Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- Karl Broman
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Gavin Simpson
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- Risk and Well-Being
- Awkward Botany
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Ted Dunning
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- James' Empty Blog
- Professor David Draper
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- All about Sankey diagrams
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- All about models
- London Review of Books
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Earle Wilson
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- In Monte Carlo We Trust The statistics blog of Matt Asher, actually called the “Probability and Statistics Blog”, but his subtitle is much more appealing. Asher has a Manifesto at http://www.statisticsblog.com/manifesto/.
climate change
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- weather blocking patterns
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Climate model projections versus observations
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- "Mighty Microgrids" Webinar This is a Webinar on YouTube about Microgrids from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), featuring New York State and Minnesota
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- SolarLove
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Paul Beckwith Professor Beckwith is, in my book, one of the most insightful and analytical observers on climate I know. I highly recommend his blog, and his other informational products.
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Earth System Models
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Warming slowdown discussion
- David Appell's early climate science
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- World Weather Attribution
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Steve Easterbrook's excellent climate blog: See his "The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet?" for example Heavy on data and computation, Easterbrook is a CS prof at UToronto, but is clearly familiar with climate science. I like his “The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet” very much.
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Climate Change: A health emergency … New England Journal of Medicine Caren G. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., and Regina C. LaRocque, M.D., M.P.H., January 17, 2019 N Engl J Med 2019; 380:209-211 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1817067
Archives
Jan Galkowski
“How should children learn about climate change?”
Posted in #climatestrike, Banned Books Week, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, climate disruption, climate economics, climate hawk, climate justice, climate nightmares, climate science, ClimateAdam, ecological disruption, global blinding, global warming, global weirding
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Future liability for fossil fuel energy producers and conveyors
While I don’t entirely have the optimism which Professor Pearce expresses for the ability of climate models to be as specific as he describes, I am very optimistic that real time remote sensing resources, namely satellites, will get good enough to be highly specific regarding emission sources for all kinds of species of greenhouse gases. These won’t be available on the moment, but they will be available at high spatial resolution a week or two after the event, and they will, with fusion against databases, be able to identify the specific source of the emission.
Posted in #youthvgov, an ignorant American public, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, climate disruption, climate economics, climate emergency, coastal investment risks, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate responsibility, global warming, risk, Risky Business
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Comment on “Federal policy can drive the solar industry… but still may fall short”
Yuri Hurwitz posted an opinion piece at PV Magazine USA of the title in this post’s subject line. While I noted his concerns, I thought they were misplaced. And I thought he missed some other concerns which were more important. Below I repeat my comment, slightly expanded. Note Mr Hurwitz’ post was as a guest at PV Magazine.

Thank you for the post. I was aware of all these problems. There are others I can and will add, but let me comment on the ones mentioned.
I understand the constraints on supply, the difficulties with tariffs, and the power of zero Carbon energy, particularly solar, as a means of expanding employment. However, I see little economic that can get in the way of solar or wind and storage which incentives can help. Solar and wind will be the energy supply of choice on sheer economics by 2030 if they are not already. While post-pandemic supply issues are affecting everyone, the sudden surge in demand for solar and wind solutions certainly exacerbates that. But it is a nice problem to have. I’m sure the solar and wind industries will solve these.
For example, Michele Della Vigna of Goldman Sachs reported in an interview on Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View that fossil energy projects projects presently suffer a 10% to 18% premium in loans for their implementation given by major banks in comparison to (comparable) wind, solar, and storage projects. Specifically, loans on the latter have 3% to 5% coupons. Loans on the former have 15% to 20% coupons. (Exponential View is an awesome podcast, by the way. It’s much better than, say, Nelder’s Energy Transition Show.)
But there are other, more social obstacles which wind and solar need to overcome. Whether these were problems that were seeded by vested energy interests through clever PR or whether these are organic, right now, particularly in area which have ample open space to host wind and solar, these energy sources are considered aesthetically unacceptable. That’s silly of course, and it’s downright injust and unethical considering that these area, often suburbs, use lots of electricity, will use more once they get EVs, and yet they expect natural gas plants sited near and sometimes in low income communities and communities of color to provide the electricity they need. They also are conveniently situated away from major pipelines bringing fuels, and away from compressor stations and the like.
But nevertheless it is a big problem. It will eventually be overcome, when the economic argument is compelling enough — and it will be — but in the meantime it is blocking things like community solar which bring many benefits to people of all income grades and people having all kinds of residences.
There is also opposition to agrivoltaics for reasons I do not entirely understand. Here farmers can get income streams from dual use of their properties, something which farmers, for example, in upstate New York have been doing a long time with wind turbines and natural gas wells. But the opposition to solar and, admittedly, recent more ferocious opposition to turbines, is new and somehow different, and that needs to be solved.
The solar industry needs to remake itself in a way which puts a more human face on it. Whether that is by doing better PR or whether that is by having more employment oriented focus — having solar and turbine components built in local areas rather than in Asia. Agrivoltaics should be an easy sell, but it isn’t. If there are vested interests funding opposition , as they certainly did to nearshore wind turbines, SEIA and others need to root that out and expose them. They could find many allies. This human face needs to make it difficult for them to be painted as “another face of big energy who only cares about profits.” That’s not true, of course. Solar and wind and storage are revolutionary technologies, and no one knows the great benefits they’ll provide. But the degree to which solar moratoria and anti-solar-on-farm campaigns are succeeding suggests SEIA isn’t providing for a key part of their mission.
There is no way a federal mandate is going to soothe over these problems.
As I said, I am sure the long term future of solar, wind, and storage are bright. The projections say that the capital cost of building wind+solar+storage in the 2030s per kWh will be one sixth of the cost of transmission of grid electricity also per kWh. Accordingly, no manufacturer, subdivision developer, or home owner will want to buy electricity from the grid unless they absolutely have to do so. That will change whole communities, whole towns, whole cities, and land use policy. But in the interim it would be nice to think these good people in these communities could engage with solar, if only to nudge its implementation in ways more acceptable. I fear that if they oppose it outright and develop a history of doing that, when the unopposable force arrives, all their interests and preferences will get bulldozed by massive economic advantage, and I’m sure that wave will arrive with coarse effects. That is unfortunate, but inevitable.
It’s up to SEIA and the rest of us to provide the arguments and the vision of how solar, wind, storage are all in everyone’s best interests, as we know they are.
There probably will be a residue of progressives who won’t buy this approach. I’ve regarded and spoken with people with these attitudes for a long time. My assessment is that to the degree to which they put achieving other social objectives such as social justice and wealth equity or even biosphere diversity above solving climate disruption is the degree to which they do not really buy that there is an emergency with respect to the climate, one which needs to be urgently fixed with all the means at hand. To selectively rule out classes of means because of who’s doing the solving or what their history might be is preferring a choice which the natural world is not presenting us. That may be due to our collective and historical foolhardiness, but we are here. And we need to move forward knowing where we are.
Posted in agrivoltaics, American Solar Energy Society, Berkeley Haas Energy, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, clean disruption, climate business, climate disruption, climate economics, climate emergency, climate finance, climate justice, climate policy, decentralized electric power generation, demand-side solutions, distributed generation, ecomodernism, economic disruption, ecopragmatism, electric vehicles, electrical energy engineering, energy transition, engineering, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, Mark Jacobson, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Osborne, Our Children's Trust, photovoltaics, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Talk Solar, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Climate Facts from James Hansen and Makiko Sato Ahead of COP26
From the newsletter of 14th October 2021:

Left are greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, and right are cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, 1751-2018. Don’t think it’s China.
Prior COPs have been characterized by self-delusion so blatant that one of us (JEH) describes the backslapping congratulations at the end of the COPs as a fraud. We cannot blame it all on the political leaders, however. We scientists deserve a large part of the blame.
Scientists were slow to realize how low the targets must be for greenhouse gas (GHG) levels and for global warming to achieve a stable, healthy climate for young people and future generations. We also should have made clearer the effects of lags (delayed responses) in the climate system, as well as the time required to replace energy systems that are the largest source of GHGs.
Political leaders were slow to even set a meaningful goal. At last, with the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2015, they set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Global warming had already reached about 1°C, so 1.5°C was believed to be the lowest feasible warming limit. However, the leaders did nothing to realize the two essential actions that the target implied (see below). Instead, they went home and took actions and allowed policies that made the goal unachievable.
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, 14th October 2021

Quoting again:
The most extraordinary fact revealed in Fig. 2 is probably current emissions by the U.K. The industrial revolution began in the U.K. and for a long period the U.K. had the highest emissions per capita. Yet U.K. per capita emissions today are about one-third of those in the United States, and U.K. emissions are declining rapidly.[4]
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, 14th October 2021
I also offer the following from the same post, although I say loudly I completely disagree with it:
Two actions are essential if we are to phase down GHG emissions rapidly. The first, as described many places, most recently at Can Young People Save Democracy and the Planet?,1 is the need for a rising carbon fee as a foundation that will make all other carbon-reduction policies work faster and more effectively. The funds (collected from fossil fuel companies) must be distributed uniformly to legal residents – otherwise the public will never allow the fee to rise to the levels needed to rapidly phase down carbon emissions.
The second essential action is whole-hearted support for development and deployment of modern nuclear power. Otherwise, gas will be the required complement to intermittent renewable energy for electricity generation. Gas implies pipelines, fracking, air and water pollution, and emission of CH4 and CO2 that would assure climate disaster. Modern nuclear power, in contrast, has the smallest environmental footprint of the potential energies because of its high energy density and the small volume of its waste, which is well-contained, unlike wastes of other energy sources.
Nuclear power is already the safest of all major energy sources,[13] based on deaths per kilowatt hour, but modern nuclear power is now far superior, with the ability to shut down in case of an anomaly and not require external power to keep the nuclear fuel cool. Nuclear power has also been the fastest way to deploy power to scale,12 which will be important for phasing out CO2 emissions in places such as China.
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, 14th October 2021
The only way nuclear is a viable alternative is if the peoples of, for instance, New England suburbs — and their environmentalist supporters — continue to insist that solar farms and wind turbine constellations cannot be located close to where they live. If they do that, then modular nuclear power, distributed and small scale, is the only way forward to mitigate climate disruption.
Choose your poison, New England.
Posted in climate denial, climate disruption, climate economics
Tagged 100% wind water solar storage, anthropogenic global warming, BANANAS, climate disruption, economic disruption, energy policy, liberal climate denial, NIMBY, nuclear energy, progressives climate density, solar energy, wind energy
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An Open Letter from U.S. Scientists Imploring President Biden to End the Fossil Fuel Era
The following open letter was published on Thursday, 7th October 2021. Here is a link to the PDF original.


























“A political dynamic …”
Interesting.
Anger. With love. But setting boundaries.
Anger is about defeated expectations.
Seneca.
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Meet Solkjøring

Solkjøring is a 2022 Nissan LEAF SV Plus. Claire named her Tesla 3 Greta, for obvious reasons, and to honor Maphiyata echiyatan hin wini. I searched for an appropriate name for the LEAF. I was tempted to name it “Svante” after Svante Arrhenius, but I thought “Too many first names.”

We have an electric home, powered mostly by solar PV panelsii. The exceptions are (a) a gasoline-powered water pump in case the neighboring wetlands and latent streams flood, never used, but just in case, (b) a propane-powered emergency backup generator, again seldom used, and (c) a propane grille. The rest of it, from stoves, to laundry to heat pumps heating and cooling, our hot water heat pump hot water heater, even our lawnmower, are all electric. There is an orphaned oil furnaceiii which exists in case temperatures drop below Civ.
I’ve written before about our arrangement.

Solkjøring means “sun riding” or “sun driving” in Norwegian. Since the LEAF is charged primarily using electricity from our solar panels, I thought that idea a compact description in a single word. I mean there’s the German sonne fahren but that’s not as compact.
So Solkjøring it is!

The only downside of the name I found is that the Nissan USA portal and app use a database which store words in ASCII. They don’t even use ISO 8859-x, let alone Unicode UTFv. Accordingly when I entered the name as properly spelled it was rejectedvi. So I chose to approximate it Solkjoering in those places, but Solkjøring is what the name is, properly spelled.
i “Woman who came from the heavens.”
ii We’re planning to power the remaining by getting more panels later this year or early 2022. More on that later.
iii Ironically as climate warms, that’s becoming less likely, even around Boston.
iv One for which we’ll probably never need to buy oil again.
v WordPress accepts them.
vi I’m used to such corruptions as my given name is “Jan.”
First Contact, and the Long Now Foundation
Since I was 15 years old, I have been convinced that, basically, humanity is hopelessly oriented to the short term, even if its own long term success or even survival was in the balance. In those days, as I worked through high school and college, majoring in Physics, I was delivered to a point where I needed to choose a graduate school path. I consulted. My choices were Artificial Intelligence or SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Major players advised me away from SETI, and while AI, in 1974, was a long sought capability, at least the skills attending the software and algorithms and engineering and computer science could earn me a living. For SETI, I would be a marginal astronomer or astrophysicist or, worse, exobiologist with engineering creds, and these would not make a living.
In the end I chose MIT and AI, but SETI has never been far from my mind.
And in the intervening years, with threat of nuclear war receding, and despite threat of impact of climate change increasing, posing a threat which could be much worse, I hoped humanity might get its act together.
I was deeply disappointed. It hasn’t. The slipshod international response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of 2019-2022 demonstrates how badly off we collectively are.
So, I revert to my opinion of 1967: Humans are hopelessly short sighted. While we might blunder our way into some kind of equilibrium with climate disruption and eventually find some mix of curtailment, direct air capture, and suffering with which we can survive, it is far less an impressive performance by a group of hominids who think they are king of the hill in technology and science than those claims would suggest.
The hope in 1967, and increasingly now, is that a First Contact experience might shock us collectively into realizing where our place is, and the perspective we need to adopt. I do not mean an indirect inference of an extraterrestrial civilization as in Carl Sagan‘s Contact book and movie, but, instead, direct, in person contact, even if the extraterrestrials do not stick around for a long time.
The goals I have for such an encounter are similar to those of the Long Now Foundation. It’s not surprising that some of the principals of the Long Now also hold strong positions and are active at trying to deal with climate disruption due to human emissions of fossil fuels.

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Last ICE car gone from our ownership
Welcome to our new 2022 Nissan LEAF SV Plus! Still need to pick a name for it …. Our Tesla 3 is called “Greta.” I was thinking of “Svante” but Claire thought that was too obscure.



Our Nissan dealer is Milford Nissan in Milford, Massachusetts, and the sales manager is Guy Bedau. Excellent experience!
Posted in electric vehicles, EVs, Nissan LEAF, Svante Arrhenius, Tesla, zero carbon
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Jeremy Grantham credits Greta Thunberg and XR for pressuring governments to finally do something to cut emissions
The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder has recently become my favorite podcast. I eagerly await each new episode and, as a paying subscriber, I enjoy the delightfully long and geeky assessments, analyses, and opinions from really stellar guests.
There are educational episodes as well, introducing audiences to how the electrical grid actually works, and how, recently, grid forming inverters work.
Episode 144 featured Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire investor and co-founder of GMO, a Boston-based asset management firm, who spoke about market bubbles and, of course, the energy transition. Mr Grantham has been working to stop climate change as well, referring to it as “the race of our lives” and calling for a Marshall Plan to deal with climate change (possible paywall at link).
Mr Grantham was asked a lot of things by Mr Nelder relating to finance, China, and Carbon pricing. In one segment Mr Grantham credits Greta Thunberg and XR for pressuring governments like never before to act on cutting emissions, and praising their success. That segment is linked below, and I urge you to listen to the entire interview.
I also recommend subscribing to The Energy Transition Show. It is entirely listener supported and it is a fabulous piece of journalism, far better than many other assessments of energy and climate I know.

Climate Change and Extreme Weather Linked in U.N. Climate Report
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Youth Climate Anthem: “Long Forgotten Road”
The song was written by Scilla Hess, Ellie Wyatt, and Jonathan Owes-Yianomah:
LYRICS Welcome to the world Every boy, every girl This is your life your big adventure and your ticket is free they send you to school they’re gonna teach you the rules you’ll find out things are not quite what they seem take it from me the book they wrote is full of lies they says right is wrong and wrong is right so don’t believe the black and white cuz everything is shades of grey we got to learn from our mistakes Chorus: We got to pick up the pieces put them back together it’s down to us if we wanna make it better And try to find our long forgotten road pick up the pieces put them back together it’s down to us if we wanna make it better I’ll see you on the long forgotten road Welcome to the plan Every woman, every man They tell you there’s no price tag on your life they’ll have you believe That you have a voice You think that you have a choice Meanwhile they sell our future for a dollar, to a den of thieves We’re all under the same skies they got no answers to all our whys We speak the truth to all their lies Now we gotta gotta do what it takes And learn from our mistakes Chorus: We got to pick up the pieces put them back together it’s down to us if we wanna make it better And try to find our long forgotten road pick up the pieces put them back together it’s down to us if we wanna make it better I’ll see you on the long forgotten road Woah If we wanna Woah Then we gotta try to find our long forgotten road Woah If we wanna Woah then I’m gonna see you on the long forgotten road now we’re writing the book we’re not frightened to look see it with our eyes wide open we’re making our own rules Now we’re taking control old ways gotta go see it with our eyes wide open we’re making our own rules We’re making our own rules We’re making our own rules Pick up the pieces Put them back together It’s down to us If we wanna make it better I’ll see you on the long forgotten road Woah If we wanna Woah Then we gotta try to find our long forgotten road Woah If we wanna Woah then I’m gonna see you on the long forgotten road Gotta gotta do what it takes And learn from our mistakes Gotta gotta do what it takes And learn from our mistakes .
Biomes are too dynamic and intertwingled to be managed with simple political slogans: The case of Gnetum luofuense
Corners of the Environmentalist Establishment voice shrieks regarding what they call a biodiversity emergency, prompting even skilled journalists to claim the trend poses “as great a risk to humanity as climate change.” We went through the “insect apocalypse” fiasco, which turned out to be argued using bad evidence, specifically, insufficient sampling and improper statistics, including confirmation bias and sampling bias. Even UNEP shouts out about a “biodiversity emergency,” putting in hand-in-hand with the “climate emergency.”
A lot of this results from bad definitions and expectations. As Daniel Botkin observes in his book The Moon in the Nautilus Shell — Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered, many of our notions regarding species extinction and invasive species are grounded in myths regarding how biomes operate and interact:
… Environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s was essentially a disapproving and in this sense negative movement, focusing on aspects of our civilization that are bad for our environment. It played an important role by awakening people’s consciousness, but it didn’t provide many solutions to our environmental problems, or even viable approaches to solutions. That environmentalism was based on ideas of the industrial age — the machine age — ideas that developed in the eighteenth century and expanded in the nineteenth, ideas that I will argue in the rest of this book are outmoded.
That environmentalism has been perceived as opposing technological progress, but both those arguing for progress and those arguing for protection of the environment have shared a worldview, hidden assumptions, and myths about human beings and nature that dominated the industrial era. In the large, neither science nor environmentalism has gotten to the roots of the issues, which lie deep in our ideas and assumptions about science and technology, and go even deeper in myths and ancient worldviews.
(pages 8-9, Botkin, The Moon in the Nautilus Shell, 2012)
This is a growing opinion among professional biologists. It’s understandable why. A flawed understanding of how biomes work impedes proper conservation and management, and is often antithetical to the very idea of natural management. As Botkin argued in his earlier book, Discordant Harmonies, many of us have this idea that if people did not interact with natural systems, or interacted minimally, they would return to an equilibrium wherein “native species” would thrive. Botkin quotes George Perkins Marsh:
In countries untrodden by man, the proportions and relative positions of land and water, the atmospheric precipitation and evaporation, the thermometric mean, and the distribution of vegetable and animal life, are subject to change only from geological influences so slow in their operation that the geographical conditions may be regarding as constant and immutable.
(G. P. Marsh, Man and Nature, 1864)
Botkin isn’t the only advocate of this view. There’s Peter Del Tredici, both in his article, “The flora of the future,” and in his book Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast — A Field Guide (2nd edition, 2020). There’s the late Steven Vogel’s Thinking Like a Mall — Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature where Vogel argues the very concept of “nature” itself is flawed.

Tanner Smida, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There’s a lot of concern about honey bees (Apis mellifera). No doubt with ubiquitous use of pesticides like neonicotinoids, habitat destruction, and fungal pathogens make life difficult. But honey bees are not the only natural pollinators, even though most popular discussion considers “natural pollinators” synonymous with Apis mellifera. There are bumblebees, stingless bees, mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees, as well as various moths. While environmental pressures create what are effectively “dead zones” for honey bees and some other bees, the general pattern is that wild bees thrive in other areas, even if these are inconveniently situated, at least from the perspective of farmers or apiaries. (See monitoring measures here and here.) Bee populations respond to some of these threats, including developing associations with bacteria like Bombella apis which suppress fungal pathogens.
Like so much else in biosphere dynamics, loss of species in one area is complemented by emergence or migration of other species in their place. This species rotation is typical, and should be expected due to phenological changes imposed by climate disruption. Even in the case of bees, climate disruption is apparently the most significant pressure, more than changes in landscapes or landscape quality, per
Kammerer, Melanie, Sarah C. Goslee, Margaret R. Douglas, John F. Tooker, and Christina M. Grozinger. “Wild bees as winners and losers: Relative impacts of landscape composition, quality, and climate.” Global Change Biology 27, no. 6 (2021): 1250-1265.
That suggests that if honey bees are to be protected, the best first step is to limit climate disruption by getting off fossil fuels and shutting their extraction and use down, even if that means conversion of some existing habitats to others, like felling trees to create solar fields.
In addition, and this is more or less the the point of this blog post, honey bees can be harmful to some plants. Consider the gymnosperm Gnetum luofuense. It evolved before bees so, as Alun Salt tells in his Botany One blog post about them,
It’s no surprise that the plant has no use for them. However, they still produce pollen, a food that bees like to eat.
Salt summarizes the report
Yang, Min, Tao Wan, Can Dai, Xiao‐Chun Zou, Fan Liu, and Yan‐Bing Gong. “Modern honeybees disrupt the pollination of an ancient gymnosperm, Gnetum luofuense.” Ecology (2021): e03497.
His subtitle tells the whole story:
Some people fixate on honey bees as essential for pollination. Reality is more complicated. For one species, honey bee visits actively harm its chances of pollinating a partner.


If active measures to promote biodiversity are taken, managers ought to understand matters first and well before stumbling into a place where they don’t know what they are doing. And people with concern for biomes and the general environment ought to appreciate that while slogans like “biodiversity emergency” might make great rallying cries to gain membership and financial support, their relevance to biological reality is limited.
Posted in Aldo Leopold, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anthropocene, Apis mellifera, bacteria, being carbon dioxide, Bill McKibben, biology, Botany One, climate disruption, climate emergency, climate policy, complex systems, control theory, Cult of Carbon, Daniel B Botkin, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, Gnetum luofuense, gymnosperms, Steven Vogel
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safest form of energy

“100 % renewables is possible, here’s how”
zentouro and Raya Salter look at The Question, beginning with the work of Professor Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford University and colleagues. The report to which they refer is now summarized in a book by Professor Mark Z Jacobson. I’ve posted about Professor Jacobson’s work and his book a few times at this blog.
Posted in Mark Jacobson, zero carbon
Tagged 100% WWSS, climate disruption, electrical storage, solar energy, wind energy
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We Are Here
This is written from the perspective of New England, particularly southern New England, but the argument made by these charts is a bounding one. Namely, as CleanTechnica the original source of the story noted, “Germany has solar resources comparable to Alaska’s (not a joke).” The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) noted here is done for Germany, not New England. But LCoE is free of subsidies, and Germany is a big, wealthy OECD country, so the results are comparable. (No one, to my knowledge, has done such a study specifically for New England.) New England is snowy, but not, in principle, as snowy as Germany.
Basically, we are here. That means that solar, wind, and storage are already cheaper than any fossil fuel source.
The second argument, presented in a single cost, is that EVs have matched the cost of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, and that sales of ICE vehicles have peaked. The perspective is international, of course, with an emphasis upon Europe, and not southern New England.
On EVs, I think people need to remember there are five drivers of take-up of EVs, setting aside their benefits for reducing emissions:
- Capital cost of EV after whatever incentives apply.
- Lifetime operating cost of EV relative to ICE vehicle, including energy and maintenance, primarily tires.
- Density of the charging network in driving areas of interest.
- Battery power density capacity for EV, meaning giving range of EV.
- Reliability of EV.
#3 and #4 are in tension. It’s long been expected that the 2020-2030 decade will see two or more breakthroughs on energy storage and capacity. As that happens, and these get rolled out to the marketplace, the pressure to provide dense charging networks will lessen. Similarly, the push to provide charging networks will lessen the pressure on battery innovation, and that froth of innovation will be applied to making EVs cheaper and being better vehicles.
I need to drop something in here. I have read, and I have heard from some so-called environmentalists that they are opposed to EVs, preferring electricity-powered mass transport. Why? They don’t like where and how the Lithium for EV batteries is sourced and where it is. They don’t bring up the obvious comparison question, given that people are not going to do without personal vehicles, where are the materials making the components of ICE vehicles sourced?
Here’s another gloss on Lithium production.

So moving on to zero Carbon energy and storage …



And sales of ICE vehicles have apparently peaked:
