Stare at the sun

Well, not really. Just with your mind's eye

The image above is a classic headline from the Murdoch-owned London tabloid in 1992 after they managed to help swing the 1992 British election to the Tories. Since I’m currently in Georgia on the Silver Wave Tour helping to make sure that Murdoch-owned Fox doesn’t swing the 2024 American election behind the ever-more disgusting Donald Trump, it may seem an odd image, but I couldn’t resist.

That’s because—and I may be searching for solace here as I sweat out the last days of the campaign—it’s been a good couple of weeks for the sun. Not just because it produced the aurora that swept the internet but because it became even clearer that the remarkable escalation of solar power is starting to put a real dent in the prospects for fossil fuel.

Not that you would have known it from reading the headlines: for the last few days they’ve mostly been about another form of energy—nuclear power—after the news that a few of the world’s richest companies had placed orders for small modular reactors to power a few of their data centers in the next decade. As the National Review put it, “Big Tech Presses a Button and America Goes Nuclear Again.”

I have no problem with these nuclear plans. It took me a while, but I’ve spent the last many years urging states and nations to keep their existing nuclear power plants alive. I have no great objection to the IRA spending money on nuclear research (it’s less stupid than carbon capture from power plants, that’s for sure). If super-rich tech giants want to subsidize efforts to build some future generation of nuclear power, have at it.

But understand: it’s a side show. An expensive one—as a big Oxford study has made clear, nuclear power is barely falling in price; indeed, it may even have a negative cost curve. So: sideshow, not that they can’t be entertaining, and you never know, maybe someday nuclear researchers will be as successful as the renewable energy engineers. But be clear—that’s where the action is. Over under the big top, solar power is in the center ring, and wind and batteries are in the other two, and what an act they’re putting on!

Here’s how the European think tank Carbon Brief put it this week in their analysis of the latest numbers from the International Energy Agency

Global electricity generation from solar will quadruple by 2030 and help to push coal power into reverse, according to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2024 shows solar overtaking nuclear, wind, hydro, gas and, finally, coal, to become the world’s single-largest source of electricity by 2033.

This solar surge will help kickstart the “age of electricity”, the agency says, where rapidly expanding clean electricity and “inherently” greater efficiency will push fossil fuels into decline.

As a result, the world’s energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will reach a peak “imminently”, the IEA says, with its data indicating a turning point in 2025.

Is this fast enough to catch up with climate change?

It is not

Despite these changes, the world is on track to cut CO2 emissions to just 4% below 2023 levels by 2030, the agency warns, resulting in warming of 2.4C above pre-industrial temperatures.

It says there is an “increasingly narrow, but still achievable” path to staying below 1.5C, which would need more clean electricity, faster electrification and a 33% cut in emissions by 2030.

But it is by far the most hopeful thing happening on our planet at the moment—finally, finally, we’re in the race. And if we push we could speed it up. The numbers are already remarkable, and as far as I can tell almost no one knows them. The world is installing more than a gigawatt of solar power every day, and has been for more than a year—the number continues to steadily increase. A gigawatt is about the size of a nuclear plant—an old-style nuclear power plant. People are building—every day—the solar equivalent of a nuclear reactor, at a tiny fraction of the cost. All the small modular reactors that Google just ordered, which will be coming on line between 2030 and 2035, will together add up to only about 500 megawatts, or half a gigawatt. That is to say, the equivalent of about 12 hours worth of solar panels.

To give just one example of this pell-mell trend, in California the state just passed a law that should allow farmers on land that’s turned droughty because of climate change to generate 20 gigawatts of solar power. That’s forty times the size of Google’s ballyhooed nuclear move.

“What AB 2661 does is it provides us the ability to be the master planner for this solar development, which we’re excited about, because it allows us to be more thoughtful about how the solar goes in and how it’s integrated with the surrounding land use and incorporated into the district,” said Jeff Payne, the other assistant general manager of Westlands. 

The plan allows for flexibility with land use and some of the land that is transitioned to solar may end up going back to agricultural use years later, said Payne. That flexibility has been key for Westlands’ growers who want to maintain their agricultural heritage, said Payne. 

According to SJVWater, the website covering water issues in the San Joaquin Valley, this one region could provide a sixth of California’s electricity by 2035. And California is, remember, the fifth largest economy on earth.

The solar story gets better and better and better: this week one manufacturer announced that their new panels—guranteeded for 40 years!—will produce one hundred times as much energy as it takes to make them.

I’m not telling you this is going to save the earth. The earth is balanced pretty perilously, as this month’s State of the Climate Report from a passel of leading researchers put it.

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.

But I am telling you that the numbers coming out of the solar revolution are suddenly big, dwarfing everything else. And we need big numbers.

In other energy and climate news:

+The fight against “biomass”—i.e., cutting down trees to burn for electricity—is moving west. Having deforested large chunks to the southeast for wood pellets to ship to Europe, Drax is now setting its sights on California and other locales for supply. And the locals are, happily, fighting back, as Nick Engelfried makes clear

Global energy companies are currently pushing to build at least four major biomass pellet plants along the West Coast: two in Washington and two in California. The rhetoric they use to describe these projects includes phrases like “carbon neutral” and “renewable energy,” terms also featured prominently at the CANOPY conference.

However, for communities that will bear the brunt of the forest biomass industry’s environmental impacts, the benefits of these types of projects are far less clear than they appear in the rosy picture painted at CANOPY. In fact, up and down the West Coast the burgeoning biomass boom threatens to derail hard-won progress on climate, ecosystem protection and environmental justice.

As Danna Smith of the Dogwood Alliance points out, this is all part of an ongoing project to waste taxpayer money on the project of burning things for energy—which, as California has made clear, isn’t necessary—it’s been supplying a huge percentage of its energy needs this year by taking advantage of the burning sun.

+Great reporting from, as so often, Pro Publica, who has really analyzed the forces fighting one solar project in Ohio. Whaddya know, it turns out to be the fossil fuel industry, which has procured the help of the local newspaper.

Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.

The campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests. A former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county’s largest employer and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors, was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper now in the hands of Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage.

Ariel and the former executive did not respond to requests for comment. Metric Media’s leader did not answer questions for this story; he has previously denied that his news outlets are partisan.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits, Floodlight and its partners have reported. In Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro-solar politician. In Alabama, the state’s largest monopoly electric company purchased a historic Black newspaper, then didn’t write about soaring power bills. In California, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered; it doesn’t cover itself critically.

By way of contrast, John Farrell at the Institute for Local Self Reliance brings the heartening tale of the “solar help desk” that volunteers at Solar United Neighbors have set up to help Americans sort through the process of going solar.

“We’re nonprofit and we’re vendor neutral. We don’t partner with any sales companies. We come in with no biases. Our only agenda is for consumers to have a good solar experience. We work at rebuilding trust within the industry and trying to change the negative narrative of bad solar actors.”

+Elizabeth Kolbert has an important interview with NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt at Yale’s Environment 360 website. He talks about just how anomalous these last 18 months have been. Bottom line: there’s still not a good answer for the rapid spike in global temperature, which is probably the scariest possible news:

Like I said, there’s two reasons why you could have messed up the prediction. One is you are missing some driving element. Another is you are underestimating the spread. Things are behaving in a more erratic way than we expected, and that means the future predictions may also be more off. And you could think of things being more off in multiple ways because the system is changing in a way where what happened in the past is no longer a good guide to what’s going to happen in the future. And that’s concerning.

+The Sierra Club reports that utilities are not keeping their decarbonization pledges

After evaluating utilities’ plans to 1) retire coal by 2030, 2) build clean energy by 2035, and 3) not build new gas through 2035, we find that utilities score an aggregate of 29 out of 100, just 12 points higher than the first report four years ago.⁴, ⁵ While this reflects some progress, it is time for utilities to step on the accelerator and make plans to achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.

+In the midst of Sukkot, a good moment to celebrate the decision by the Reform branch of American Judaism to divest from fossil fuel. Here’s a report from Sammy Roth that really highlights the great work of Jacob Siegel and Dayenu

The Union for Reform Judaism draws a distinct line from civil rights to the climate crisis. Its fossil fuel divestment resolution quotes King: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”

+Much attention in the last week to Donald Trump falling silent—39 minutes of conducting music at a Pennsylvania rally, 19 minutes of tetchy silence when he had mic problems on Friday. But there’s something to be said for him not talking. Here (via Walter Einenkel) is what he had to say about windpower last week at another of his confabs:

“The wind, the wind. It sounds so wonderful,” Trump meandered on. “The wind, the wind, the wind is, the wind is bullshit. I'll tell you. It's horrible.” 

Faced with that, it’s not surprising that responsible authorities across the country are trying to “Trump-proof” their climate policies. Here’s the report from California:

Top Democrats in the state, including Attorney General Rob Bonta, are working with the state’s climate regulator, the California Air Resources Board, on the “Trump-proofing” strategy. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said the state legislature will be ready to meet in a special session after the November election if necessary.

When Mr. Trump became president in 2017, California officials were caught flat-footed, said Mary Nichols, who was the state’s top climate regulator from 2007 to 2020 and now informally advises state policymakers. “It came as a shock,” she said.

As the Trump administration dismantled Obama-era environmental rules and then took aim at California’s policies, the state fought back, Ms. Nichols said. California filed more than 70 climate and environmental lawsuits against the Trump administration, prevailing in more than half of them.

That kind of record is not assured in the future, in part because Mr. Trump reshaped the nation’s courts, appointing more than 200 federal judges. Those appointments include three Supreme Court justices, who helped form a conservative supermajority that delivered decisions to restrict the government’s authority to regulate climate, air and water pollution. As soon as January, the court could hear the case that is challenging California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act.

+If for some reason you have to move to Florida, this might be the right neighborhood.

And if you’re moving anywhere, Zillow is starting to offer climate ratings on homes for sale

In addition to disclosing a home’s square footage, school district, and walkability score, Zillow will begin to tell users about its climate risk — the chance that a major weather or climate event will strike in the next 30 years. It will focus on the risk from five types of dangers: floods, wildfires, high winds, heat, and air quality.

The data has the potential to transform how Americans think about buying a home, especially because climate change will likely worsen many of those dangers. About 70% of Americans look at Zillow at some point during the process of buying a home, according to the company.

“Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Healthy markets are ones where buyers and sellers have access to all relevant data for their decisions.”

+Australia’s Blair Palese is one of the finest activists I know anywhere in the world, and a swell writer as well. Here she describes taking her family for one last look at the Great Barrier Reef

The most recent five-year reef Outlook Report outlined in no uncertain terms that we have limited time to see the world’s largest coral reef system, stretching over 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles), alive due to the impact of intense ocean warming. Through the loading of carbon in our atmosphere we are basically cooking one of the planet’s largest and most incredible natural wonders. 

(It’s worth pointing out that she and her family live in Australia, so this is not high-carbon travel).

+One more potential downside of “solar geoengineering” (tossing sulfur into the air to block sunligh) it: it could hurt solar and windpower

Our results indicate that the potential for solar energy, whether compared to a moderate emissions scenario or the high emissions baseline, would be reduced in almost all parts of the world if SAI is used.

We find typically larger differences under moderate warming than high warming because solar energy potential is larger in a world where global temperatures are not raised as high. Solar panel efficiency is reduced substantially in a much-warmer world.

Geographically, the largest relative reductions are in the mid-to-high latitudes. (This is due to solar geometry, which dictates that the sun’s rays arrive at a lower angle for higher latitudes, meaning they have to pass through more aerosol particles on their way to the surface.)

+Let’s call it the Greenhouse Effect: Fred Pearce reports that in places with huge concentrations of greenhouses growing produce under glass, the panes are reflecting enough sunlight back to space to cool the local climate.

The extent of the planet’s growing enthusiasm for greenhouses was revealed in May by a new satellite mapping exercise, which estimated the land area covered with permanent greenhouses at 3.2 million acres, an area the size of Connecticut, with China hosting more than half of this expanse. This is more than twice previous estimates, and 40 times those made four decades ago.

And the figure is just the tip of the albedo iceberg, says the study’s lead author, Xiaoye Tong, a geographer at the University of Copenhagen. He told Yale Environment 360 that if temporary coverings of crops by reflective plastic sheets were included, the figure would be 10 times higher — more like the size of New York State.

The spread of greenhouses and plastic sheeting on crops amounts to a huge climate experiment, according to researchers who believe it could offer a template for cooling urban areas — or even taking the edge off global climate change. Says Xuehua Fan, a researcher at China’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing, “Agricultural plastic film could… be regarded as a potential geoengineering project.”

+Yikes. Just six percent of homes in Italy are insured against natural disasters. So when they happen, people are…in trouble.

Cristina Baccarini is waiting to hear whether her parents’ home, which was also damaged by flooding in May 2023, needs to be demolished because of its now-fragile foundations. A bed and radiator protrude from the smashed outside wall of the bedroom where the elderly couple were sleeping.

They were rescued by helicopter after climbing up to the balcony on the building’s first floor. Baccarini’s father, 91, has dementia and is recovering in hospital from a fractured femur. Her mother is staying with a relative.

“My parents are effectively homeless,” said Baccarini, trying not to cry. “The house was insured but not for flooding – we tried, but because we were flooded last year we couldn’t obtain cover.”

+Veteran environmental campaigner Kim Heacox is camped out in Arizona for the election fight, and his reflections in the Arizona Republic are important for locals to consider after 21 straight days of record-breaking heat

“Trump’s lies are not errors,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson. “They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.”

Imagine Phoenix and Tucson at 130F. Imagine Arizona as destabilized as Florida is today. It’s coming unless we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, embrace renewable energy, install solar panels, learn what’s true and vote blue.