nuclear-news

Given the very real possibility that she’ll be at or near the pinnacle of our politics for somewhere between four and sixteen years, it’s worth asking how she will handle the gravest crisis that looms over our planet. That’s not the same as asking if she should be elected, because, on climate issues, a shrink-wrapped pallet of frozen Ore-Ida French fries would be a vast improvement on the incumbent. But it’s going to take an unflinching, unrelenting effort to transform America’s energy system and lead a similar process globally. Is she committed to that?

Her defenders point to a number of powerful statements that she made over the course of her Presidential primary campaign. She’d eliminate the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal. She’d tell the Department of Justice to investigate oil and gas companies. ………

If there’s a rub, it’s that, to date, she hasn’t been that eager to really stand up to power on this issue. …….

What will she do if she becomes Vice-President? I imagine that her courage will depend on the climate movement’s success in eroding the political power of the oil companies. The weaker the fossil-fuel conglomerates become, the less scary they are. (Oil barons understand this, which is why they’re spending large sums to reëlect Trump). My guess is that Harris is a run-of-the mill politician, who will go where the footing is easiest.  ……….

(Note to Joe Biden.) The Sunrise Movement—the group of under-thirties who organized the sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office that served as a coming-out party for the Green New Deal—produced a YouTube video for Markey last week, which may be my favorite political ad of all time. (Watch till the end for one of the best knife twists in campaign history). If Markey wins, he will go back to the Senate a national progressive hero; more to the point, he will have demonstrated that truly taking on climate change can pay off politically. That lesson won’t be lost on anyone, Harris included.  ……….

Obvious but important: a new study from Climate Central found that as temperatures rise, so does demand for air-conditioning. It projects that, by 2050, demand for air-conditioning will rise in the United States by fifty-nine per cent—and far more than that around the world. That is why we need highly efficient air-source heat pumps, which also cool air, and why we need enormous amounts of renewable electricity to power it all.

……  Scoreboard

⬇️ Big number on the board this week: a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius), which is the highest reliably recorded temperature ever on planet Earth. It happened over the weekend, in California’s Death Valley, which is also the place where the nominal Earth temperature record of a hundred and thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit was set, in 1931. That number, though, has been disputed ever since, and the great weather historian Christopher Burt published a lengthy investigation, in 2016, proving it could not have happened. For now, a hundred and thirty degrees is the mark—but don’t expect it to last.

……..Extraordinarily bad fire news from across the planet. In the Amazon, fires are burning at a rate not seen for a decade. In Siberia, fires may be burning at a rate we’ve never previously seen—and the heating, drying region may be on the verge of moving into a new and extreme “fire regime.” In Colorado and elsewhere in the American West, this year’s fire season has begun in earnest. The forests surrounding Hanging Lake—one of the state’s premier tourist sites—almost burned. The fourteen-year-old climate activist Haven Coleman reports via Twitter: “Even inside my house it’s hazy. . . . Feels like I’m being cornered, trapped. Stuck home since there’s covid everywhere, but NOW my home is becoming unbreathable. Everything sucks. Ugh.” Indeed. By midweek, evacuations were under way in California, where fires were threatening the city of Vacaville and other parts of Napa and Sonoma.

…….The two-thousands were, officially, the hottest decade on record, up 0.39 degrees Celsius from the previous decade, which is a huge change in ten years’ time. It’s an urgent reminder that the next decade may be our final chance to take serious climate action

A new study in Nature confirms that the effect of the pandemic on the planet’s temperature was negligible—greenhouse-gas emissions fell, but much of the smog that tends to cool the planet also disappeared. “These results highlight that without underlying long-term system-wide decarbonization of economies, even massive shifts in behaviour, only lead to modest reductions in the rate of warming,” the authors wrote. They also, however, noted some good news: “Pursuing a green stimulus recovery out of the post-covid-19 economic crisis can set the world on track for keeping the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement within sight.”