cutting back on building new large-scale projects and shifting towards digesting the capacity they have already put in place,” said Justin Wu, head of Asia for BNEF, said in January of 2017.

“China is facing slowing power demand and growing wind and solar curtailment. The government is now focused on investing in grids and reforming the power market so that the renewables in place can generate to their full potential. In Japan, future growth will come not from utility-scale projects but from rooftop solar systems installed by consumers attracted by the increasingly favorable economics of self-consumption.”

It’s ironic, however, that Solomon decided to use Japan as throwaway proof of “a worldwide trend rejecting renewables.” If he had made the argument even a year ago, it might have held more weight, but given recent moves by Japan’s government, and corporations and utilities within Japan, it loses all importance.

In July, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, better known as TEPCO, announced that it intends to pursue the development of between 6 and 7 GW worth of renewable energy capacity worth tens of billions of dollars in an intentional move away from nuclear power. Speaking to Nikkei, TEPCO’s president Tomoaki Kobayakawa announced his company will look to develop 6 to 7 GW of renewable energy across Japan and overseas in a move expected to yield 100 billion yen ($8.98 billion) in profit. “We must gain a competitive advantage in renewable energy,” he said.

Meanwhile, in September, Japan’s Electric Power Development Co., better known as J-Power, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with French multinational electric utility ENGIE to collaborate on power projects, specifically offshore wind and floating offshore wind projects — a further sign of Japan’s turn away from nuclear, and specifically towards contending with Taiwan as an offshore wind hub. And only last week, the Fitch Group published a forecast which expected Japan to add 17 GW worth of new solar capacity by the end of 2020, before the sector begins to slow.

For Lawrence Solomon, Japan also does not prove his belief that renewable energy is on the back foot.




I could go on. Solomon points to Germany, the UK, and Australia as further proof that the world is turning away from renewable energy. While both Germany and Australia serve as good examples of this, they are about the only two countries that do — and only from a national point of view, with sub-state actors serving to pick up where the nation’s governments left off (or, in Australia’s case, never picked up to begin with).

Solomon’s citing the UK as an example of a flagging renewable energy industry, however, truly beggars belief. Not only is the UK home to one of the world’s most persistent and dominant renewable energy countries, Scotland, but the UK is also the world’s offshore wind energy leader, boasting a portfolio of projects in operation, under construction, or in development, of 35.2 GW.

Agreed, the UK’s investment is likely to fall, a point made by the Green Alliance in January of 2017, analyzing the UK Government’s own numbers. The government has proven lackluster at best when it comes to preparing for a post-Brexit world, and it has thoroughly mishandled commitments to various technologies (onshore wind and solar, in particular). However, it’s important to look at the long-term — the Green Alliance’s analysis only looks to 2020, and a July announcement from the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy could mitigate some of these short-term losses, by setting a timeline for new offshore wind auctions starting from 2021.

“The renewables sector in the UK has seen pretty dire policy from government: solar and onshore wind projects have been effectively blocked, despite the fact that they’re now the cheapest form of new power,” explained Dustin Benton, Policy Director at Green Alliance. “By contrast, dirty power stations, supported by the UK’s flawed capacity market, have seen several hundred million pounds of government contracts over the past few years.”



“The exception to this generally gloomy picture is in offshore wind: despite irregular auctions, the sector has reduced prices by two-thirds over the past two years, and the government has committed to procuring around 16 GW of new offshore wind during the 2020s, putting the country on track for 30 GW by 2030 – a level consistent with meeting the UK’s carbon targets.”

It’s also worth remembering that Great Britain currently boasts its lowest ever share of fossil fuels in its energy mix, accounting for only 41% of total generation, down from 71% only 7 years ago.



An argument against renewable energy and climate change is not complete, however, without mentioning the biggest elephant in the room — the United States. Solomon reserves an entire paragraph for the US but barely manages to come close to the truth.

Solomon sets the scene — the Democrats are out of power and Donald Trump is in, and quickly moves to exit from the Paris Agreement. What did the country manage to do with this new paradigm shift?


Right out of the gate, Solomon … well, he pretty much rushes headlong into the gate. Solomon starts out by claiming that the US has revived its coal industry. One wonders exactly where to start on this. In January, Reuters obtained preliminary US government data which showed that the coal industry continues to shed jobs. In February, figures published by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) revealed that not only had there been no new coal capacity added during 2017 (and only 3 units in 2016) but that coal’s total share of generating capacity has declined by 17.83% over the past five years. In fact, according to figures published in June by the US Energy Information Administration, coal has dropped to providing only 27% of total electricity generation.

The cause for coal’s steep decline? According to researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado Boulder writing in May, the responsible party is not renewable energy but is in fact the decline in natural gas prices. And only this week, the White House — the very center of Donald Trump’s power — has reportedly shelved a plan to bail out the coal (and nuclear) sectors. 

The final point to make is, possibly, the most absurd. Written and positioned as if it was the final nail in Solomon’s argument, he writes that “The once-powerful United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, formerly a fixture in the news, is defanged and forgotten, having lost its US funding and its relevance.”

Solomon’s article was published on September 28, only 11 days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report warning that limiting global warming to 1.5°C will “require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Putting aside the fact that the IPCC works in long-term cycles and is not beholden to publish material regularly (nor has it ever), Solomon must have regretted that particular sentence.




It takes something special to be able to so blatantly and casually lie in public as Lawrence Solomon manages. To so clearly and repeatedly mishandle the facts and misconstrue the evidence requires either an almost champion level of ignorance, or a complete disregard for the truth. Solomon squeezes at least a dozen lies and half-truths into only 750 words — that’s at least one every 62 words.

Is the global renewable energy industry on the back foot? No — in fact, in many parts of the world, it is progressing faster than ever before, and well above any other energy technology. The industry is maturing, however, and with that naturally comes some bumpy patches — stagnation, political intervention and misappropriation, and economic fluctuations; to think otherwise is naive.


But to think that these bumps in the road represent some global shift away from renewable energy is to ignore all common sense and historical evidence. Renewable energy isn’t going away, nor is it declining in popularity. It is the future — not just because we need it to be, but because it is economically better. 


https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/21/lies-lies-more-lies-lawrence-solomon-is-scared-so-is-the-fossil-fuel-industry/

SNIPPET:

Despite years of claims and commitments about clean investment and alleviating climate change, the world's largest oil companies have contributed just 1% of their spending budgets to green energy in 2018.

Companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and BP, have all accelerated efforts into renewables and battery technology in recent years. But many efforts have been overshadowed  by the oil industry's efforts to block or overturn environmental regulations.

Full article:



https://www.businessinsider.com/big-oil-claims-its-doing-its-part-on-climate-change-its-not-even-close-2018-11

 
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Novemebr 14, 2018




''The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks,'' Dr. Wallace S. Broecker 
warned humanity, decades ago. Now it looks like the beast is awakening, and even former critics seem to be coming around to the idea that we should stop poking it.

This reversal is even showing up in what we watch after work. The libertarian-leaning sensibilities of South Park’s creators have been plainly evident on TV for years. Humor like South Park’s fuels the sort of nihilistic “both parties are the same” rhetoric that allows edgy young men to feel superior to both parties, without having to actually make a political choice.

Climate change has come up in the show multiple times, from skewering the over-the-top dramatics with a Day After Tomorrow parody to lampooning the smug self-satisfaction of Prius driving liberals. But the episode that has continued to resonate, particularly in the deniersphere, is the ManBearPig episode. This infamous 2006 bit mocked Al Gore’s pandering to the press and public while promoting his Inconvenient Truth movie.

To be fair, the episode was always more about Gore’s attention-seeking behavior and bitterness at losing the presidency. The titular mythical monster (half man, half bear, half pig) served a stand-in for his public concern for climate change. For deniers obsessed with Gore, though, “ManBearPig” became something of a meme. 

But in last Wednesday’s episode, twelve long years after Gore was mocked mercilessly for warning of ManBearPig’s existence, the cryptid made its first (real world) appearance in the show. And real news like NBC  and Vanity Fair--as well as conservative fake news like Newsbusters, the Washington Times and Fox--all wrote how this new episode could be considered an anthropocene apology to Al Gore.

In the episode, the cartoon’s four young protagonists must seek out Gore after being blamed for the murders committed by ManBearPig (which police mistake for yet another school shooting). They’re determined to make amends so that they can clear their names and take down ManBearPig together. Lest you think the creators are now fans of the former VP, the cartoon Gore is less than gracious, requiring the kids apologize repeatedly and throw him a party at Olive Garden, where he bores them with a slideshow of his career. At the end, he gives them his Nobel prize and tells the kids it’s up to them now. (Presumably, this cliffhanger will be be picked up in tonight’s episode.)

But in one particularly climatic scene, captured by the right-wing “Media Research Center,” ManBearPig slaughters his way through a restaurant, while a glib denier explains that “You can't just go along with what people are saying, Susan, okay? There's no scientific proof, no real evidence of a ManBearPig… everyone wants to use the fear of a ManBearPig to get what they want. They throw around bad science, bad taxidermy… ”

When ManBearPig crashes through the wall behind the man, and begins a violent rampage he continues undaunted, saying “You can't just let people tell you that if you don't believe in ManBearPig, then you don't care about the world.”

When Susan points out that not only is ManBearPig real, but here, right now (and ripping the spine out of the guy behind him) the man shifts to the denier line that it’s too late now: “What can we do that everyone else will also do, Susan? Come on, use your brain. Even if we do something about it...  What about the Chinese? They’re just gonna keep right on--”

But ManBearPig picks him up and begins chomping down on the his skull, cutting off his denial mid-sentence.

While climate change was already plenty real twelve years ago, when ManBearPig was just a figment of Gore’s imagination, a decade of Sandys and Harveys and Marias and Florences, of wildfires and droughts and pests and heat waves, have made the risk of poking Dr. Broecker’s climate beast an obvious, if inconvenient, truth.