Scottish green hydrogen scheme gears up to fuel ferries, buses and trains (excerpt): The Guardian

"Scottish Power’s wind and solar farms will soon help produce green hydrogen to run buses, ferries and even trains as part of a pioneering strategic partnership to develop the UK’s nascent hydrogen economy.

Wind and solar farms will produce the gas alongside Scottish Power,

The renewable energy company, owned by Spain’s Iberdrola, will work alongside companies that specialise in producing and distributing the zero-carbon gas. Hydrogen is expected to play a major role in helping the UK to meet its climate targets.

Scottish Power will use the clean electricity generated by a major new solar farm planned for a site near Glasgow to run an electrolyser, owned by its project partner ITM Power, which will split water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules."..............

Go to complete The Guardian article

Related: HYDROGEN The once and future fuel? Opinion

  hydrogen,clean energy,energy,#renewables,

Australia's government channels government green funds away from renewables towards subsidies for fossil fuels.

(Pics by this blog)

ARENA to get $1.4 billion as Coalition channels funds to CCS, hydrogen and pubs (excerpt): RenewEconomy

The federal Coalition government has finally decided to extending the funding for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, but will – as predicted – push both ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation away from wind and solar into other “low emission” technologies, including carbon capture and storage.

 

ARENA and CEFC have played critical roles in advancing Australian renewable, storage and other critical enabling technologies since their creation in 2012, and despite repeated attempts by the Coalition government to dismantle them, and severe cuts to ARENA’s original budget.

ARENA – which is now nearly exhausted of funds, and had its board recently stacked with Coalition favourites – is to be given “guaranteed baseline funding” of $1.427 billion over the next 10 years, and will be given extra allocations in the annual budget. For 2020/21, that will amount to $191 million.

This is part of a $1.9 billion package to the two green funds that will include money for CCS, a regional hydrogen hub, along with many of the project identified by a group led by former Origin Energy CEO Grant King, and even some money for pubs to upgrade their refrigeration systems.

 

The government will change the mandates of both ARENA and the CEFC so they can more or less follow the government’s Technology Roadmap which is to be finalised in the next couple of weeks, and which looks at technologies beyond wind and solar, including gas, hydrogen and CCS.

 

The push to broaden the mandate into “low emissions” technologies will require parliamentary approval – rejected by the Senate when the Coalition first tried to scrap the bodies – and comes just days after the unveiling of a major gas package, and the government’s extraordinary ultimatum to build a 1GW gas plant in the Hunter Valley.

 

Go to Renew Economy's complete article by Giles Parkinson

 

Related: Compromised: Genie Energy and the Murdoch media’s climate denial (excerpt): Michael West Media

PM Morrison,#Australia,#methanegas,coal mining,gas,ARENA,#fossilfuelcompanies,role of media,

 

 

Body count: How climate change is killing us: Paddy Manning's Book

"True stories of loss and courage from people at the frontlines of Australia's worst climate-fuelled disasters - bushfire, heatwaves, flash-floods, disease outbreaks and now the latest in a new age of pandemics. 

What are the health risks of climate change, why weren't we warned and what are Australian governments doing about it?"

   About The Book

"Suddenly, when the country caught fire, people realised what the government has not: that climate change is killing us.

But climate deaths didn’t start in 2019. Medical officers have been warning of a health emergency as temperatures rise for years, and for at least a decade Australians have been dying from the plagues of climate change – from heat, flood, disease, smoke. And now, pandemic.

In this detailed, considered, compassionate book, Paddy Manning paints us the big picture. He revisits some headline events which might have faded in our memory – the Brisbane Floods of 2011; Melbourne’s thunderstorm asthma fatalities of 2016 – and brings to our attention less well-publicised killers: the soil-borne diseases that amplify after a flood; the fact that heat itself has killed more people than all other catastrophes put together. In each case, he has interviewed scientists to explore the link to climate change and asks how – indeed, whether – we can better prepare ourselves in the future.

Most importantly, Manning has spoken to survivors and the families of victims, creating a monument to those we have already lost. Donna Rice and her 13-year-old son Jordan. Alison Tenner. The Buchanan family. These are stories of humans at their most vulnerable, and also often at their best. In extremis, people often act to save their loved ones above themselves. As Body Count shows, we are now all in extremis, and it is time to act.

 

Climate Fires in the USA

Respected journalist Paddy Manning tells these stories of tragedy and loss, heroism and resilience, in a book that is both monument and warning.

‘A climate emergency tour de force.' Dr Bob Brown

'True stories of heroism and unimaginable loss...Body Count is a brilliant exposition of why we must deal with the climate problem now.' Ross Garnaut

'Climate change kills. … Through the accounts of people who have lost so much, Paddy Manning drives home the deeply personal impact of climate change. Governments continue to ignore the impact on climate change on human health at OUR peril. The future of our planet and our future generations depends on everyone playing their part, today.' Professor Kerryn Phelps

'A stunningly powerful call to political leaders everywhere who hear the warnings of the devastating impacts of climate change on health but fail to act.' Dr Helen Haines, independent member for Indi

‘Moving stories of heroic courage and tragic loss. A pause to reflect on the lives lost and how urgently we need change.’ David Pocock, former Wallabies captain"

To order the book 

 

Children Face Unique Health Threats Due To Climate Change

Related: How Climate Migration Will Reshape America Millions will be displaced. Where will they go? (excerpt) : NYT Magazine

#climate crisis, #climateemergency, #Australia, #California, Oregon, #climatefires, #USA, smoke, infectious diseases, #foodsecurity, water security, #heatwaves,  

How Climate Migration Will Reshape America Millions will be displaced. Where will they go? (excerpt) : NYT Magazine

(Pics by this blog)

Hurricane Michael left this

" ....... I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and I mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (See a detailed analysis of the maps.) "

Sea rise and no planned retreat

"What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million

people — nearly one in two — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be

particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo. "

........................

Some predicted sea rise may be too conservative

"Let’s start with some basics. Across the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Ariz., does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, 
extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer — which supplies nearly a third of the nation’s irrigation groundwater — could be gone by the end of the century."

Go to complete, extensive New York Times Magazine article

Related:  Trump baselessly questions climate science during California wildfire briefing (excerpt): CNN

#America, #climaterefugees, #extremeheat, #searise, #USA, climate migration, water security

Video - 'We're just flaring a tremendous amount of gas': Oil executives in leaked recording share their REAL views on climate change and burning natural gas while publicly claiming to have emissions under control (excerpt) : Mail Online

Summary from article


"• A discussion by the Independent Petroleum Association of America among oil and gas executives was secretly recorded in June 2019

• In recording they shared their true stances against climate change and their opposition to federal regulation of methane emissions 

• Ron Ness, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said: 'We’re just flaring a tremendous amount of gas. The value of it is very minimal'

• He slammed stronger regulation of natural gas as an 'unnecessary burden'  

• Dan Haley, the president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, suggested the industry use emotional marketing tactics to 'win these battles'

• He said: 'The activists are doing this when they talk about banning fracking in Colorado. They don’t show explosions. They show women and children' 

• Comments come as oil and gas leaders are criticized for flaring natural gas, which creates pollution and emits planet-warming greenhouses gases "

Go to the extensive Mail Online article

Related:  Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says (excerpt): The Guardian (3 years old but still relevant)

Related: 'Australia in January,

 California in August':

 Aussies watch on in horror

 as wildfires ravage

 US west coast (excerpt): SBS

#fossilfuelcompanies, oil companies,  #methanegas, gas, greenhouse gas pollution, 

Compromised: Genie Energy and the Murdoch media’s climate denial (excerpt): Michael West Media

(Pics by this blog)

See the interesting article below. 

The TV series 'The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty' will soon be screened on ABC TV.

Murdoch series coming to ABC TV

"Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, former CIA director James Woolsey, former US Treasury head Larry Summers, former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, hedge fund boss Michael Steinhardt and Jacob Rothschild have something in common. They are all on the board of oil and gas explorer, Genie Energy. Gas industry whistleblower Simone Marsh explores Rupert Murdoch’s fossil fuel interests.

Psychological warfare, or psywar, is the use of propaganda against an enemy, supported by such military, economic or political measures as may be required. Such propaganda is generally intended to demoralise the enemy, to break his will to fight or resist, and sometimes render him favourably disposed to one’s position. 

Book: Hack Attack

Psychological warfare, winning the “hearts and minds” of the civil population, has been integral to the climate war.

And Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been integral to the propaganda war; so much so that its Australian business has come under serious pressure this year amid anger over the coverage of the bushfires by major titles The Australian, the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, the Courier Mail and Foxtel’s Sky News.

Overnight, Rupert Murdoch’s son James publicly rebuked Murdoch’s Fox News over its climate denialism. Last week, a senior executive, Emily Townsend, took the extraordinary step of going public to criticise her own media organisation for its “dangerous” coverage of climate change. 

Behind the propaganda

Threats to democracy

The Murdoch press has always been avidly in favour of fossil fuels and notorious for spreading doubt about the science of global warming. It is worth looking, therefore, at the formal links between Rupert Murdoch and the oil and gas sector.

For a start, News Corp companies in Australia have extensive commercial arrangements with multinational oil and gas corporations. They take big advertising dollars, although how big remains a secret. Their newspapers stage “roundtables” or corporate conferences at which journalists and executives mingle with fossil fuel executives. Yet, rival media Nine Entertainment and its Australian Financial Review masthead does the same.

Where News is different is in Murdoch’s direct financial interest in oil and gas exploration in the Middle East, investments which also compromise New Corp’s coverage of Middle East politics and Israeli expansionism.

Murdoch has aligned himself with fossil fuel interests globally via the American Australian Association (AAA), and Genie Oil and Gas. Genie oil and gas is a division of Genie Energy and has been involved plans to frack in Israel. Its big project now, however, is exploring for oil in the Golan Heights, which is disputed territory once controlled by Syria."....................................."

Go to the complete Michael West Media article
by Simone Marsh | Jan 15, 2020

Related:  Climate Change is a cause of attacks on democracy

 

Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says (excerpt): The Guardian (3 years old but still relevant)

Pics from this blog

Note: A three year old article but what has changed apart from some greenwashing?

A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.

 

Exxon

The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute. 

Traditionally, large scale greenhouse gas emissions data is collected at a national level but this report focuses on fossil fuel producers. Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change.

The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report.