Wet Hot Planetary Future

Yes it's the heat, but wow the humidity!

Cedar Key, Florida this morning. I predict it won’t be the last image we see of flooding from Hurricane Debby, as it threatens to stall across the low country of the Carolinas.

Hurricane Debby, currently working its way across the Big Bend country of Florida, is headed toward the Atlantic coast, where it’s expected to stall for several days, generating massive amounts of rainfall. For residents of the low country, this will bring back very bad memories of Hurricane Florence, in September of 2018, which was the second-biggest rainfall in American history—by some accounts it dropped the equivalent of all the water in Chesapeake Bay on the Carolinas.

Of course you’re now wondering what the biggest rainfall in American history was: that would be Hurricane Harvey, just about exactly a year earlier in 2017, which dropped as much as 60 inches of rain on coastal Texas. In both cases, the water temperature in the surrounding oceans was hellish—and of course that’s the point. Warm air soaks up moisture, especially from the oceans: increase the air temperature a degree celsius and it’s capable of holding 7 percent more water vapor. We’ve increased the temperature a degree and a half…

It’s not just on Gulf Coast, of course. We’ve seen huge rainfalls from desert Dubai to Delhi, where in June record heat was suddenly replaced by record deluge, with nine inches falling in 24 hours on the second most populated city on earth. An April analysis finding that this would be the sweatiest summer ever recorded across the tropics appears to be panning out.

“It’s commonly known that the Earth is warming, and El Niño is a warm episode of a natural climate oscillation, so we expect the two to constructively interfere — that El Niño will compound the effects of global warming,” Berkeley researcher William Boos said. “Over the long term, global warming brings increased temperature, as well as increased humidity — that is, increased water vapor content of the air. Together with El Niño, this allows the heat and humidity to build up to greater levels at a given location in the tropics.”

The researchers concluded from their analysis that the “strong‐to‐very‐strong El Niño” at the end of 2023, which was rated a 2.0 on the Oceanic Niño Index, suggests a 2024 tropical land mean maximum wet bulb temperature of 26.2 C (79.2 F) and a 68% chance of breaking existing records. The wet bulb temperature — basically the temperature you can maintain when covered in sweat or a wet T-shirt in the presence of a strong wind — is a better indication than temperature alone of how humans feel under humid heat conditions. In warm-humid environments like the tropics, wet bulb temperatures above 30 C could lead to irreversible heat stress.

According to Boos, some areas that frequently suffer under humid heat stress, such as northern India, have a 50% chance of suffering record heat and humidity this summer.

Here’s Christine Ro, writing in Forbes, with a paragraph that’s worth reading twice just to be reminded what all this means on a daily basis for the poorest people on the planet, who have done nothing at all to cause the crisis.

Rising humidity affects human health not only directly, but also indirectly through the work that people’s lives depend on. Street vendors in Mumbai have reported that humidity risks spoiling the fruits, vegetables, and flowers they sell. In Delhi, a survey of street vendors found that 80% had fewer customers during heatwaves, and most of these workers could not take breaks during heatwaves. Intense heat creates a vicious cycle of lower income, fewer resources for healthcare, and worse health, driving a need to work more under punishing conditions.

Or, as one climate researcher explained to Ro:

Yet Avikal Somvanshi can just about live with 50°C heat in Delhi (where a dedicated heatstroke clinic opened in May amidst a brutal heatwave). What Somvanshi can’t handle is increased humidity, when “Delhi turns into a sauna.”

“You can’t really do anything,” he says. “You just have to sit in front of a fan and wait for it to pass.”

As often happens with the climate crisis, we’re getting the worst of all worlds: the increased moisture is not showing up in arid areas where it could do some good. An important January study found that over dry continental interiors there were reduced levels of humidity—which is bad news for, among other things, wildfire. (When things get hot and dry, it doesn’t take much to get a conflagration going). But in the places where most people live, along the ocean coasts, the numbers are really astounding: meteorologist Ben Noll today was listing the record humidity values in Debby’s path, and predicting that the hurricane would be “adding a new swath of records to this map by the end of the week.”

As Jeff Masters and Bob Henson reported a few hours ago,

if the rains from Debby are as intense and widespread as implied in the strong agreement among forecast models and official outlooks, Debby is likely to cause damage in excess of $10 billion, making this Category 1 hurricane more like a Category 3 or 4 storm in its impacts. Expect to see Debby’s name retired at the conclusion of the 2024 hurricane season.

Maybe the rainfall will slosh its way up to New England, as happened after Hurricane Beryl triggered record flooding in parts of my state of Vermont, where people are now figuring out if they can stay in their homes.

And what is there to be done?

On the one hand, nothing. This is physics in its simplest form, and physics is unstoppable.

On the other hand, everything. We’re a few weeks from the first votes being cast in this year’s presidential election, otherwise known as the last real chance for the United States to do something about the crisis it’s done more than any other country to cause. On the one hand, the Biden Harris administration is on track to actually cut America’s emissions substantially over the next four years—its investments in clean energy are beginning to kick in. (Leah Stokes has a fine account of the role that Harris played in the IRA fight) On the other hand, Trump and his sidekick have denied people are changing the climate (JD Vance is simultaneously desperate for Americans to have more kids, and utterly indifferent to the physical world they will inhabit). All of which is to say: organize. Organize. Organize.

You can start by joining the Elders for Kamala call tonight at 8 eastern organized by Third Act. Even if you’re not an elder! The lineup reflects the way that serious people of all stripes are lining up to beat Trump: we’ve got Senators current (Bernie) and former (Tim Wirth and John Kerry, who also was, um, Secretary of State and international climate leader). We’ve got stars—Jane Fonda, Bette Midler. We’ve got some of the country’s greatest writers: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rebecca Solnit, Terry Tempest Williams. We’ve got all kinds of other great organizers and leaders and what’s more we’ll have lots of ways for you to get hands-on involved. Young voters are in; time for those of us of a certain age to join in!

Everyone complains about the weather, especially now—through November 5 you’ve got extraordinary leverage to actually do something about it!

In other energy and climate news:

+A staggeringly hopeful new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute finds that extracting minerals for new batteries won’t break the planet—indeed

Even as battery demand surges, the combined forces of efficiency, innovation, and circularity will drive peak demand for mined minerals within a decade — and may even avoid mineral extraction altogether by 2050. These advancements enable us to transition from linear extraction to a circular loop, with compounding benefits for our climate, security, equity, health, and wealth.

Change is already underway. Without the past decade of improvements in chemistry mix, energy density, and recycling, lithium, nickel, and cobalt demand would be 60–140 percent higher than they are today. Continuing the current trend means we will see peak virgin battery mineral demand in the mid-2030s.

Accelerating the trend along six key solutions — deploying new battery chemistries, making batteries more energy-dense, recycling their mineral content, extending their lifetime, improving vehicle efficiency, and improving mobility efficiency — means we can reach net-zero mineral demand in the 2040s.

At that point, end-of-life batteries will become the new mineral ore, limiting the need for any mining altogether. We have enough to get there; our known reserves of lithium, cobalt, and nickel are twice the level of total virgin demand we may require, and announced mining projects are already sufficient to meet almost all virgin demand.

Accelerated progress means we only need to mine a cumulative 125 million tons of battery minerals. This quantity alone can get us to circular battery self-sufficiency. That is 17 times smaller than the amount of oil we extract and process for road transport every year. And, at today’s commodity prices, about 20 times cheaper as well.

This is the circular economy that people have talked about hopefully for many years. It’s coming faster than we imagined.

+Staggeringly unhopeful news from the scientists studying the great Atlantic currents that, among other things, keep Europe warm. Climate change, unabated, will collapse those currents by mid-century. It could happen as soon as 2037, and as late as 2064, with a median date of 2050. As Rodielon Putol explained at Earth.com,

The urgency and precision of this prediction are unprecedented, sounding alarms among many within the scientific community and beyond.

The detailed forecast has heightened concerns and spurred intense discussions about the potential global impact, emphasizing the need for immediate action and comprehensive climate strategies to mitigate the impending crisis.

Study co-author René van Westen is an atmospheric and marine researcher.based at the University of Utrecht.

“This is really worrying,” said van Westen. “All the negative side effects of anthropogenic climate change, such as more heat waves, more droughts, and more flooding, will continue. If you add an AMOC collapse on top of that, the climate will become even more distorted.”

+In news from the corporate domination sector, attempts to phase out fossil fuel production are being met with lawsuits (and settlements) under ‘free trade agreements.’ The U.S. avoided, mostly on a technicality, having to pay $15 billion for nixing the Keystone XL pipeline, but as Katie Surma and Nicholas Kusnetz explain

Australia, Canada, Colombia and Slovenia are facing tens of billions of dollars in claims from companies for phasing out coal power plants, rejecting mining licenses or disallowing liquefied natural gas permits. In 2022, Italy was ordered to pay a British oil company roughly $200 million after offshore drilling restrictions upended the firm’s development plans. 

In other countries, the system set up for these claims—investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS—has driven up costs of closing coal power plants, prevented governments from canceling oil and gas licenses or otherwise impeded efforts to reduce fossil fuel use, government ministers and researchers say. Companies even win awards despite leaving behind environmental contamination, violating human rights or breaking national laws.

The ISDS system is uniquely daunting for governments because arbitrators overseeing the cases can award compensation not just for real losses but also for unearned, expected future profits. It’s a key reason awards can balloon into the billions of dollars. 

Governments already face numerous practical and political obstacles as they attempt to move away from fossil fuels, said Canadian lawyer and professor Gus Van Harten, who has studied ISDS’s evolution for decades. “This system is providing an unwarranted and unexpected further minefield.” 

+Back to school beckons—so timely advice on how to organize to Rewild Your Campus.

+Veteran activist Patrick Reinsborough coined the term Marsification a few years ago in “an effort to critique the whole tech-billionaire Mars-will-save-us narrative. It picked up steam recently through a little media attention and then New Scientist naming it as one of their words of the year for 2023 and then it got into wikipedia.  

We created the word to help activists name how fantasies of turning Mars into Earth are distracting us from the fact we’re rapidly turning Earth into Mars. It’s also a general critique of techo-fixes in general since the Mars fixation is the most absurd techo-fix narrative of them all.”

And now there’s a record album to go with it, music that “invites you to float in the zero gravity of astrocolonial dreams and the nightmares that fuel them.”

+Nifty new tool from airgradient.com lets you know where carbon emissions are coming from around the world

The data comes from more than 500 open source AirGradient air quality monitors that are run by engaged citizens around the world. This marks a significant milestone in environmental monitoring, especially in the context of ever-increasing CO₂ levels, which we recently saw increase by a record-breaking 5ppm compared to last year.

+One of the best things about the Inflation Reduction Act is how its clean-tech factories are being built in the places that need them the most. As Anthony Flint reports, this is a huge boon for ‘legacy cities.’

In the Carondelet neighborhood of St. Louis, where once-busy shipyards gave way to vacancy and blight during the waning decades of the 20th century, a global specialty minerals company is building a $400 million factory to produce highly efficient batteries for energy storage.

Another new factory is rising up amid the shuttered steel mills and closed coal mines of Weirton, West Virginia, built by a different manufacturer whose battery technology involves mixing iron particles and air. 

And in Schenectady, New York—where the production of electric lights, appliances, and engines by Thomas Edison’s General Electric company spurred an economic boom that began in the late 1800s and had faded away by the mid-1900s—the first of a class of super-tall, highly efficient onshore wind turbines recently rolled out from a pristine assembly line at a new GE plant.

“It’s a win-win for the environment and the local workforce,” beamed New York State Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara in a TikTok video recorded outside the plant, which will ultimately employ 200 people including skilled union labor. The end result, he said, will be “a more affordable, reliable, sustainable, and secure energy future.”

+Working in collaboration with Vox, Drilled Media’s remarkable Amy Westervelt has the goods on carbon capture—the oil companies that are promoting it and taking huge amounts of taxpayer money to implement it have known all along it won’t work.

Squinting at the numbers reveals some shocking takeaways about Exxon’s confidence in CCS. While Shell’s optimistic projection envisions 10,000 large-scale CCS facilities operational by 2070, with more than 2500 facilities by 2050, Exxon predicts somewhere between 250 and 500 facilities by 2050.

Exxon’s 2018 projections align with what critics of CCS have been saying for years. In its fact sheet on CCS, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a nonprofit, non-partisan think tank that produces market-based research on the energy transition, states: “It’s worth noting that not one single CCS project has ever reached its target CO2 capture rate.”

Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson said that because it also requires energy and materials to function, CCS attached to a fossil-fueled power plant is worse for the climate than replacing fossil energy with renewables.

“They actually increase carbon dioxide emissions by doing this, in addition to increasing air pollution,” he said, referencing a study he conducted in 2019 that does the math on the lifecycle CO2 emissions of various carbon capture scenarios. Even when CCS is powered by wind, Jacobson said it’s not worth doing, from a climate perspective. “If you just used wind to replace coal in the first place, you’d get a higher reduction in CO2 emissions,” he said.

Meanwhile, Nina Lakhani in the Guardian shows how the CCS plants have become an environmental nightmare in Cancer Alley.

Ammonia production generates air pollutants such as nitrogen oxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds – a toxic mix already choking residents in Cancer Alley. CO₂, itself an asphyxiant and intoxicant, also poses a threat as leaks can cause injury or death by replacing oxygen in the air – which makes St Rose residents Randy and Dedra Dorsey fear for the safety of their grandchildren.

Out canvassing, some locals were dismayed by prospects of another polluting facility while others hoped it would bring jobs. At one house, a retired teacher with a heart condition was anxious that the air quality could get even worse and signed the petition, promising to attend the forthcoming community meetings. Kyereh did her best to stay positive and moved on to the next house, but the 54-year-old was worried.

+Counterpoint—Most of the country’s environmental groups (and me too) think the new permitting reform bill put forward by Joe Manchin is too kind to the fossil fuel industry. Sam Matey, in his Substack newsletter, disagrees

Developing Asian economies are building gigawatt-scale solar farms by the dozen, and adding a little more American LNG to the market in addition to the Qatari and Russian LNG already available isn’t going to stop that.

Let us hope it’s just a little more, because as the Guardian reports this week, methane emissions are now rising at their fastest rate in decades.

Also on Substack: Kaitlin Curtice, with a lovely account of what she calls ‘mother-earth-driven politics.”

And the thing is, as much as we want to believe that our politics and social leanings dictate our relationship with Mother Earth, it’s actually the other way around.

I mean, think about it. Think about the way colonization has worked throughout the centuries, separating peoples from the land, desecrating Mother Earth, destroying waters, trees, and the peoples who care for them.

It’s important to separate our souls and bodies from Mother Earth for colonialism and authoritarianism to thrive.

+If there’s a voice I need to hear regularly, it’s Utah writer Terry Tempest Williams. Here she is in the Salt Lake Tribune explaining from her Castle Valley home that its time to actually address climate chaos. The desert has always had deluges, but

these last two flash floods felt different, just as the climatologists have warned, especially in drought. Scientists say floods will become more frequent, more intense and more catastrophic in scope and scale. And in the American Southwest, their predictions are coming to pass. We are ground zero for climate chaos be it extreme heat, extreme floods and as happened within Pre-Puebloan cultures: extreme displacement. It is now understood that the “Ancient Ones” did not disappear as we were taught decades ago, but left the Colorado Plateau and migrated to the Rio Grande Valley due to the megadrought of 1,200 years ago. We are experiencing this once again.

+Cheap Chinese EVs aren’t coming to America any time soon, thanks to large tariffs designed to protect Detroit, but they are spreading fast in the rest of the world. BYD just agreed to deliver 100,000 vehicles for Uber in Europe and Latin America.

+I love the Olympics, and so it annoys the heck out of me that it too has to cope with the difficulties of the climate crisis. But it does, as the LA Times reports:

Weather has been a challenge during the first week of these 2024 Summer Olympics, with conditions veering from one extreme to another.

A storm blew in for the opening ceremony, drenching the city with an inch of rain and hanging around long enough to postpone skateboarding the next day. Then came the heat.

Researchers worry that Paris represents the latest in an Olympic trend that has winter athletes scrambling to find enough snow and their summertime counterparts facing health risks — cramping, vomiting, heat stroke — caused by peak temperatures.

“We are in a race against time,” Sebastian Coe, a former Olympian and head of the international track federation, wrote in a report last month. “Whilst global temperatures continue to rise, climate change should increasingly be viewed as an existential threat to sport.”

+The ever vigilant House Judiciary Committee, led by that exemplary public servant Jim Jordan, has discovered that a ‘woke cartel’ of Presbyterians, Quakers and Catholic nuns is intimidating Big Oil, which would simply like to overheat the planet in peace, thank you very much.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee recently released a press statement that opened with: “Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust Chairman Thomas Massie (R-KY) demanded information from more than 130 U.S.-based companies, retirement systems, and government pension programs about their involvement with the woke ESG cartel Climate Action 100+.

Several faith-based organizations received the letter, including the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the United Church of Christ, and the Quaker organization Friends Fiduciary Corporation, as well as JLens, a Jewish lens on investing. The list also includes Catholic organizations like Mercy Investment Services, Christian Brothers Investment Services, Loyola Marymount University, and the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell.

+I missed this in June, but the Institute for Local Self Reliance, and the reliable John Farrell, have an important new report on the dangers of for-profit utility monopolies

The century-old system of regulated, for-profit monopolies controlling U.S. electricity distribution is broken. Electric service is fundamentally public in nature, much like municipal water or wastewater services, but it is primarily provided by private companies. However, the underlying, basic legal premise has always been that a private utility “was created for public purposes [and] performs a function of the state.”1 The public purpose has been subverted by private, monopoly ownership. Along with costly electricity, this structure generates a vicious cycle –– monopoly, investor-owned utilities build excessive political power on the backs of captive customers, sabotage public oversight and competitors, and then pour their monopoly profits into further political subversion. Instead, federal and state policy makers should break up utility monopoly power by reasserting public control over distribution of this public good.

The costs of electric utility monopoly power are staggering. By hindering clean energy investment of their competitors, investor-owned utilities block rapid and affordable climate solutions that can create thousands of good jobs. Carbon pollution from utility power plants has juiced record storms and wildfires causing widespread destruction of homes and costing thousands of lives. The total health costs from electricity pollution are staggering –– equal to the price paid for all electricity sold each year –– and include a lifetime sentence of asthma for millions of children. Utilities have hiked electricity prices to record levels in many regions, triggering a debilitating routine of shutoffs for many families. These lasting impacts cost all of us, even as they compound longstanding disproportionate health and economic harms for people of color and those with low incomes.

+Forget high-tech solutions—a new paper from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson finds that the Bronze Age technique of firebricks could be the key to cutting industrial emissions

The technology involves assembling heat-absorbing bricks in an insulated container, where they can store heat generated by solar or wind power for later use at the temperatures required for industrial processes. The heat can then be released when needed by passing air through channels in the stacks of “firebricks,” thus allowing cement, steel, glass, and paper factories to run on renewable energy even when wind and sunshine are unavailable.

These systems, which several companies have recently begun to commercialize for industrial heat storage, are a form of thermal energy storage. The bricks are made from the same materials as the insulating bricks that lined primitive kilns and iron-making furnaces thousands of years ago. To optimize for heat storage instead of insulation, the materials are combined in different amounts.

Batteries can store electricity from renewable sources and provide electricity to generate heat on demand. “The difference between firebrick storage and battery storage is that the firebricks store heat rather than electricity and are one-tenth the cost of batteries,” said lead study author Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and School of Engineering. “The materials are much simpler too. They are basically just the components of dirt.”

+Your zero-carbon bitcoin…probably isn’t.