Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? / The Guardian

"It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.

More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us."

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"Imagine, then, that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we do about coronavirus. What action would we take? As the New Economic Foundation’s Alfie Stirling points out, a strict demarcation between the two crises in unwise. After all, coronavirus may trigger a global slowdown: the economic measures in response to this should be linked to solving the climate crisis. “What tends to happen in a recession is policy-makers panic about what the low-lying fruits are; it’s all supply chains and sticking plasters,” he tells me. During the 2008 crash, for example, there was an immediate cut in VAT and interest rates, but investment spending wasn’t hiked fast enough, and was then slashed in the name of austerity. According to NEF research, if the coalition government had funded additional zero-carbon infrastructure, it would not only have boosted the economy but could have reduced residential emissions by 30%. This time round, there’s little room to cut already low interest rates or boost quantitative easing; green fiscal policy must be the priority."

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"Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done – but it needs determination and willpower, which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking."

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Small, modular wind farms

small vertical-axis wind turbines

Professor John Dabiri and his team have been conducting research for over 8 years on the potential of small vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) for wind farms. According to their data, by using the wind wakes that so drastically inflate the size of wind farms using horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) constructively, rather than destructively, a VAWT farm could produce the same amount of power in 1/10th the land area, using turbines that are around 1/8th as tall. This has huge potential for industrial power production, as Dabiri et al rightfully point out, but I see an equal potential in a smaller niche: energy independence.

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Photovoltaic solar panels (PVs) are currently the standard for community energy independence, from experimental ecovillages, to exploited areas such as Puerto Rico or Navajo Nation, to more privileged people looking to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. This makes sense - even using the synergistic VAWT layout, solar still outperforms wind in power-per-area, assuming roughly equal reliability of wind and sun. PVs have a host of other problems, though, most notably a very high energy input, high cost, reliance on industrial production, and lots of intermittency from nighttime, clouds, and winter requiring large batteries. On the other hand, VAWTs can be built by the communities hoping to use them, potentially at very low cost in both energy and money, and run much more consistently through the night and the winter - potentially making up for the extra land area

While the synergistic VAWT layout is very efficient in terms of power-per-area, the one concern I have is power-per-turbine. A dynamo on each windmill could inflate the cost of the system quickly, and though smaller generators can be built from salvaged electric motors, the ideal turbine for this system is too large for any consumer washing machine or dryer motor and so finding enough motors could be tough. I believe the best solution to this would be mechanical transmission to a central generator, either through something like a jerker line or - my preferred idea - water pressure. Each turbine could run a mechanical pump, sending water through a series of pipes to run a single, large water wheel - which could either be salvaged from old industrial machinery or built by the community. This system could be incorporated into plumbing, welling, purification/desalination, etc. and could even be attached to a gravity battery system, pumping water upward when supply exceeds demand to be run back through the turbine when demand exceeds supply and thus solving the intermittency problem. A system like this would also be really easy to expand as needed
Of course, this kind of design isn’t a catch-all solution - nothing is. Areas with more reliable sunlight (such as tropical regions or deserts) and/or less reliable wind might benefit more from solar power, whereas communities with small enough energy demands to be provided by a single HAWT (like Open-Source Ecology’s design, for instance) wouldn’t have to deal with wakes at all, and thus could provide their power with only the space needed for its physical structure and access to the wind. I definitely think there are cases where synergistic VAWT clusters would be a great fit, though, and I hope this post inspires engineers, makers, and communities to start working on a robust, open-source design for such a system


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Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks: DESMOG

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.

The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?”

“Is coronavirus worse than the flu?” it began. “No, not even close.”
“It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won't go far,” ACSH added. “And the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem.”

ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadly consequences.

American Council on Science and Health?

The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of “peer-reviewed mainstream science,” in the words of the organization’s mission. Their experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write critically about companies like Monsanto. The group has received funding from oil giants including ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, chemical and tobacco industries to name a few.

Read the complete DESMOG article

The Frontline: experts answer your questions on the impacts of the climate emergency – as it happened: Ther Guardian

To mark the end of The Frontline series a panel of experts answer your questions about the climate crisis and how it is affecting Australia.
Ask Prof Lesley Hughes, Greg Mullins, Prof Michael Mann and Assoc Prof Donna Green your questions, and see the answers on our live blog. Email frontline.live@theguardian.com or tweet #frontlinelive

3 Mar 2020 15:28

And for more on the topics we covered today, read the whole of The frontline:

• The new fire zone
• The taps run dry
• The air we breathe
• The dead sea
• The killer heat
• The lost harvest

Thanks to my colleagues Marni Cordell and Adam Morton for their help running the blog today, and everybody else who put The frontline together.

It’s a beautiful, affecting multimedia series that looks at real people and the impacts the climate emergency is already having.

Thanks so much for reading, following and asking questions of our experts. It was a great and informative discussion, to mark a stellar project, and I hope to see you all again soon.

Read the original The Guardian article

State MPs dismayed at NSW Forestry logging unburnt habitat after bushfires: The Guardian

Endangered species have lost up to 82% of their habitat but Environment Protection Authority says logging of unburnt forest is legal

Lisa Cox

Logging is continuing in NSW forest north-west of Coffs Harbour in bushland that is proposed for the Great Koala national park. Photograph: International Fund For Animal Welfare

The New South Wales Forestry Corporation has continued to log unburnt forest that is habitat for some of the most imperilled species in the aftermath of the state’s bushfire crisis.

Logging operations have continued in the Styx River state forest on the north coast that is now remnant habitat for endangered species including the greater glider and the Hastings River mouse.

Both the federal and state governments have identified the mouse, which had 82% of its habitat burnt, as one of the species most at risk of extinction as a result of the bushfire disaster.

Trucks have also moved into an area of the Lower Bucca state forest north-west of Coffs Harbour in bushland that is part of the proposed Great Koala national park.

Twenty-four per cent of koala habitat in eastern NSW was burnt in the fire crisis and the environment minister, Sussan Ley, has said up to 30% of the koala population on the mid north coast may have been killed.

Environment groups and the independent state MLC Justin Field have expressed dismay that NSW Forestry Corporation has been able to continue with harvest plans in unburnt forest that is now important remnant habitat for wildlife.

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British carbon tax leads to 93% drop in coal-fired electricity: UCL News

"A tax on carbon dioxide emissions in Great Britain, introduced in 2013, has led to the proportion of electricity generated from coal falling from 40% to 3% over six years, according to research led by UCL.


British electricity generated from coal fell from 13.1 TWh (terawatt hours) in 2013 to 0.97 TWh in September 2019, and was replaced by other less emission-heavy forms of generation such as gas. The decline in coal generation accelerated substantially after the tax was increased in 2015."

Read the UCL article

See also:

Morrison now demands we 'adapt' to climate change catastrophes: IA

A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You Tube Video

Australia also needs a Green New Deal

The story of how fossil fuel corporations lie to us is shocking.

But we may have a green future! Maybe!

"What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves? We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late. This film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.” 


Subscribe to our channel: https://interc.pt/subscribe 

Read the article from Naomi Klein: https://interc.pt/2UktTeE"


See also:

Bushfire survivors join claim against ANZ for financing climate crisis : The Guardian