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Geoengineering to save the planet?

  • Thread starter Thread starter QV
  • Start date Start date
Thus making the point no one really has a full grasp and understanding of the whole complex system of our big blue ball.

Which go to the point which grinds my gears...the climate zealots, cultists, fear mongers, and just believers is the absolutes they speak in. If they would just bring it down a few amd have a real discussion about it..I think I could get more onboard. But when we are doomed unless we do xyz....well can we talk cost v benefit...nope. then it's a religion or a cult or something else.
Meteorology is my profession, I have a better than average understanding of climatology, as climatology is something we learn in my occupation.

I get that things have changed, what I haven't seen proven in any real way is that making life more expensive is a good way to make the climate change less... The climate has been changing since it formed billions of years ago. The bronze age collapse, the Roman Empire, the Nazca, etc... all rose and fell based on the climatological changes that occurred long before accurate thermometers, and weather records.
 
Meteorology is my profession, I have a better than average understanding of climatology, as climatology is something we learn in my occupation.

I get that things have changed, what I haven't seen proven in any real way is that making life more expensive is a good way to make the climate change less... The climate has been changing since it formed billions of years ago. The bronze age collapse, the Roman Empire, the Nazca, etc... all rose and fell based on the climatological changes that occurred long before accurate thermometers, and weather records.
And that demon carbon.
 
ENSO only redistributes energy it is not the addition of new energy
The climate always changing is of course true in its broadest meaning. Having recently stalled/reversed the cooling effect of the Milankovitch cycling forcing that were resulting in a -1C/1500yrs

Notwithstanding the above this thread was not the AGW thread but specific to geoengineering. I find it interesting the trepidation that people have about the intentional release of SOx when we have been releasing them at will for decades while at the same time continuing with our increase in other element cycling primarily C/CO2 which does not elicit the same
 
I find it interesting the trepidation that people have about the intentional release of SOx when we have been releasing them at will for decades while at the same time continuing with our increase in other element cycling primarily C/CO2 which does not elicit the same
SOx produces a lot of adverse health effects that CO2 does not.
 
its the geoengineering potential of SOx emissions from planes at 35000ft and ships crossing the ocean that was the issue
I know; but all that tells us is that amount of SOx didn't cause any catastrophic climate problems, only health problems for people, plants, and animals.
 
I know; but all that tells us is that amount of SOx didn't cause any catastrophic climate problems, only health problems for people, plants, and animals.
I dont think those emissions were ever expected to other than when they dump the scrubbers at sea.
The cumulative negative forcing of all aerosols is estimated to be -0.5C
 
Yeah, good luck with all that.... meanwhile, India and China want you to pass the anthracite ;)


Coal Use Hits Record High Despite Clean Energy Boom​

By Haley Zaremba - Aug 04, 2023, 6:00 PM CDT
  • Coal use reached a record high of 8.3 billion metric tons in 2022, providing about 36% of the world's electricity generation, despite an uptick in the demand for clean energy sources.
  • As global economies grappled with energy security following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China and India responded by boosting their coal industries, which overshadowed a decrease in coal usage in the United States and the European Union.
  • Transitioning India and China away from coal is estimated to cost around a trillion dollars, but it is crucial for achieving global emission goals; however, political complications and the countries' relationships with coal make this task daunting.
For years, climate experts have been begging the world’s biggest economies to wean themselves off of fossil fuels. Instead, coal use is at an all time high, hitting a brand new record of 8.3 billion metric tons in 2022, up 3.3% from the prior year, according to figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The uptick in coal demand has been concurrent with a clean energy boom, as countries across the world turned to non-petroleum based energy sources last year thanks to soaring oil and gas prices. All told, the world produced 10,440 terawatt hours from coal in 2022 – about 36% of the world’s electricity generation.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, which kicked off an entirely war over energy supply and sanctions in Europe over the course of 2022, sent shockwaves through global energy markets. To shore up energy security, global economies scrambled to find alternative energy supply chains. In the West, this mostly manifested as an intensive growth in the renewable energy sector. In China and India, however, the coal business is booming. The picture is a bit more complex in China, however, where renewables growth has outpaced every other country on earth several times over, but coal still reigns supreme in the global energy mix.

 
My favourite Dane making sense again.

The solution to hot summers - air conditioning
The solution to cold winters - furnaces
The common solution - cheap energy

Cold kills more than heat.
Warming results in fewer deaths.


since NASA satellites started accurately recording fires across the entire surface of the planet two decades ago, there has been a strong downward trend. In the early 2000s, three per cent of the world’s land area burned each year. Last year, fire burned 2.2 per cent of the world’s land area,



Bjorn Lomborg: Fear-mongering over forest fires and climate change isn't rooted in reality​

There has been a strong downward trend in the number of forest fires around the world over the past 20 years
Author of the article:
Bjorn Lomborg, Special to National Post
Published Aug 25, 2023 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read


As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked, and the proposed policy responses are enormously ineffective.


Heatwaves are clearly made worse by global warming. But the non-stop media coverage of high temperatures in the summertime fails to tell the bigger story: temperature-driven deaths are overwhelmingly caused by cold.

In the United States and Canada, a recent Lancet study found that 20,000 people die each year from heat, but 170,000 die from cold. Globally, the study finds 4.5-million cold deaths, which is nine-times more than global heat deaths. The study also finds that temperatures increasing half a degree Celsius in the first two decades of this century have caused an additional 116,000 heat deaths annually. But warmer temperatures now also avoid 283,000 cold deaths every year. Reporting only on the former leaves us poorly informed.



Around the world, governments have promised to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions at a cost beyond $5.6-trillion annually. Scared populations will of course be more likely to clamour for the perceived safety of such policies. But these policies help tackle heat and cold deaths very poorly.



Even if all the world’s ambitious carbon-cutting promises were magically enacted, these policies would only slow future warming. Stronger heat waves would still kill more people, just slightly fewer than they would have. A sensible response would focus first on resilience, meaning more air conditioning and cooler cities through greenery and water features. After the 2003 heat waves, France’s rational reforms, including mandatory air conditioning in care homes, reduced heat deaths 10-fold, despite higher temperatures.

Avoiding both cold and heat deaths requires affordable energy access. In the U.S., cheap gas from fracking allowed millions to keep warmer on low budgets, saving 12,500 lives each year. Climate policy, which inevitably makes energy more expensive, achieves the opposite.



Along with temperature spikes, alarming images of forest fires share the front pages this summer. You’d easily get the sense that the planet is on fire. The reality, however, is that since NASA satellites started accurately recording fires across the entire surface of the planet two decades ago, there has been a strong downward trend. In the early 2000s, three per cent of the world’s land area burned each year. Last year, fire burned 2.2 per cent of the world’s land area, a new record low. Yet, you would struggle to find that reported anywhere.



This year, fires have burned much more in the Americas than over the past decade. This has constantly been reported in the media. But fires have burned much less in both Africa and Europe compared to the last decade. Cumulatively to Aug. 12, the Global Wildfire Information System shows that the whole world has actually burned less than the average over the last decade.

While the media constantly focuses on Greece, which has burned much more, it omits the fact that most of Europe has burned much less. Indeed, by Aug. 12, all of Europe has cumulatively burned less than it has by this point in the year during any of the last 10 years. Yet, this has scarcely been reported anywhere.



The fire in Hawaii is deeply tragic. Yet, it is lazy and unhelpful for pundits to use the tragedy to incorrectly blame climate change. They claim it was tinder-box dry, but through most of the past 23 years, Maui County was drier than the week that it burned. Hawaii’s drought is blamed on climate, but the most recent scientific study shows no climate signal.



Pointing wrongly to climate change is dangerous because cutting emissions is one of the least effective ways to help prevent future fires. Much faster, more effective and cheaper solutions include controlled fires to burn away vegetation that could otherwise result in wildfires, improving zoning and enhancing forest management.



Floods are similarly routinely ascribed to global warming. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report has “low confidence in general statements to attribute changes in flood events to anthropogenic climate change.”

The experts emphasize that neither river nor coastal floods are currently statistically detectable from the background noise of natural climate variability. Indeed, the United Nations panel finds that such floods won’t be statistically detectable by the end of the century, even under an extreme scenario.



In the U.S., flood damage cost 0.5 per cent of GDP in the early 1900s. Now, it costs one-tenth of that, because greater resiliency and development vastly outweigh any residual climate effects.



While climate alarmism reaches new heights of scariness — with the UN Secretary General’s “global boiling” claims entering ridiculous territory — the reality is more prosaic. Global warming will cause costs equivalent to one or two recessions over the rest of this century. That makes it a real problem, but not an end-of-the-world catastrophe that justifies the costliest policies.



The commonsense response would be to recognize that both climate change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs. We should carefully negotiate a middle pathway where we aim for effective approaches that do the most to reduce damages at a reasonable cost.



To do better on climate, we must resist the misleading, alarmist climate narrative. Panic is a terrible advisor.



National Post



Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His brand new book is “Best Things First.”
 
So much for the dreams of the fools who misinterpreted a one-day favourable (for "green energy" enthusiasts) blend of energy-in/energy-out as "Germany can get all of its power from renewables now!"
 
So much for the dreams of the fools who misinterpreted a one-day favourable (for "green energy" enthusiasts) blend of energy-in/energy-out as "Germany can get all of its power from renewables now!"

And their economy is on a rocky road to mediocrity....

Germany is struggling to move away from its ‘sick man of Europe’ image​

  • The International Monetary Fund forecasts the German economy will shrink in 2023, which would make it the only G7 economy to contract this year.
  • While Germany fell into recession in the first quarter of 2023, there are “major differences” between the country now and its last stint as Europe’s “sick man,” according to Jasmin Groeschl, senior economist for Europe at Allianz.

The issues weighing on Germany’s economy can be separated into “two very separate battles,” Stefan Kooths, research director for business cycles and growth at the Kiel Institute for World Economy, told CNBC.

There are short-term, cyclical issues, many of which are a result of the global economic climate, paired with longer-term, structural problems that stem from Germany itself, he said.

Short-term cyclical issues​

One big difference between Germany’s economy now and its situation in the 1990s and early 2000s is the cyclical headwinds it’s currently tackling, according to Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro research and chief euro zone economist at ING Research.

China’s Covid-19 reopening earlier this year didn’t create the bounce back many were hoping for, which is hitting manufacturing countries across the world, while higher interest rates and energy prices are also having an effect.

“It is a different sickness [compared to] 20 years ago,” Brzeski told CNBC.

Germany’s exports, for example, are predominantly in sectors which rise and fall with the wider economy, such as cars, machinery, tools and chemicals, while other countries, such as France, are much more dependent on services exports, which are thriving in a post-pandemic world.

 

Piling on...

The real costs of wind power prove the sums don’t add up​

The chasm between net zero ambition and reality is growing ever larger
JEREMY WARNER30 August 2023 • 1:25pm
Jeremy Warner


wind power

Rising costs, complex planning laws and better opportunities CREDIT: Chris Laurens/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images

Someone get a grip. UK energy policy is once again coming apart at the seams, with growing doubts over whether net zero or even energy security goals can be met.
Only now are the true economic costs and practical difficulties of going carbon-free becoming fully evident, and it’s not a pretty sight. Yet still policymakers don’t seem to get it; either that or they are being deliberately misleading on the ease with which it can be delivered.
All pretence at “leading the world” in the application of renewables is meanwhile going up in smoke, as one-time champions pare back their ambitions for the UK market in the face of rising costs, oppressive planning laws, and better opportunities elsewhere. Rival jurisdictions, particularly the US and EU, are beginning to offer far superior incentives.
If you cannot beat them, do the opposite. Slowly, but surely, the Government is watering down its environmental agenda, which sadly but inevitably frequently clashes with the parallel goal of enhanced economic growth – the latest example being so-called “nutrient neutrality” water pollution rules which act as a barrier to more housebuilding.
Yet on paper at least, and indeed legally, the overarching environmental goal of net zero by 2050 – together with the staged targets set for getting there – remains sacrosanct, even though most practically minded people have long thought there is not a snowball’s chance in Hades of actually meeting it. A giant leap of faith in the transforming powers of technology is demanded to think it can be.

As if to confirm the gaping chasm between ambition and reality, the latest round of auctions for UK renewable energy licences, the outcome of which is due to be announced late next week, has plainly hit the rocks.
Having already abandoned a key UK offshore wind development because of rising costs, the Swedish utility Vattenfall has indicated that it won’t be participating in the Government’s so-called Auction Round Five.
Similarly with the UK energy group SSE, which has said it will not be entering its Seagreen offshore development into the auction, citing a low, officially set, strike price, and dramatically rising costs.
Under pressure from the renewables industry, the Government has announced a slight increase in the promised subsidy below strike prices, but it’s unlikely to make a difference.
Presumably there are at least some bidders still in the running; even so, officials will struggle to get the capacity hoped for, putting in jeopardy the target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030. Current capacity stands at just 14GW, so there is a way to go.

This in turn raises doubts about the Government’s separate target of complete decarbonisation of the electricity network by 2035. This, too, looks unrealistic. British energy policy is once more in a chaotic mess. It was ever thus.
As it is, policymakers have set strike prices so low that investors are struggling to see how they might make a return. No surprise that prices should be forced down like this, for the green energy transition is not just about saving the planet. It is also meant to deliver much lower energy costs.
This, too, is turning out to be a pretence.
It’s true that in the past seven or eight years, the notional cost of renewable energy has plummeted. The price of offshore wind output has, for instance, fallen by around two thirds, from £100 per megawatt hour to less than £40. There you go, say ministers in response to net zero sceptics; it’s cheaper than coal.
Would that it was, but the claim is in fact a statistical illusion. The manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs alone have been surging since the war in Ukraine. To these we must also add the costs of upgrading the National Grid to bring the new sources of electricity from where they are generated to where they are used.
Littering the countryside with pylons is understandably running into local opposition. Billions may have to be forked out to compensate affected communities,
or in finding alternative, more expensive, transmission routes. It could make HS2 look cheap by comparison.
But to gain a proper understanding of the real costs of wind, and to a lesser extent, solar, we need to factor in another of their characteristics – that they are intermittent.
In order to function effectively, the grid needs a constant balance between supply and demand; if the wind isn’t blowing, or even if it is blowing too strongly, thereby overloading the grid, there is a problem.
Lots of conventional backup capacity is required to deal with the shortfalls that result from intermittency – capacity that can be brought online quickly at the flick of a switch when needs arise.
The upshot is likely to be a high degree of duplication in generating capacity. This will obviously very considerably add to the costs of the renewable element. It’s disingenuous to say wind is cheaper than fossil fuels.

Potentially, storage could provide a solution to the intermittency problem, yet for the moment it doesn’t exist at the scale needed to do the trick. If Britain cannot guarantee to keep the lights on, nobody is going to want to set up shop here.
What about batteries? This may seem unduly pessimistic, but it stretches credulity to believe that they can ever really be the solution. Is there even enough lithium in the world to provide the level of battery power needed to supply the National Grid when the wind stops blowing?
There are alternatives, nuclear being the most obvious, but many environmentalists are as opposed to it as they are to coal, gas and oil, and here in the UK, policy on new nuclear capacity, as on much else, falls woefully short.
It is as much as we can do even to get the money-eating leviathan of Hinkley Point C up and running. Next comes Sizewell C, which scarcely promises to be much better. As Britain’s ageing fleet of existing nuclear power stations reaches the end of its life, merely replacing what’s closing down seems to be beyond us.
And to phase out the 80pc of UK energy demand currently satisfied by fossil fuels, we would need far, far more. Yet the Government continues to procrastinate. Shamefully, it is still faffing around with an international competition to decide who gets to build Small Modular Reactors, never mind how to finance them.
The last two auction rounds lulled the Government into a false sense of security on the economics of renewables. Both were hugely successful in attracting bidders at apparently highly competitive prices.
But things have changed. Having been ahead, Britain is slipping behind. Next week’s announcement on the outcome of the fifth round auction threatens to be a rude awakening.

 
Germany -

German economic policy has gone stark raving mad​

Misguided shibboleths may see the economy hit rock bottom with a painful thud
AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD30 August 2023 • 6:00am
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard


As Germany’s economic debate enters a state of feverish agitation, its hapless coalition is increasingly in the firing line

As Germany’s economic debate enters a state of feverish agitation, its hapless coalition is increasingly in the firing line CREDIT: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP
German economic policy is a clutter of contradictions and misguided shibboleths. The coalition government is offering exorbitant subsidies to profitable American and Asian semiconductor companies at a cost of €3.3m (£2.8m) per job, radically departing from Germany’s ordoliberal traditions of market primacy.
At the same time it is preparing to slash public investment in infrastructure and return to hairshirt budget cuts for its own people in the middle of a slump.

The economy went into a double-dip recession over the winter. It stagnated in the second quarter. It is probably in the first stage of a triple-dip recession this quarter.
With glorious mistiming, finance minister Christian Lindner is more concerned about the country’s debt-brake rule.
He aims to cut the budget deficit to 0.4pc by next year, citing a jump in annual debt service costs from €4bn to €40bn since 2021, which of course means deeper cuts elsewhere.
One of his solutions is to slash Germany’s “digitisation” budget by 99pc next year, despite repeated studies showing that starvation of public investment over the last 20 years has left the country with a persistent “digital gap”.
“He must call off this austerity,” says Stephan Weil, the first minister of Lower Saxony.
The Bundesbank – once again in charge of the European Central Bank – wants to compound the fiscal squeeze with further monetary tightening, even as the producer price index deflates and the eurozone money supply contracts at record rates.
Congratulations to Intel, GlobalFoundries and Taiwan’s TSMC for shaking down the better part of €22bn in German state aid in the middle of this policy chaos.
They are to be paid handsomely to build chips that will be widely traded on the global market and will probably be facing a glut by 2030, given the frantic dash for chip sovereignty on both sides of the Atlantic, and given China’s ruinous outlays on semiconductor parity.
The new chips to be built in Silicon Saxony are highly advanced in one sense, down to two nanometers, but they are a further miniaturisation of an existing silicon technology nearing its limits.
They will be overtaken by the next generation of compound semiconductors, from materials such as graphene, which are infinitely faster, use far less energy and are likely to steal a march on artificial intelligence.
A chorus of critics in Germany are asking what the country is getting for the most expensive foray into industrial policy seen in post-war Europe. These prestige “fabs” will not make the routine, mid-grade chips currently imported on a mass scale for Germany’s car industry. They fall between two stools.
The next six months will settle the question of whether inflation is the primary threat facing Germany and Europe, or whether the authorities are underestimating global deflationary forces and tightening pro-cyclically into the teeth of an enveloping downturn.
Fresh data from the ECB shows that narrow M1 money in the eurozone contracted by a record 9.2pc in July from a year earlier. Broad M3 turned negative for the first time. The full effect will hit with a delay in 2024 through complex monetary channels.

The Bundesbank used to track money closely. When the euro was launched, it insisted that M3 be included as one of the two pillars of ECB monetary policy.
The institution has turned its back entirely on the very tradition that made it Europe’s most respected central bank. It is not evident what theoretical model has replaced it.
The ECB has already raised the main policy rate by 425 basis points in a year, inflicting a large and sudden change in borrowing costs on an edifice of existing debt coming due over the next two years. Europe is also importing a tightening shock from the US Federal Reserve through the global effects of vanishing dollar liquidity.
Despite these warning signs Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel clearly wants to tighten further. “Core inflation is stubborn, so our monetary policy needs to be even more stubborn. We need staying power,” he said at the Jackson Hole conclave over the weekend.
Another Bundesbank tradition bites the dust. I am old enough to remember when German central bankers disputed the whole idea of core inflation, deeming it an intellectual cop-out by Anglo-Saxon economists.
Core inflation lags. Producer price inflation looks forward, and that ought to be sending shivers down spines at the Bundesbank.

Industrial producer prices hit -6pc in July. They are heading for -15pc by September. Services inflation is negative too.
“It is now clear that the inflation alarmists were fundamentally wrong,” said Heiner Flassbeck, former state secretary for the economy.
“Interest rate hikes by the ECB have already caused enormous damage. In view of the recession in Germany and the threat of recession throughout Europe, it is imperative that the leaders of German and European politics sit down immediately with the heads of the ECB to address the looming deflationary dangers,” he said.
Germany risks a contractionary feedback loop. Berlin’s economic elites have never acknowledged the policy error of the eurozone austerity crisis.
Germany got away with procyclical retrenchment during Europe’s lost decade by relying on the demand of other economies, possible only because it had an undervalued exchange rate against Club Med within EMU, and was equally undervalued against global competitors externally via the weak euro.
It can no longer rely on this method of relative advantage. The Latin bloc has clawed back intra-EMU competitiveness by means of “internal devaluation”.
Germany’s twin bets on cut-price Russian gas and the Chinese Wirtschaftswunder have both run into trouble. It has lost a significant share of the UK consumer market to world rivals as a result of the way that the EU chose to handle Brexit.
What Germany needs at this juncture is a large expansion of public investment and an end to reliance on foreign demand as the chief driver of growth, accompanied by root-and-branch reform of its planning bureaucracy.
It needs to dethrone the mercantilist exporting elites and pursue balanced trade rather than trying to restore a structural current account surplus of 8pc of GDP. The Lindner plan does the exact opposite.

German economic debate is in a state of feverish agitation. Everybody is lashing out at the hapless coalition. The Chambers of Industry (DIHK) says suffocating energy prices and bureaucracy are pushing Germany into crisis.
The Trade Association (BGA) wants business tax cuts and an end to the “contemptible political theatre”. The opposition wants to double down on corporate supremacy. There are deafening calls for energy subsidies to keep industry humming.

None of the major establishment parties and business lobbies accept that the 20th-century model may have run its course. They all want to perpetuate a national model that once worked marvellously but cannot work any longer.
Germany is a superbly gifted nation and will assuredly bounce back. However, first it may have to hit rock bottom with a painful thud.

One of Ambrose's major blindspots is "the people". He focuses on business, trade associations and chambers of commerce.

Brits complaining about windturbines and ULEZ while facing water and energy shortages and being forced to buy heat pumps and electric cars.
Frenchmen complaining about road taxes.
Germans complaining about heat pumps and blackouts.
Dutchmen complaining about shuttering farms.
Canadian truckers.
Unemployed American steelworkers.

The establishment is getting it wrong everywhere. Except perhaps China....
 
After Covid lockdowns and regional power outages even authoritarians have to worry about the consent of the governed.

Not to mention those involuntarily governed (Hong Kongers, Tibetans and Uyghurs come to mind).

China continues coal spree despite climate goals​

World’s biggest carbon emitter approving equivalent of two new coal plants a week, analysis shows

Helen Davidson in Taipei
@heldavidson
Tue 29 Aug 2023 11.04 BST


China is approving new coal power projects at the equivalent of two plants every week, a rate energy watchdogs say is unsustainable if the country hopes to achieve its energy targets.

The government has pledged to peak emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2060, and in 2021 the president, Xi Jinping, promised to stop building coal powered plants abroad.

But after regional power crunches in 2022, China started a domestic spree of approving new projects and restarting suspended ones. In 2022 the government approved a record-breaking 106 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity. One gigawatt is the equivalent of a large coal power plant.


The Canadian solution may be the solution to Taiwan's problems. The Americans are unlikely to invade us because it would inherit 40 million Democrats looking for handouts. Does Beijing really want 24 million free thinkers?
 
And it seems that California is also concerning itself with "the consent of the governed". Who knew that staying warm was more important than principles?


SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom campaigned on shutting down Aliso Canyon, a gas storage facility that was the site of the largest methane leak in U.S. history.

Now, five years later, his administration is poised to inject even more gas into the sandstone chamber 8,500 feet beneath north Los Angeles in a bid to stave off energy price spikes and power shortages.

He’s also blessed extensions of gas and nuclear power plants that were scheduled to be closed. Keeping the lights on takes precedence over California’s clean energy goals, at least for now.


Newsom is grappling with the same nuts-and-bolts challenges of running the electric grid as other blue-state officials in New York as well as the Biden administration. The pivot reflects the awkward reality faced by Newsom and other climate-minded governors: Politics moves far faster than the building of solar fields, wind farms and transmission lines, while power blackouts and electric bill spikes hit home immediately


“If there’s a blackout, it’s the governor’s fault,” said former Gov. Gray Davis (D), who was recalled in 2003 partly due to rolling blackouts and electricity price spikes during his term. “Certainly they don’t send you congratulations when you keep the power on, but ultimately they’ll hold the governor responsible for maintaining the grid.”

And the Brits are looking at increasing their gas storage capacity


Harland & Wolff, owner of the shipyard that built the Titanic, has overcome a challenge from Friends of the Earth to develop a natural gas storage site in Northern Ireland.

The company wants to flood a network of salt caverns under Larne Lough off the coast of County Antrim to store gas more than a kilometre under sea level.

It would store enough gas for 14 days of supply for Northern Ireland, or about 25pc of the UK’s storage needs.

The facility has a potential 40-year lifespan, as it could also store hydrogen as a green alternative to methane when natural gas is phased out.
 
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