Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

Coastalwatch said:

Martyn1981 said:

It might be too soon to pop the champagne corks, after all, the US has a habit of disappointing. But this could be incredibly important going forward, especially when we take into account Biden's other actions such as the cancelling of the Keystone Pipeline, and the licences to extract oil and natural gas on public lands and waters, and all in his first few days. Looks like Biden is going to war!

Biden Orders End To Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Promotes Equity For Underserved Communities

President Biden this week did something CleanTechnica has been advocating for over the course of many years — ending government subsidies for fossil fuels. If humanity is to find a rational and reasonable answer to the challenge of a warming planet, we must stop making the burning of oil, natural gas, and coal the basis of our economy. Giving fossil fuel companies government incentives to extract more oil, gas, and coal is inconsistent with that goal.

This news must be reverberating around the boardrooms of the FF industry today. No doubt they'll be lobbying their friendly Senators to oppose it with every weapon at their disposal. However, I do just wonder if they'll now begin investing in renewables seriously rather than simply embarking on greenwashing exercises!

It gets worse, their credit ratings are about to get hit too. I almost feel sorry for them, almost!

Rating agency S&P warns 13 oil and gas companies they risk downgrades as renewables pick up steam

Rating agency S&P has warned 13 oil and gas companies, including the some of the world’s biggest, that it may downgrade them within weeks because of increasing competition from renewable energy.

The rating agency said it had increased its risk rating for the entire oil and gas sector from “intermediate” to “moderately high” because due to the move away from fossil fuels, poor profitability and volatile prices.

A lower credit rating can make it harder or more expensive for companies to borrow money. In particular, many fund managers will not invest in companies with a junk rating.

Black rock (9trillion of funds under management) weighing in on the topic:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55849898

Job loss warning

When the boss of the world's biggest investor speaks, those company bosses listen. He wants them to explain how they are going to get to net zero over the coming decades.

But he also admitted that starving polluting companies of cash too quickly would mean dramatic job losses.

"If we all ran away from the hydrocarbons and everything, and if you ran away with most of those companies in the FTSE [100], the job loss in the United Kingdom would be extraordinary. Is that the outcome that they want?" he told the BBC.

Nice try, but there are more jobs in RE than FF's. Plus it's green and ethical. If only the companies had listened to the science (since the 1970's), instead of investing so much money in denial, there wouldn't be a problem, and as a small side effect the world would be cleaner and greener, and less people would be losing their homes to climate changes and increased extreme events ....... or dying from pollution.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

Coastalwatch said:

Martyn1981 said:

It might be too soon to pop the champagne corks, after all, the US has a habit of disappointing. But this could be incredibly important going forward, especially when we take into account Biden's other actions such as the cancelling of the Keystone Pipeline, and the licences to extract oil and natural gas on public lands and waters, and all in his first few days. Looks like Biden is going to war!

Biden Orders End To Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Promotes Equity For Underserved Communities

President Biden this week did something CleanTechnica has been advocating for over the course of many years — ending government subsidies for fossil fuels. If humanity is to find a rational and reasonable answer to the challenge of a warming planet, we must stop making the burning of oil, natural gas, and coal the basis of our economy. Giving fossil fuel companies government incentives to extract more oil, gas, and coal is inconsistent with that goal.

This news must be reverberating around the boardrooms of the FF industry today. No doubt they'll be lobbying their friendly Senators to oppose it with every weapon at their disposal. However, I do just wonder if they'll now begin investing in renewables seriously rather than simply embarking on greenwashing exercises!

It gets worse, their credit ratings are about to get hit too. I almost feel sorry for them, almost!

Rating agency S&P warns 13 oil and gas companies they risk downgrades as renewables pick up steam

Rating agency S&P has warned 13 oil and gas companies, including the some of the world’s biggest, that it may downgrade them within weeks because of increasing competition from renewable energy.

The rating agency said it had increased its risk rating for the entire oil and gas sector from “intermediate” to “moderately high” because due to the move away from fossil fuels, poor profitability and volatile prices.

A lower credit rating can make it harder or more expensive for companies to borrow money. In particular, many fund managers will not invest in companies with a junk rating.

Black rock (9trillion of funds under management) weighing in on the topic:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55849898

Job loss warning

When the boss of the world's biggest investor speaks, those company bosses listen. He wants them to explain how they are going to get to net zero over the coming decades.

But he also admitted that starving polluting companies of cash too quickly would mean dramatic job losses.

"If we all ran away from the hydrocarbons and everything, and if you ran away with most of those companies in the FTSE [100], the job loss in the United Kingdom would be extraordinary. Is that the outcome that they want?" he told the BBC.

Nice try, but there are more jobs in RE than FF's. Plus it's green and ethical. If only the companies had listened to the science (since the 1970's), instead of investing so much money in denial, there wouldn't be a problem, and as a small side effect the world would be cleaner and greener, and less people would be losing their homes to climate changes and increased extreme events ....... or dying from pollution.

I think the point is that fossil fuel industries are already getting defunded and (having as you said not taken steps to diversify away from fossil fuels) might very rapidly go bankrupt which would have n immediate and severe impact on economies, particuarly possibly the UK because our min share index is overweight with oil and commodity companies.  Yes it must be done but do it too quickly and we could be looking at a shock of order 20% of gdp per head which is an awful lot less money to spend on NHS cancer treatments amongst other 'nice to haves'.

History has taught us that shed labour will eventually be absorbed into other productive industries but the Welsh and Northern mining villages show that this can take a long time and come at huge cost to the individual.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

Coastalwatch said:

Martyn1981 said:

It might be too soon to pop the champagne corks, after all, the US has a habit of disappointing. But this could be incredibly important going forward, especially when we take into account Biden's other actions such as the cancelling of the Keystone Pipeline, and the licences to extract oil and natural gas on public lands and waters, and all in his first few days. Looks like Biden is going to war!

Biden Orders End To Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Promotes Equity For Underserved Communities

President Biden this week did something CleanTechnica has been advocating for over the course of many years — ending government subsidies for fossil fuels. If humanity is to find a rational and reasonable answer to the challenge of a warming planet, we must stop making the burning of oil, natural gas, and coal the basis of our economy. Giving fossil fuel companies government incentives to extract more oil, gas, and coal is inconsistent with that goal.

This news must be reverberating around the boardrooms of the FF industry today. No doubt they'll be lobbying their friendly Senators to oppose it with every weapon at their disposal. However, I do just wonder if they'll now begin investing in renewables seriously rather than simply embarking on greenwashing exercises!

It gets worse, their credit ratings are about to get hit too. I almost feel sorry for them, almost!

Rating agency S&P warns 13 oil and gas companies they risk downgrades as renewables pick up steam

Rating agency S&P has warned 13 oil and gas companies, including the some of the world’s biggest, that it may downgrade them within weeks because of increasing competition from renewable energy.

The rating agency said it had increased its risk rating for the entire oil and gas sector from “intermediate” to “moderately high” because due to the move away from fossil fuels, poor profitability and volatile prices.

A lower credit rating can make it harder or more expensive for companies to borrow money. In particular, many fund managers will not invest in companies with a junk rating.

Black rock (9trillion of funds under management) weighing in on the topic:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55849898

Job loss warning

When the boss of the world's biggest investor speaks, those company bosses listen. He wants them to explain how they are going to get to net zero over the coming decades.

But he also admitted that starving polluting companies of cash too quickly would mean dramatic job losses.

"If we all ran away from the hydrocarbons and everything, and if you ran away with most of those companies in the FTSE [100], the job loss in the United Kingdom would be extraordinary. Is that the outcome that they want?" he told the BBC.

Nice try, but there are more jobs in RE than FF's. Plus it's green and ethical. If only the companies had listened to the science (since the 1970's), instead of investing so much money in denial, there wouldn't be a problem, and as a small side effect the world would be cleaner and greener, and less people would be losing their homes to climate changes and increased extreme events ....... or dying from pollution.

I think the point is that fossil fuel industries are already getting defunded and (having as you said not taken steps to diversify away from fossil fuels) might very rapidly go bankrupt which would have n immediate and severe impact on economies, particuarly possibly the UK because our min share index is overweight with oil and commodity companies.  Yes it must be done but do it too quickly and we could be looking at a shock of order 20% of gdp per head which is an awful lot less money to spend on NHS cancer treatments amongst other 'nice to haves'.

History has taught us that shed labour will eventually be absorbed into other productive industries but the Welsh and Northern mining villages show that this can take a long time and come at huge cost to the individual.

Nice try - if we move to RE the economy will collapse and we won't be able to treat cancer!
I suppose the good news now is that scare tactics are all that remain.

Martyn1981

Big Oil in the US appears to have spotted the risk that the expanding EV rollout will bring. I'm guessing that they are scared of even a small drop in petrol sales as World supply is already too high, so if prices remain low, it's expensive (relatively) US shale oil, and Canadian tar sand oil that will lose money first.
[I recall an article on 'peak price' a few years ago, suggesting that Chinese BEV buses had already reduced oil demand by half of that needed to create an oversupply and peak price situation that World oil producers would not be able to rectify - since they would have to work together and reduce production, at a time when they know that what's left in the ground will become worthless.]

Big Oil Woos Big Corn To Fight Off Biden EV Push

According to Reuters, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, an oil refining trade group, acknowledges it has been in touch with representatives of the corn and biofuel industries at the state and federal level recently to seek support for policies that will reduce the carbon intensity of transport fuels and block efforts to provide federal subsidies for electric vehicles. The goal is to offer an alternative to Biden’s EV initiative and make sure there continues to be  a market for liquid fuels like gasoline and ethanol.

EricMears

michaels said:

. . . fossil fuel industries . . . . might very rapidly go bankrupt which would have an immediate and severe impact on economies, particularly possibly the UK because our min share index is overweight with oil and commodity companies.  

A few FF companies going bankrupt would indeed have an immediate effect on e.g. the FTSE100 but that wouldn't necessarily have any effect on the UK economy !   When a share ceases to exist,  share indices are reformulated to try and report a similar level with a slightly different list of companies.

ASavvyBuyer

Flexible heat pumps ideal for power grids congested by solar and wind

"According to its experts, intelligent control of heat pumps may result in the creation of between 0.5 and 1 GW of temporary grid flexibility by 2030."

Martyn1981

Carbon Commentary Newsletter extracts. Also a note to say that there won't be a newsletter for a few weeks

Other work will mean that I am not able to write this newsletter for the next few weeks. Apologies for this and I will be back as soon as I can.  

2, Hydrogen for aviation. A couple of further developments on Orkney, the network of islands off the north-east coast of Scotland. The local airport operator is setting up a trial centre for low-carbon aviation, including hydrogen, electricity and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Airplanes on Orkney generally fly short routes between the islands carrying a small number of passengers, making the archipelago a perfect location for experimenting with these new fuels. In addition, the main airport on Orkney said it will install a hydrogen powered boiler to make both electricity and heat (CHP) for its buildings. Orkney makes hydrogen from the regular surpluses of wind energy that it experiences. The boiler manufacturer is the German company 2G, which says it has already installed four hydrogen CHP systems elsewhere. (Thanks to Cathy Scott).
 
3, Shell and floating wind. Shell supported the proposed Emerald Wind project off the south-east coast of Ireland, buying 51% of the development company running the proposed site. Emerald Wind will use floating wind turbines totalling up to 1 GW of capacity, providing up to 15% of annual Irish electricity demand. Although this farm is still in its early stages, with electricity probably only arriving onshore in 2027, this is another indication of Shell’s interest in floating offshore wind.
 
4, Carbon removal. Microsoft followed Stripe and a small number of other US companies holding competitions to elicit bids to offset its carbon emissions. It received bids that promised to remove 55 million tonnes of CO2. Almost all of these are, in Microsoft’s words, ‘short-term and nature-based’. The company selected 15 winning suppliers, covering 1.3 million tonnes of CO2. All but about 5,000 tonnes were either forestry-related (1.1 million tonnes) or focused on soil restoration (0.2 million tonnes). In total, the carbon removal represents about 10% of Microsoft’s current emissions but the intention is to multiply carbon removal four-fold in the next ten years. As usual in these competitions, the Climeworks Icelandic direct air capture project also won but only promised removal of 400 tonnes. Biochar projects were also winners for small tonnages. The Microsoft documents detailing its move to negative emissions are absolutely exemplary and point to the urgent need to develop robust accounting and transparent markets. ‘(T)here is no real existing carbon removal ecosystem and the world must build a new market on an unprecedented scale and timeline, from nearly scratch’. (Thanks to Danielle Toutoungi).
  
6, Geoengineering. Nobody actually wants to geoengineer but the world probably won’t keep under 2 degrees of temperature increase without it. One of the most controversial proposals is to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface by placing reflective material high in the atmosphere/stratosphere. Bill Gates has backed one of the most advanced experiments, run by a Harvard group that intends to put particles into the stratosphere above Sweden, possibly as early as this year. The prospective amounts are trivial, said to be less than 2 kg, and the substance is innocuous - chalk dust - but the reactions have been furious. As with dubious schemes offsetting CO2, the worry among activists is that the world will think that it can continue to emit carbon if it blocks solar energy. But surely the lessons of the last year are clear? If we don’t research geoengineering now, but eventually decide that the climate emergency requires it, we won’t have the base of knowledge necessary to do it safely or quickly. Careful experiments of this sort seem vital to me.
 
7, Transport of renewable fuels. A consortium including the Port of Antwerp looked at the practicalities of bring hydrogen, ammonia, renewable methanol and other hydrogen carriers from energy-surplus countries such as Chile and Morocco to north-west continental Europe. The conclusion of the study is that energy transmission by ship is feasible and that ammonia (NH3) will generally be the cheapest way of transporting hydrogen. But the main influence on the overall cost of renewable hydrogen will continue to be the price of wind or solar power in the country of origin. This is a detailed and very useful analysis of the likely cost of getting low carbon energy into regions with relatively low renewables potential.
 
8, A larger hydrogen boiler. The decarbonisation of the Orkney airport is at a small scale (Note 2). A test firing of a much larger hydrogen boiler was carried out in the north west of England, operating at 1 MW, a size suitable for many industrial applications. Two large manufacturers operating in the region will now also run trials using hydrogen for larger scale industrial heat. These are the first experiments of this size that I have seen.
 
9, Synthetic fuels. The German government put money behind the introductory work for a commercial-scale aviation fuel refinery, saying that the country needed several million tonnes by 2030. ‘Electrofuels’ will be made from hydrogen and from CO2 captured from industrial processes, such as cement manufacture, or directly from the air. The intention is to design a plant to make about 10,000 tonnes a year. This is roughly the quantity already proposed for the first plant of Norsk eFuels in Oslo by 2023. Infinium, a company based in California developing electrofuels for aviation and shipping  said it had closed a financing round with venture capital and industrial investors, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a business backing a striking fraction of the initiatives mentioned in these newsletters. No numbers were provided.
 
10, Circular packaging. About half of all UK sales of clothing were made in online in 2020 and the percentage continues to rise. The materials in which they were packed and transported continue to increase, forming a larger fraction of the waste stream. One simple idea to make retailing more circular is to send out clothes in a durable but flexible plastic container which can then be folded up and returned via conventional postal services. Hipli, a small French company, is pioneering a polypropylene zipped bag that can be reused 100 times, claiming that this would typically reduce packaging waste by 25 kg. It says it already has 75 online retailers using its flexible containers. It claims that if 90% of its bags are returned after each use the carbon footprint is one fifth of similarly sized cardboard containers.

 

michaels

Really interesting thoughts on geoengineering (bullet 6), personally I don't know where I stand on either the concept or even the research.

Martyn1981

Looks like Joe Biden is playing it clever. He's emphasizing the job creation from RE and BEV's. For so long the FF industry has been lying about the economic impacts of moving away from them, and funding so many election campaigns, whilst jobs in the FF industry (especially coal) have been slipping.
Hopefully now the lies have ended, and the immediate benefits to the workforce, as well as the environment and the economy will shine through. Just a shame that all the benefits were denied for so long due to FF industry pressure and misinformation.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs — Biden’s Climate Policies Intersect Labor Goals

Robust climate policies are beneficial for the environment, human health, and the next generation’s safety. But in order to persuade a partially reluctant constituency, US President Joe Biden has framed his climate policies as a solution to an economy already weakened by the pandemic. As he presented what the New York Times this week called “a sweeping series of executive actions,” Biden’s climate policies include a constant and clear mantra: “jobs.”

He uttered the word “jobs” 15 times in his announcement. And these are “green jobs” which would create a “prevailing wage.”

“Today is climate day in the White House, which means today is jobs day at the White House,” Biden affirmed. “We see these workers building new buildings, installing 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations across the country as we modernize our highway systems to adapt to the changes that have already taken place.”

Martyn1981

Heard of this story on Tesla Time News yesterday, and found this article on it ...... quite timely.

When the Pandemic Gutted Oil Revenues, Wind Power Rescued Wyoming’s Capital City

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Robin Lockman feared the worst for her town of Cheyenne, Wyoming. As the city’s treasurer, she estimated that it might lose up to 25 percent of its budget as tax revenues stalled and the prices of oil, gas and coal tanked, eliminating money the city typically receives from the state as royalties from the extractive energy industry.

So the city did the hard work of laying off 18 employees and cutting funds for travel and training. And then a surprising thing happened: The huge deficit never arrived. In fact, over the summer, the city brought in more tax revenue than the year before.

Between July and September, Cheyenne saw a 20.5 percent increase in tax revenue compared to 2019. In September alone, the increase was a staggering 83 percent, or $1.4 million. “I was in shock when I saw it,” said Lockman. She feared the good news was a mistake, so she called the Wyoming Department of Revenue to confirm the numbers. “The tax reported was legitimate, and was due to the Roundhouse Wind Project,” said Lockman, referring to an energy development west of the city.