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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Private utility front groups thwart public utility efforts
“The utility industry is quietly dispatching a network of front groups to thwart the growing push for public power across the US – a push that comes amid mounting frustration over sky-high utility bills, electric outages, a slow transition to clean energy and private utilities’ soaring profits.
“Municipal utilities — or ‘munis’ — are owned and operated by local authorities and broadly have lower rates, better reliability scores and are structurally more accountable to customers. Federal data shows public power companies’ bills, on average, are about 14% lower than private.
“Utilities are funding the front groups because ‘the public power movement is a direct threat to their profits’, said Sean Higgins, president of Ann Arbor for Public Power. ‘If this happens, then Ann Arbor is no longer paying them for electricity, so that cuts into their profit margin, so obviously they oppose it’.
“In most states, municipalities can legally take over the grid from private or investor-owned utilities, a process called municipalization. The municipality must pay the utility a fair price for the grid’s infrastructure before it establishes its own power company.” [click the link for the full article]
Next Era Energy elbowing it’s way into data centers
“A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry.
“The results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate.
“‘Mergers are not about consumers; they’re about shareholders’, said Ari Peskoe at Harvard Law School. ‘For the Dominion shareholders, they are selling their shares at a premium. The executives are getting massive payouts. Ratepayers are all an afterthought’.
“The transaction is allowing NextEra to accelerate its data center ambitions, which had trailed those of its regulated peers, by using Dominion’s expertise and relationships. NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, includes Florida Power & Light, the largest regulated electricity utility in the state, and NextEra Energy Resources, a wholesale electricity supplier that owns power plants across the nation.” [click the link for the full article]
Nate Hagens — practicing whole systems thinking
“There has been so much news of late. And the thread running through all of these is similar. There is a gap between the version of reality being broadcast at us and the version that is actually unfolding underneath.
“The US Department of Energy last week put out new promotional educational materials announcing what they’re calling the golden era of energy dominance. The headline claim is that the United States now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined.
“That claim is technically accurate, but also misleading depending on how you count. The USA production number bundles in crude oil, natural gas, plant liquids, biofuels, and refinery processing gain. The Saudi and Russian numbers in comparison are typically on a narrower crude-only basis, which is the higher quality energy stuff.
“We are a net product exporter, and much of the product is natural gas liquids (NGL) which result in products, not gasoline or diesel. In the past two years, the USA averaged importing over six million barrels a day of oil, and we exported around four million barrels. We’re somewhere near the top of the carbon pulse, give or take. Navigating the next twenty or thirty years is going to require honest data about where we are actually on that curve and many other things.
“Okay, next item. One complexity cascade that the news has picked up on is fertilizer shortages. The Persian Gulf supplies around thirty percent of traded urea, a quarter of the world’s ammonia, a fifth of phosphate. And with the strait closed, there are now three million tons a month not getting to fields and pushing up prices for the remaining available supply. Farmers facing higher costs apply less fertilizer.
“But there’s another food supply cascade receiving less coverage. About a billion people depend on LPG or kerosene for cooking fuel. India imports 60% of its LPG, and 90% of that comes via the Strait of Hormuz. Sub-Saharan Africa — almost a billion people used to use charcoal and firewood, but had been transitioning to that same cleaner gas from the now closed Strait of Hormuz.
“Okay, item number four. After a long legal battle, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota was just opened up for mining. Copper, nickel, and cobalt, the same minerals being framed as essential for the transition to a more sustainable world. The contradiction is right there in the headline. To save the climate, we’re being asked to sacrifice the wilderness.
“This brings up a critical but rarely spoken point. Most of our environmentalism today is calibrated for problems of the [carbon pulse] upslope — CO2 emissions, plastics in the oceans, endocrine-disrupting chemicals. On the [carbon pulse] downslope, the scale of those kinds of externalities may start to ease — less industrial waste, fewer emissions, less plastic output. That is an important reprieve in theory.
“However, globalization will, by definition, retreat, which means we will no longer be able to outsource our extractive externalities to the DRC or the Atacama Desert or Inner Mongolia, or elsewhere anymore. The downslope battle is going to look different and arguably much bigger at the local and regional scale. And the Boundary Waters decision is just one whisper of what’s coming.
“So here’s an uncomfortable question and a relevant question: What can we do now while we still have institutions and attention and discretionary energy to prepare for very different pollution and extraction problems coming on the backside of the carbon pulse? This might be one of the key areas in planning and intervention ahead.” [click the links for the full articles]
Capitalism — privatize the profit, externalize the costs
“Some years ago, I wrote to the leaders of The Nature Conservancy, that you can’t save the last great places unless you stop climate change. My thesis is that democracy in America is a major cause of the climate crisis, and to address that crisis we need a transformation in American democracy.
“You may have seen the banner at climate demonstrations: ‘System Change, Not Climate Change!’ System change is essential because the climate crisis is deeply rooted in defining features of our current system of political economy. Here are some of those features:
- an unquestioning commitment to economic growth at any cost;
- a measure of that growth, GDP, that includes as positives the growth of the fossil fuel industry and the costs of coping with the damaging effects of climate change;
- powerful corporate interests whose overriding objectives are to grow their profit while avoiding the costs of the climate change they cause;
- markets that systematically fail to recognize those costs;
- government that is both handmaiden to corporate interests and GDP growth;
- runaway consumerism spurred on endlessly by sophisticated advertising;
- concentrations of wealth so vast that they paralyze effective political action.”
[click the link for the full article]
Right whales are making a comeback
“North Atlantic right whales were once so thoroughly hunted they nearly went extinct. In fact, they were called right whales because they were considered the ‘right’ ones to hunt, as they lived close to shore and floated on the surface once killed. When hunting these mammals was outlawed, they slowly started to bounce back.
“So, it’s a relief to have a successful calving season like this year, with 23 new calves, the most since 2009. Amy Warren is the Scientific Program Officer at the New England Aquarium. One of the things that my team does primarily is that we manage the North Atlantic Right Whale Identification Catalog. The catalog goes back to 1935. So, any whale we’ve ever identified is in this catalog, living or dead.
“Estimates have their population at under 400 total. We don’t know what the populations used to be, because they were decimated so long ago. So, right whales were protected in 1932 from whaling, but the they’re thinking that the population of right whales was maybe between 20 and 50.
“Jumping to the 80s, 90s, 2000s into now, technology has gotten better, fishing gear has gotten stronger, it’s gone farther offshore, boats are bigger, boats are faster, and so all these new uses of the ocean by us have made it more dangerous for whales.” [click the link for the full article]
Plastics — modernity’s evil twin
“Methyl methacrylate, the highly flammable organic compound at the center of the chemical crisis in Garden Grove, Calif., is widely used to manufacture resins and acrylic plastics, such as Plexiglas. It is found in products like advertising signs, light fixtures, plastic plumbing, acrylic-latex paint and road pavement markings. The chemical is also used to make bone cement for orthopedic procedures, as well as dental crowns and fillings.
“The scale of the current crisis reminded Professor Joseph Allen of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where similar toxic chemicals were released. As in that situation, the threat of combustion looms. Because methyl methacrylate is so flammable, fire would transform the compound, generating a complex host of new chemical byproducts and pollutants.” [click the links for the full articles]
Leo XIV pontificates against AI dominion
“Pope Leo XIV took direct aim at the power of Big Tech in his first encyclical on artificial intelligence. The 83-page papal teaching frames AI as the new industrial revolution and makes an appeal to ‘disarm AI’ by removing it from military and economic interests.
“Leo wrote, ‘Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. Disarming does not mean renouncing technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible’.
“Leo also took on Big Tech in the document, highlighting the dangers of having a few wealthy individuals influence the future and livelihood of humanity. AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” [click the link for the full article]
Sick of climate haggling, bloc of countries to phase out fossil fuels
“As the US and Israeli war against Iran puts oil at the centre of global concerns, a new intergovernmental coalition is seeking to accelerate the energy transition outside the UN’s climate change convention (COP) system.
“The coalition’s 57 members, who account for almost half of global GDP, met last week in the Colombian coastal city of Santa Marta for the First Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. Rather than duplicating COPs’ efforts to establish new greenhouse gas reduction targets, the coalition agreed to create a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“From the outset, the hosts stressed that the high-level segment was not a space for negotiations, but rather a forum for countries and other stakeholders to discuss practical steps to move away from fossil fuels.
“China, Russia and the US were not invited, as they had not shown the necessary spirit to be part of the ‘coalition of the willing’, and that Colombia wanted to avoid a rehashing of the lengthy debates at COP30.
“The first of the workstreams will focus on developing national and regional roadmaps away from fossil fuels. The second workstream will be focused on changing the financial system to better facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels. The final workstream has the aim of advancing progress towards a fossil fuel-free trade system.” [click the links for the full articles]
Rooftop solar is resistant to conflict disruption
“Solar power is becoming increasingly important in places where war and energy insecurity collide. In a recent Guardian opinion essay, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Michael Shank argued that attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, and unstable fuel markets, highlight just how vulnerable fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure can be.
“The global fuel crisis is a continuing reminder that true energy security and independence will continue to elude us so long as we remain dependent on fossil fuels. This reliance on finite resources only worsens a country’s threat profile.
“Centralized and fossil fuel-dependent power plants and energy grids are sitting ducks, targets very vulnerable to attack by adversaries. There is another way to bolster energy security and independence: decarbonized and decentralized energy, using local, renewable resources to power, heat and cool a community, with battery storage for backup.
“Countries like Spain are rapidly transitioning to renewables — better insulating themselves from gas price shocks and better protecting themselves from future grid-wide blackouts.” [click the links for the full articles]
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