That Climate Change Guy 🌍

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

As President Trump works to blunt the growth of wind and solar power and expand fossil fuel production in the United States, the renewable energy industry is making a new pitch: You need us.

Wind and solar developers are increasingly pointing out that America’s demand for electricity is soaring, driven by a boom in data centers, and it’s proving difficult to build enough new gas plants to supply all the extra power that the nation needs.

Wind, solar and battery storage are relatively quick and cheap to construct. That could help avert energy shortages and keep prices low, an argument that renewable energy firms are making to policymakers.

“Our message to the administration is, let’s be realistic about this,” John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra Energy, one of the country’s largest power producers, said in an interview. “If you take renewables and storage off the table, we’re going to force electricity prices to the moon.”

These are tough times, politically, for the renewable energy industry. Mr. Trump has been a blistering critic of wind turbines for years and openly promotes fossil fuels like oil and gas, riding into office on a promise to “drill, baby, drill.” He has halted federal approvals for wind farms, placed a moratorium on large solar arrays on public lands and frozen billions of dollars in spending for battery factories and electric grid upgrades.

At the same time, Republican leaders in Congress are talking about ending federal subsidies in the form of tax credits for low-carbon electricity, which have been expected to supercharge the growth of wind and solar power. Uncertainty around those credits has paralyzed the renewable energy industry, with companies delaying projects and laying off workers.

The chaos could make it harder for the United States to slash its planet-warming emissions, even as scientists warn the risks from climate change are escalating.

"Milton’s ferocity and its rapid intensification were fueled by abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico – just one of many ways that climate change made the storm more severe, according to a host of climate scientists, Axios, and NBC News’s senior Miami meteorologist John Morales, who broke down on air as he described the coming storm.

“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”

― Robert Louis Stevenson

Climate change is affecting ecosystems in many different ways. One of its consequences is increasingly longer and more intense periods of heat, which affect essential natural processes—such as pollination. A team of researchers from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) has now investigated in more detail how heat affects one particular player in these processes—the bumblebee. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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