"Senate passes $739bn healthcare and climate bill after months of wrangling"
It was ugly. It was hard fought but it came through.
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A deep look at the new inflation reduction act, why its divisive among climate experts, and why its historic
Related, here is a piece in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer - "The Best Evidence Yet That the Climate Bill Will Work"
The three new estimates were conducted by Energy Innovation; Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm in New York; and the REPEAT Project, a university-associated team led by Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor. The studies represent a new spin on an old approach. Normally, when Congress considers a major piece of legislation, outside economists pore over its details, feeding them into computer models to estimate how each provision might affect GDP, inflation, and the federal budget deficit. Instead, the three groups looked at the bill’s climate effects, sketching what the bill could mean for carbon emissions, clean-energy deployment, and energy costs.
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The Manchin-Schumer bill wouldn’t get all the way to Biden’s 2030 goal, Jenkins told me. But it would get close enough that states, cities, companies, and the Environmental Protection Agency could get the country over the finish line.
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"Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act is really a climate and energy bill. What’s in it?"
More info on the bill that was announced last night. I appreciate Vox's breakdowns.
Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed in their joint statement that the bill delivers enough on climate to cut pollution by roughly 40 percent by 2030. (Economic modelers at Rhodium Group said that after an initial review of the bill, the 40 percent figure was “plausible.”) The legislation helps move the US a little closer to its stated goal of cutting pollution in half within the decade.
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The Seattle Heat wave has arrived. Katie and I spent some time last night prepping for it. We don't (yet) have AC in the house, so we make use of portable AC units. We set one up in the bedroom for sleeping, and the other goes into the office. Since they are right across from each other, we hang a blanket in the hall to create a faux door, and we leave the two rooms connected.
We lose a bit of the air but it allows us to be connected at home, and lets the dogs have a bit more space to roam rather than being locked in the bedroom.
I do hate the portable AC units and every year we swear it's the year we get central AC. Then something else comes up (it was the garage roof this year.) We'll see if next year is the year (spoilers: it will be.)
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"How not to solve the climate change problem"
When politicians talk about reaching “net zero” emissions, they’re often counting on trees or technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air. What they don’t mention is just how much these proposals or geoengineering would cost to allow the world to continue burning fossil fuels.
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Studies show that the most effective way to address the climate change problem is to decarbonize the economies of the world’s nations. This means sharply increasing use of renewable energy – solar and wind cost less than new fossil fuel plants in much of the world today – and the use of electric vehicles.
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"Africa’s wildlife parks managers meet to boost conservation"
Officials are meeting in Kigali in Rwanda this week as part of the continent’s first-ever Africa Protected Areas Congress in a bid to expand the preservation of land and marine wildlife, despite little funding and the low quality of many existing conservation areas in the region.
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The congress brings together wildlife parks and reserves managers, scientists, and Indigenous and community leaders. It’s hoped that increasing the dialogue between groups will improve the health of Africa’s biodiversity hotspots and combat worrying trends, such as the increase in poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.
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"U.K. braces for record temperatures as ‘heat apocalypse’ hits Europe"
Having endured similarly historic heat last year in a region also known for not always having AC, my heart goes out to those in the UK. Stay cool. Stay hydrated.
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A good interview with Charles Kenny
Bold in below quotes is the question carried over from the link. My only edit to a quote below was to elide portions.
In a case like climate change, we see sort of a fascinating “stuff” and “nonstuff” problem, where we need to do the engineering and we need to get people to enable the conditions for that engineering work to happen fast enough and then put it in place. Pandemics are another case like that.
So take pandemics. You can see the last three years in sort of two different ways. One is of immense human progress, driven by human cooperation. So when I got my first Pfizer shot, we were talking about a vaccine that was developed more rapidly than any vaccine in history. It was developed in an effort that involved the world. So you had the Hungarian scientists working in the United States who did some of the underlying research. And in Emma Rene, you had the children of Turkish refugees in Germany who actually developed the vaccine. You had the Greek [immigrant] who moved to America and ran the company that produced it. In my case, you had the Vietnamese woman who actually stuck the injection into my arm, now living in the United States: global cooperation at its best. It was a sign of what we can accomplish.
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When you look at the state of the progress movement today or the state of the fight against climate change or the state of the fight against pandemics, where do you see us falling, on that narrow line between too much doom and too much satisfaction?
With climate, I feel that the doom has won out. You mentioned a while ago that you were looking for a book for your child on climate change that wasn’t all doom and you couldn’t find one. And I think that does reflect sort of the general discourse on climate in a really disappointing way.
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What would you say to skepticism of progress that’s coming from people feeling like promises were made about the future that the future didn’t live up to, that progress hasn’t delivered on its promises?
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I’m a bit of a skeptic about happiness literature. I don’t think that we ought to be maximizing subjective well-being on a scale of 1 to 10 as a sole public policy aim. But I do think the subjective well-being literature points you in a bit of a direction. [Subjective well-being] has been flatlining in many countries around the world, many rich countries around the world, over the last 10, in some cases, 20, 30, 40 years — it depends what question you ask, but there’s good reasons to think we’re not seeing a massive increase in happiness.
And so, you know, if people thought that what material progress was going to deliver was sort of human perfection, they’re right to be disappointed, I guess I would say. I think they were naive to expect that to begin with, but that’s easy to say after the fact.
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"Inside Clean Energy: Some EVs Now Pay for Themselves in a Year"
I had really really wanted to make my current "new" car an EV. I really did. But I couldn't find an EV option which I was comfortable inside and which fit our budget. But I am committing here, finances allowing, regardless of size - our next car will be electric. Granted, based on our current purchasing frequency, that is ten years down the road. We'll see.
Most of us think of gasoline prices in terms of dollars per gallon, not dollars per barrel. Luckily, when Molchanov did his analysis he used numbers even English majors could understand. A gallon of gas cost $3.10 in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. That same gallon costs a lot more this year, and Molchanov doesn’t expect things to get better. He expects the average cost for 2022 to be about $4.50 per gallon. But while gas prices have jumped about 45 percent, Molchanov expects electricity costs to increase in 2022 by just 6 percent, from 13.7 to 14.5 cents per kilowatt hour. It suddenly got a lot cheaper to charge a battery than fill up a gas tank.
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Wildfires Are Putting Giant Sequoias at Existential Risk
Saw coverage of this on the NBC news yesterday. Here's hoping that firefighters can get the blaze under control and we don't lose the amazing trees that have seen so much history over their lives.
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Inflation, Scarcity and the Road to Survival
Originally brought to my attention via this blog post, this article raises some good points which I had - admittedly - taken for granted or overlooked altogether.
We are now trapped in what I have called “the poverty of two narratives” that pits the business-as-usual crowd against the green transitionists. This supposed debate avoids unpleasant realities such as rising global consumption and growing rates of energy use in a finite world. Moreover, both groups believe unlimited economic growth is the only answer to our multiplying emergencies.
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Plastic Recycling Is Working, So Ignore the Cynics - The Washington Post
There's been a lot of coverage about how plastic recycling has been a lie. I'm glad to hear it's only mostly been a lie.
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The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future
[Auto Generated Summary]:
Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. "The idea is to let the plants put back at least as much carbon and minerals as we take out."Tolly tells me that "The green manure ties up nutrients, fixes nitrogen, adds carbon and enhances the diversity of the soil. The more plant species you sow, the more bacteria and fungi you encourage. Every plant has its own associations. Roots are the glue that holds and builds the soil biology."The other crucial innovation is to scatter over the green manure an average of one millimetre a year of chipped and composted wood, produced from his own trees or delivered by a local tree surgeon. As Tolly explains: "It isn't fertiliser; it's an inoculant that stimulates microbes. The carbon in the wood encourages the bacteria and fungi that bring the soil back to life." Tolly believes he's adding enough carbon to help the microbes build the soil, but not so much that they lock up nitrogen, which is what happens if you give them more than they need. If we can discover how to mediate and enhance the relationship between crop plants and bacteria and fungi in a wide range of soils and climates, it should be possible to raise yields while reducing inputs.
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The weather in Seattle this week is brutal. It is the final straw, we'll be looking to get central air or a heat pump or something to ensure the house is manageable in times like this in the future.
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Warren, AOC and others propose $500 Billion Bill for Green Mass Transit
It's a bit over a year since Warren dropped out of the Presidential race and I'm still sad I'm not writing President Warren, but things like this are still amazing and I can only hope that the Democrat control allows us to see some sweeping changes like this.
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The Pandemic Year Marked a Turning Point in Climate Change
No, it didn't. We just showed that when we do less as a planet, it does what we want it do in regards to lessening the damage we're doing on the planet.
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The Pandemic Year Marked a Turning Point in Climate Change
No, it didn't. We just showed that when we do less as a planet, it does what we want it do in regards to lessening the damage we're doing on the planet.
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