Intensity

Right Now, Everything's Turned to 11

People mobbing a water delivery truck earlier today in New Delhi

Nearly 70 percent of the planet’s landmass, and nearly 90 percent of its population, is in the northern hemisphere. That means that the next six or eight weeks encompass the hottest days on planet earth each year, as we straddle the summer solstice on this side of the equator—the hottest days usually follow the solstice by a week or three, as the heat accumulates from all that sunlight on land and sea. Last year, in early July, we had the string of what researchers are certain were the hottest days the earth had seen in the last 125,000 years. Since then we’ve had twelve straight months of all-time records; we learned earlier today that May joined that list.

So while climate disaster can and does come in all seasons and all places now, we are heading into the peak of what you might call greenhouse season, when one can be sadly certain of hideous news. Right now we are seeing a heatwave of truly monstrous proportion across Asia—the temperature in New Delhi these past days has topped120 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in its recorded history. (And the British colonizers were at least good about recording temperatures). This newsletter doesn’t describe every hideous consequence of global warming, because there’s not much we can do about it—our job is to try and keep it from getting worse. But sometimes moral and intellectual clarity demands simple description.

Heat like this kills people, obviously—and when eventually total mortality statistics are analyzed, it will turn out that it killed many many more than we now know, people whose hearts simply gave out. But most people won’t die—there are 35 million people in Delhi, and most will live to endure the almost unimaginable, day after day. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there over the years—it’s a leafy city, and home to some of the world’s most moving monuments, above all the Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated. But it’s also badly polluted, filled with the smoke from cars and auto-rickshaws, cooking fires and factories; the last time I was there you couldn’t see the giant Indian flag at Connaught Place from across the street.

And now—now it’s very like hell. It’s hard enough if you’re rich. Nitin Singh, a lawyer, told his story to the Guardian: “My home has three air conditioners, but frequent power outages have left me helpless,” said Singh. “A two-hour power outage last night compelled me to reserve a hotel room for my sick father and kids. My wife and I spent the majority of the night on our home’s terrace, and we had trouble falling asleep even for a few hours.” But most Delhiites are very very poor.

Every morning, Tripti, a social health worker who lives in the impoverished enclave of Vivekanand Camp, is among those who has to stand under the blazing sun with buckets and pots, waiting desperately for the water tanker to arrive.

“People have to wait for two to three hours in the queue for just for the couple of buckets of water,” she said. “The increasing temperature has made it worse. As the heat is increasing, we need more water but the supply is in fact decreasing. We are suffering badly and heat is making it impossible to live.”

Many of the city’s slums have no running water, and as supplies have dwindled in the heat, the trucks that deliver water for a price have dwindled. Here’s Esha Mitra of CNN, describing the arrival of the water wagon in one neighborhood:

Dozens of people run to the truck, some even climbing on top of it to throw pipes in, pushing in to get their containers filled with water. It’s first come first served, and many people miss out.

Mother-of-six Poonam Shah is one of those people.

“There are 10 people in my family – six kids, me and my husband, my in-laws, relatives come over sometimes – can we all bathe in one bucket of water?” she asks.

Today her family may not even have one bucket. Poonam was working her street food stall when the water truck arrived. She tried to run back for it – but it was too late, the water had run out.

It’s not just Delhi, of course. As the Times reported last week, “over the past year of record-shattering warmth, the average person on Earth experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures than they otherwise would have.”

Right now Mexico is sweltering under record heat—monkeys by the hundreds are falling dead from trees, and people in the nation’s capital are forming human chains to block streets so that the government will send them water trucks. As Axios reports, the largest city in North America—which has already seen record temperatures and huge drifts of hail—could run out of water in the next few days.

Experts say that by June parts of the city's central valley could reach "day zero," when there isn't enough water to pump out to the city, even if the typical rainy season starts that month.

And then there’s Gaza, which is already hell, but where ”extreme unseasonal heat” in recent weeks “made the already inhumane living conditions even worse.” UN officials said tents “feel like greenhouses,” and of course those tents are now being bombed. Since adding my voice to calls for a ceasefire early on in the Gaza fight, with a few exceptions I haven’t written much about it because others are doing so ably, and because it’s outside my area of expertise. But the fact that this weekend Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing even the late ceasefire attempts of President Biden—and in the process helping erode the network of international organizations that we also rely on to coordinate the climate fight—marks him as a truly terrible leader, whose focus on his own political existence robs so many others of their chance at physical survival. (It’s shameful that our Congress is inviting him to speak; I’m very glad that my senior senator is turning down the chance to attend).

The heat has reached the U.S. too, of course—the Biden administration is about to propose a series of rules to deal with the “sharply rising” problem of dying on the job from heat. (Needless to say, the new rules are “expected to meet stiff resistance from some business and industry groups, which oppose regulations that would, in some cases, require more breaks and access to water, shade and air-conditioning.”) And the Washington Post reports that thousands of schools that used to do fine without air-conditioning are now infernos. Philadelphia, say, where the head of the teacher’s union reports

“I ran into one teacher as she was walking her first-grade class down to computer science — she was wearing a dress and the back of the dress was literally soaked right through. It was sticking to her,” Jerry Jordan said. A little boy got out of line and lay down on the concrete floor. He stayed put, even when the teacher urged him to rejoin the class. “But it’s cool here,” Jordan remembers him pleading.

Another new study this week found dramatic increases in asthma attacks for children during heatwaves.

This list could go on and on and on. Across the planet people are trying to hang on. As the Associated Press reported in a roundup of the weather news,

In a world growing increasingly accustomed to wild weather swings, the last few days and weeks have seemingly taken those environmental extremes to a new level. Some climate scientists say they are hard pressed to remember when so much of the world has had its weather on overdrive at the same time.

“Given that we’ve seen an unprecedented jump in global warmth over the last 11 months, it is not surprising to see worsening climate extremes so early in the year,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck. “If this record pace of warming continues, 2024 will likely be a record year of climate disasters and human suffering.”

As Overpeck implies, expect worse news in the week ahead. This stretch of months around the solstice is becoming an endurance contest each year, and each year it grows more desperate.

But here’s the thing: At the exact same moment—the same string of months—that the planet is beginning to unravel, human beings are finally accelerating the only real response we have: the rapid rollout of sun, wind, and batteries. The rate at which we’re adding renewable energy capacity jumped fifty percent last year. A new report this week found that wind and sun aren’t just growing faster than fossil fuels—they’re growing faster than any electricity source in history.

The rise of wind and solar has been stemming the growth of fossil fuel power, which would have been 22% higher in 2023 without them, Ember says. This would have added around 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) to annual global emissions.

Nevertheless, the growth of clean electricity sources needs to accelerate to meet the global goal of tripling renewables by 2030, Ember says. 

Meeting this goal would almost halve power sector emissions by the end of the decade, and put the world on a pathway aligned with the 1.5C climate target set in the Paris Agreement. 

Even in India, the share of electricity generated by coal dropped below 50 percent for the first time since 1966. There’s every sign that, globally, 2023 saw the peak in global emissions; all those solar panels are not just accounting for growth in energy demand any more, but beginning to cut into the actual consumption of fossil fuels. Now the job is to make the decline so steep that we build enough momentum to begin catching up with the physics of global warming.

It is a terrible story, almost unbearably tragic. But its ending hasn’t been written yet.

In other energy and climate news:

+ More than a third of the Amazon ‘rainforest’ is struggling to recover from massive drought, new data shows:

The new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines satellite images of vegetation activity from 2001 to 2019. Tens of thousands of pixels, each covering a 25-sq km (9.65-sq mile) area, were analysed on a month-by-month basis and correlated with local rainfall data.

The authors’ goal was to investigate how “the frequency, intensity, or duration of droughts contributes to stability loss of Amazon vegetation”.

They found 37% of the mature vegetation in the region exhibited a slowing-down trend. While the patterns varied from area to area, they concluded that the highly deforested and degraded south-eastern Amazon was most vulnerable to a “tipping event”: in other words, a calamitous decline of the tropical rainforest to a different, drier state.

+As Cathy Becker points out in the Des Moines Register, insurance companies continue to be the great hypocrites of the financial world

As the planet warms, the insurance industry finds itself at a crossroads, entangled in a paradox of its own making. On one hand, insurers bear the immediate brunt of climate change through increased claims from natural disasters. On the other, they perpetuate the crisis by backing the fossil fuel projects driving global warming. This duality not only exposes a glaring hypocrisy but also raises fundamental questions about the role of insurers in our collective future.

A recent article in The Hill highlighted the insurance industry’s losses due to inadequate housing policies exacerbated by climate change. But it missed a critical piece of the puzzle: Even as insurers withdraw from climate-vulnerable regions, they continue to invest in and insure fossil fuels ― the very industry at the heart of the climate crisis. This omission points to a larger, uncomfortable truth about the insurance sector’s complicity in the crisis of our time, leading us to an uninsurable future.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that more and more homeowners are simply going without insurance because the policies they can still find are completely unaffordable due to climate change.

Kathleen Haughton, for example, moved to California’s Butte Valley from Paradise after her hometown was destroyed in 2018’s devastating Camp Fire.

She needed a loan to rebuild her house, which meant buying insurance. Her cheapest option was $7,000 a year for a California Fair plan, which offers insurance to people who can’t buy from major companies.

Priced out of that option, Haughton bought a $1,200-a-year plan that doesn’t cover natural disasters — and hopes that the Camp Fire was a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe.

“I figured if I lose everything again, that’s God’s plan,” she said.

+A serious shout-out to the Alaska youth suing the state to block a new pipeline and other fossil fuel development. The federal lawsuit that birthed this wave of litigation may have been dismissed, but the Montana version won at trial, and there are similar provisions of the Alaska state constitution that give these young people hope.

The challengers, aged 11 to 22, argue that the proposal – and that legislation in particular – violates two sections of the Alaska constitution: the right to protected natural resources for “current and future generations”, and the right to be free from government infringement on life, liberty and property.

“The acceleration of climate change that this project will bring will affect what the land provides and brings to my culture,” said Summer Sagoonick, the 22-year-old lead plaintiff in the case and a member the Iñupiaq tribe. “I am counting on the courts to protect my rights.”

+Nantucket vacation homes for billionaires are literally falling into a rising sea, and yet they keep building more

In total, sea level rise, coastal flooding, and erosion are estimated to cause over $3.4 billion in cumulative damages to Nantucket over the next five decades, according to the plan.

But demand for properties has remained sky-high on the idyllic island. Last year's median home sale price was $3.2 million, up from $1.9 million five years prior, according to data from local firm Fisher Real Estate. Twenty-seven percent of the homes sold cost more than $5 million.

Considerably more tragically, a group of indigenous in Panama are having to abandon the small island where they’ve lived for two hundred years as the sea rises. Here’s a picture of Gardi Sugdub, crowded with homes that will soon be empty

+Very bad news from the Antarctic, where new research finds massive intrusions of warm sea water beneath the Thwaites ‘doomsday’ glacier. As the CBC reported

The glacier is massive — about 120 kilometres across and covers an area of 192,000 square kilometres. 

"You can imagine it like a big lump of ice sitting in a bowl. And at the moment, that ice is all the way up to the end of the bowl. So you can't get water in particularly far," Dow said during an interview on CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition with host Craig Norris.

"But as soon as you start losing ice into the bowl, it becomes easier and easier to get the water in. That water can float the ice on top and so at that point, we start losing ice very, very rapidly."

+Immigration and climate are rapidly becoming the same crisis, so it’s important to pay attention to the rise of militarized and heavily surveilled borders—hence this important new book from Petra Molnar.

+Excellent news: even without building badly needed new transmission lines, simply string up new high-tech wires on existing poles can dramatically increase the amount of current they carry

“We have to be able to integrate all this low-cost, renewable energy fast,” said Amol Phadke, a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

That’s where replacing the country’s power lines — or “reconductoring,” as engineers call it — comes in.

Most of America’s lines are wired with a technology that has been around since the early 1900s — a core steel wire surrounded by strands of aluminum. When those old wires heat up — whether from power passing through them or warm outdoor temperatures — they sag. Too much sag in a transmission line can be dangerous, causing fires or outages. As a result, grid operators have to be careful not to allow too much power through the lines.

But a couple of decades ago, engineers designed a new type of wire: a core made of carbon fiber, surrounded by trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. Those new, carbon-fiber wires don’t sag as much in the heat. That means that they can take up to double the amount of power as the old lines.

According to the recent study from researchers at UC-Berkeley and GridLab, replacing these older steel wires could provide up to 80 percent of the new transmission needed on the electricity grid — without building anything new. It could also cost half as much as building an entirely new line and avoid the headaches of trying to get every state, city and even landowner along the route to agree to a new project.

Meanwhile, read Brian Deese’s excellent account in the Atlantic of the steps needed to keep increasing new electricity generation and transmission in this country. Deese was a key architect of the Inflation Reduction Act

Total investment in clean energy was more than 70 percent higher in 2023 than in 2021, and now represents a larger share of U.S. domestic investment than oil and gas. Clean-energy manufacturing is off the charts. Money is disproportionately flowing into promising technologies that have yet to reach mass adoption, such as hydrogen, advanced geothermal, and carbon removal. And, thanks to a provision that allows companies to buy and sell the tax credits they generate, the law is creating an entirely new market for small developers.

But for all of this progress to deliver, it needs to translate into clean energy that Americans can actually use. In 2023, we added 32 gigawatts of clean electricity to the U.S. grid in the form of new solar, battery storage, wind, and nuclear. It was a record—but it was still only about two-thirds of what’s necessary to stay on track with the IRA’s goal of reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

+China just switched on the first utility-scale sodium ion battery. This is a big deal because sodium is a lot cheaper and easier to obtain than lithium.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is heralding a new method of building solar panels more cheaply that may help the U.S. compete with China

The main building blocks in solar panels are polysilicon wafers, which are treated with chemicals and silver to produce solar cells that can collect energy from the sun. Those cells are connected to get finished modules.

The step that uses silver and is being overhauled by Lumet is called metallization. It is one of the most expensive parts of cell assembly. The process uses screen printing techniques that rely on squeegeeing a silver paste through a mesh screen in a process similar to stenciling, then drying it out. The silver is coated on the cell in ultrathin shapes, known as fingers, for capturing sunlight.

Making the fingers as thin and efficient as possible has been critical to reducing solar costs because silver is expensive. Prices for the precious metal have recently risen to their highest level in more than a decade—above $32 a troy ounce—buoyed in part by strong solar demand.

Current printing techniques have reached their limit, Lumet says. The company coats the surface of plastic films with silver paste in precise patterns. That film then gets pressed onto preheated solar cells. The elevated temperatures make the pattern stick on the cell, so the film can then be peeled off. 

+Writing in the LA Times, Sammy Roth gives California governor Gavin Newsom what-for after he cripples the state’s community solar efforts.

Maybe Newsom has been a victim of his own success, raising expectations to the point where his mistakes shine as brightly as his accomplishments. Maybe the governor and his advisors fume when activists shower them with criticism instead of praise.

But if Newsom is serious when he talks about the urgency of the climate crisis, then he’s asking for this kind of scrutiny.

+Put solar panels on top of hospitals! And colleges: don’t make your faculty fly off to conferences all the time! Your students are adept at zoom, you can do it too!