2023 in climate change

The high risk of rolling blackouts in the energy-rich province of Alberta has subsided.   Poor planning.  

It was a good idea to shut down thermo-electric coal plants but insufficient capacity replaced it.  

2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin

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Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe

How Electric-Vehicle Demand Is Losing Steam in the U.S., in Charts - WSJ (ungated version)


The headline is misleading IMO. Content is otherwise interesting, in particular the last chart.

Market penetration growth rates strike me as impressive. The fact that China is well ahead of peer economies strikes me as very positive for the future growth of the global EV market. Perhaps it is time that the US federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel were increased.

Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions

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Oxfam: Richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity

• The richest 1 percent (77 million people) were responsible for 16 percent of global consumption emissions in 2019 —more than all car and road transport emissions. The richest 10 percent accounted for half (50 percent) of emissions.
  
• It would take about 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99 percent to produce as much carbon as the richest billionaires do in a year.
  
• Every year, the emissions of the richest 1 percent cancel out the carbon savings coming from nearly one million wind turbines.
  
• Since the 1990s, the richest 1 percent have used up twice as much of the carbon we have left to burn without increasing global temperatures above the safe limit of 1.5°C than the poorest half of humanity.
  
• The carbon emissions of richest 1 percent are set to be 22 times greater than the level compatible with the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement in 2030.

Remember when chatting about the weather wasn’t sinister and weird?

 R_P wrote:

It was nicer than usual in Denver, so that must mean this chart is wrong. 

 R_P wrote:
Oh Yeah! Wait till next year! 

NASA confirms summer 2023 was Earth's hottest on record

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 black321 wrote:
Better (too) late than never.

Wow, even the Wall Street Journal is calling Exxon hypocrites. You could argue a company is in its right to protect its business model, even if it's ultimately on a road to failure...but you cross the line when you "spin" the story or outright lie about even the real facts and conclusions from your own research and people. Not sure what is worse, companies/managers that do that, or fools who see no harm.

some excerpts

Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era

Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives.

Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus.

The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial.

Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.

“The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys” that were espousing climate change denial, said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity that partly focuses on environmental issues. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”

Exxon’s public shift on climate change came after the Royal Society, a British scientific academy, criticized the company for spreading “inaccurate and misleading” views on climate science in 2006. Exxon responded in a letter that it recognized “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.”

While Tillerson and others played down the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s scientists were themselves modeling alarming increases in carbon emissions without dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.

https://www.wsj.com/business/e...

(2021)

Conservatives have already written a climate plan for Trump’s second term

Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies.

The 920-page blueprint, whose hundreds of authors include former Trump administration officials, would go far beyond past GOP efforts to slash environmental agencies’ budgets or oust “deep state” employees.

Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials. (...)

 R_P wrote:
Three decades is what is often used elsewhere.

"Winter heatwave"