Donald Trump’s Climate Fantasies

NEW YORK – Legend holds that King Canute brought his flatterers to the sea to show them that even a king could not command the ocean waves, that the laws of nature are more powerful than the decrees of men. So pity Donald Trump, who really believes that his executive orders can hold back the tides.

Jeffrey D. Sachs.

Trump is surrounded by cronies rather than flatterers, and they and their foolish, ignorant king believe that by denying climate change they can restore the wealth and glory of coal, oil, and gas. They are wrong. Greed will not reverse human-caused climate change, and Trump’s executive orders will not stop the global process of phasing out coal, oil, and gas in favor of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, and other low-carbon energy sources.

In less than 100 days, we have learned that Trump is a man living in a fantasy world. He issues decrees, barks orders, sends out midnight Tweets, but to no avail. The facts – real ones, not his “alternative” variety – keep intervening. There is physics; there is law; there are courts; there are procedures; and there are voters, only 36% of whom approve of Trump’s job performance. There is also China, which wins technologically and diplomatically from every self-defeating move by the incompetent US president.

Read the piece by Jeffrey D. Sachs on Project Syndicate - “Donald Trump’s Climate Fantasies.”

The Cost of Solar Power has 25% decrease in Just 5 months

The future is looking bright for solar as the clean, renewable energy source gets more affordable.

The cost of solar power has
 dropped 25% in just five months.

In just 5 months, the cost of solar went down 25% as shown by two recent construction bids for solar projects in China and Abu Dhabi. On August 11, a bid of $0.46/W was put forward to build 500 megawatts of solar power in China and on September 19 a record low bid of $0.023/kW was submitted for 1.2 gigawatts of solar power in Abu Dhabi.

China and Abu Dhabi are not the only places in the world seeing dramatic changes in the cost of solar. A 100 megawatt solar project in Nevada recently submitted for approval would deliver electricity at $0.04 /kWh. That is the lowest price ever presented or seen from a US solar farm and much lower than the price of electricity for a new nuclear, coal or natural gas power plant.

Read the Solar Trust Centre story - “The Cost of Solar Power has 25% decrease in Just 5 months.”

Snakes and ladders, and climate change

Nicholas Christof - comparing climate
change to a snake plague.

Are terrorists more of a threat than slippery bathtubs?

President Obama, er, slipped into hot water when The Atlantic reported that he frequently suggests to his staff that fear of terrorism is overblown, with Americans more likely to die from falls in tubs than from attacks by terrorists.

The timing was awkward, coming right before the Brussels bombings, but Obama is roughly right on his facts: 464 people drowned in America in tubs, sometimes after falls, in 2013, while 17 were killed here by terrorists in 2014 (the most recent years for which I could get figures). Of course, that’s not an argument for relaxing vigilance, for at some point terrorists will graduate from explosives to nuclear, chemical or biological weapons that could be far more devastating than even 9/11. But it is an argument for addressing global challenges a little more rationally.

The basic problem is this: The human brain evolved so that we systematically misjudge risks and how to respond to them.

Read Nicholas Kristof’s comment in the New York Times (the same article was published today in the Melbourne Age headed “If climate change was a snake plague, we’d react”) - “Overreacting to Terrorism?”

Australia procrastinates, prevaricates, while France acts

A

ustralia procrastinates and prevaricates while others act.

Yes, Australia is caught in a coal conundrum – the country’s economy is inextricably linked to the coal industry and so with coal being the global warming villain, it’s imperative that we extricate ourselves from this dilemma.

While the Australian Government and a handful of others, primarily Canada, are blind to the alternatives, either knowingly or otherwise, others are acting, with the latest being France.

ClimateProgress reports that France will halve the country’s energy consumption by 2050, cut nuclear power production by a third by 2025 (from 75 percent of electricity mix to 50 percent), and increase renewable energy to 32 percent of total energy consumption by 2030.

Read the ClimateProgres story - “France Passes Law To Halve Its Energy Use, Slash Fossil Fuels A Nuclear”.

Power of the people needed to address climate change

T

he French Government conducting the tests must have known it could not win against such a show of people power.

So a few minutes before midnight on 10 July 1985, French secret service agents struck in Auckland harbour, New Zealand. They bombed and sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, one of the ships that was due to lead the flotilla into the nuclear test zone. The French agents murdered Fernando Pereira, a photographer and crew member.

Read the EcoWatch story about people power - “People Power Needed Now More Than Ever”.

Nuclear power - powerful energy source, powerful reactions

The idea of nuclear power always ignites profuse, and sometime violent, reactions.

A nuclear power plant.

However, it has been argued that if we are serious about reducing our carbon dioxide emissions, then it is time to embrace nuclear power.

A Professor of Climate Science, Barry Brook, and a Professor of Climatology, Tom Wigley, have argued for a new global movement in support of nuclear energy.

Writing on The Conversation in an article headed: “Serious about emissions? It’s time to embrace nuclear”, the paid said it was time the fossil-fuel-dominated energy was on the way into the environmental history books.

“There still exists a widely held belief that expanding electricity generation from nuclear fission poses a comparable or greater threat than climate change. This is a gross miscalculation of risk,” they said.