Blog Post:Blog Post - Resilience Recognition is Rising

Blog Post - Recognition of Resilience is Rising - But Let's Not Forget About That Other Thing

Greetings,

I am looking out my window today as I pull together this Post to send to you. And I am happy to say that the ground I am looking at is white. Unfortunately the temperature is working against it staying that way and that is not welcome news, at least not to me. I grew up with seasons and I want seasons as well as everything that comes with them to remain.

It's no secret that the season facing the biggest existential threat is winter. In my usual section called "Things That Caught My Eye", I have included a compilation of links to good stories that I recently saw on this issue, and have added my thoughts as well. Those of you who have alway relished having snow, you may want to take a look, before you begin to suffer from what is being called "Solstagia".

My main thoughts in this issue, however, are on Resilience, the other side of the climate coin from emissions reduction. I talk about how it is good to see recognition of resilience growing, but then discuss

how we can't think about it at the expense of the other side of that coin. I argue that if we do we risk getting caught in an upward spiral of emissions that will continually require great efforts (and dollars) devoted to resilience...and so on.

Hope you enjoy what you read. Always glad to hear from you if you do - and even if you don't. :)

Dan

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Links to Past Posts:

There is no "O" in Climate Change

It was an Instagram COP - And I am Finally OK with That

How to Talk About Climate With Your Crazy Uncle at Thanksgiving

Monty Python and Climate Change

What You Need to Know About NIMBYism

H mm..So How Much Did My Heat Pump Really Cost?

What it Means to Be a Climate Voter

The Climate Conundrum of Air Conditioning

Predictions Made About Utilities Made 10 Years Ago - How Did They Hold up?

My Vote For The Most Under-Appreciated Impact of Climate Change

10 Things I Should Have Written About

So I Went to the COP - Here Are My Top 10 Takeaways.

Efficiency and Clean Energy - Faster vs More

Efficiency & Clean Energy - More vs. Faster

It's Time For A Climate Vote - On the Record

Good COP, Bad COP .....Thoughts Before Glasgow

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

What I Should Have Written About

The Serenity of Being a Climate Voter

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Some Things That Caught My Eye ...

Latest Yale Climate Opinion Survey ...

... 72%, 52%, and Other Good Numbers

The latest Yale Climate Opinion Map is out. This new version updates the maps with 2023 data and adds two new survey questions: “developing clean energy should be a high priority for the president and Congress” (66% nationally) and “support generating renewable energy on public land” (79% nationally).

The new survey showed that a majority in each state believes climate change is happening, with a national showing of 72% on that question. When asked if human activity was the cost, 52% nationally said it was, with only six states having less than a majority.

https://mailchi.mp/yale/new-yale-climate-opinion-maps-discover-state-level-trends?e=9a5ccd4f52

A Positive Tipping Point for Clean Electricity?

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has released its forecast covering 2024-2026. It predicts a rise in global electricity demand, but also sees generation from low-emissions sources as being adequate to cover that new demand. Furthermore, the IEA says that nearly half of the world’s electricity will come from low-emissions sources by 2026. The organization defines low-emissions sources as nuclear, wind, solar and hydro.

The Executive Summary of the Report has a lot of top-line takeaways about where demand will rise and fall, and what the effect will be on economies and industries.

https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024/executive-summary

Those Were Indeed the Days…At Least for Many of Us

If you grew up in an area that regularly got snow during the winter, you really should read the articles I am linking below to help you begin to think about how times are changing.

I still remember my mother coming into the bedroom as my brothers and I were stirring awake and telling us that the overnight snowfall had caused schools to be closed for the day. It was a snow day! And instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, we were instantly energized and couldn’t wait to have breakfast so we could get out to the local sledding hill, where every kid in town headed as soon as they could.

Things are changing in all sorts of ways, and the snow day is but one of them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/climate-change-snow-kids/

For a longer, more thoughtful piece on this, which also introduces the term “Solstagia”, read this:

https://www.vox.com/culture/24001256/snow-winter-climate-change-solastalgia-warming

And to understand how “cold snaps” are changing, read this:

https://wapo.st/4bbmreC

Setting Standards on the Reliability of Distributed Resources

The entity responsible for ensuring the reliability of the nation’s electricity grid (NERC) has announced it is undertaking a first-time effort to develop reliability standards for “inverter-based” resources. At present, conflicting arguments over the reliability of such resources, in particular renewable energy ones, are often made as increasing amounts of decentralized, distributed resources are added to the grid.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nerc-ferc-reliability-standards-ibrs-inverter-based-wind-solar/705282/

A Win for Gas in the Courts. Next Stop the Supremes?

One of the first local governments to take steps to ban new (incremental) gas hookups in buildings was Berkeley, California. That ban was overturned last year by the 9^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on the grounds that even though emissions reductions was the aim of the ban, it violated the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act. That is the law that designates DOE as the entity to set energy efficiency standards and generally bars states and local governments from doing their own. The latest move by Berkeley was to request an En Banc (all judge panel) to review the court’s earlier decision. The request was turned down, and the next stop for Berkeley would be likely be to go to the Supreme Court.

The Climate Conundrum of Forests

The article linked below is the best I have read in addressing all sides of the debate over how to manage forests under U.S. Government ownership and management. At least it seems like all sides – there is a new “side” focused on storing CO2 under U.S. Forest lands. But the most interesting thing for me in this piece was looking at “old” forests versus “mature” forests. The latter are the forests that have a chance at becoming “old” and older stands bring greater climate and other benefits. Yet mature forests are open to logging and not as well protected.

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2024/1/12/24023876/biden-forest-service-proposal-old-growth-forests

Nuclear is Alive and Well

I have not talked about nuclear in a while, and how I am an ardent supporter of it for climate reasons. Yes, I protested against nuclear when I was young, but that was then, and this is now. And the now is climate and carbon emissions.

Nuclear problems of the past create hangovers that last a long time. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukashima, etc. The accidents that have happened have loomed large in the mindset of some countries while others have plowed ahead.

Take Europe. You have France, that has one of the largest percentages of its electricity supply of any country, and you have Germany, which based on Fukashima concerns, has shut down all of its nuclear stations. Obviously, in doing that, the Germans took a lot of existing zero-emissions electricity off the grid.

The UK doesn’t get as much press for its nuclear pursuits, but it is definitively in the nuclear camp. The country aims to have up to 24 GW of nuclear capacity by mid-century, up from 6 GW today, which could meet around a quarter of the country's forecast electricity demand.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-aims-faster-investment-decisions-new-nuclear-projects-2024-01-11/

https://www.politico.eu/article/nuclear-power-claire-coutinho-electricity-uk-plan/

That Other Front in the Range Wars …

There have long been health and pollutant questions about using gas stoves in the living areas of our homes, especially given that some of these are not vented to the outside. Evidence of the low profile of this is the fact that there are no federal standards applicable to this.

But the issue of gas vs electric is not a low-profile issue in the climate context. And those advocating for electrification have found the health issue to be another arrow in their quiver.

The linked article reports on a controlled test of gas stoves versus electric induction ones. Spoiler alert: Electricity won. But read it anyway. It has all sorts of informational nuggets in it, and I learned all sorts of things from it that I didn’t know.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/16/gas-stoves-induction-cooktop-health/

Do These Climate Bragging Rights Come with a Risk?

The White House, particularly Vice President Harris, has been very vocal in recent weeks touting the $1 Trillion climate-related expenditures being made under the Inflation Reduction Act. the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 (that went toward manufacturing, research, and development); new spending in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; and funding increases the administration secured at EPA and the departments of Energy, Transportation and Commerce. While this is most definitely a talking point that should appeal to climate voters, it seems possible that those who think that President Biden is responsible for outsized growth in spending and the deficit may react differently.

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Recognition of Resilience is Growing ... ...But We Can’t Forget that Other Thing

I went to a meeting put on by a local civic/environmental group not that long ago. It was billed as a meeting on climate change, and I thought I would drop in and see what people might talk about, or even whether I could help answer any questions.

The guest speaker that kicked things off was from a regional quasi-governmental planning organization and his remarks were focused only on resilience in the local watershed. This was not surprising given what my state and others have gone through relative to extreme weather events. And for that reason, it was giving the audience something they wanted to hear about. There were numerous questions from attendees, all having to do with resiliency or something close to it.

Let me digress for a moment ... Resiliency is not defined by everyone the same way when it comes to climate. I am using it mean resistance, as in the ability to resist the impacts of climate change, particularly extreme weather. To others, resilience is the ability to bounce back after something bad happens, as in taking a punch but not letting it knock you out. For me, I use the first definition, because I think resilience must be about adaptation to live with climate impacts. I think the other definition gets too close to the idea of rebuilding houses on a recognized flood plain after they have all been destroyed by a flood.

For those of us who wake up each day hoping that the public will become more attuned to the climate emergency that we face, the fact that people are understanding that extreme weather is being fueled by climate change is good news. The latest survey information shows that statistically.

Weather events seem to also have finally tipped the media scales a bit, especially since extreme weather events give the kind of photos and videos that weather reporters love to appear in and which producers dream of showing. Thankfully, climate change is being mentioned as a factor during these clips.

Resilience is becoming a big focus in New York City. It has (as all cities should) an interdisciplinary Panel of Experts on Climate Change (NPCC) that monitors and reports to City Officials on climate change and its potential impacts.

First convened in 2008, the NPCC is a group of 20 climate experts who advise policymakers on the latest science and strategies to address hazards facing the five boroughs.

The sea levels around New York City have already risen about a foot since 1900, a higher rate than the global average. The NPCC’s latest estimates project sea levels around the city to continue to rise between half a foot and just over a foot in the 2030s. The panel expects sea levels around the city to continue to rise at least another foot — or up to almost two feet — by the 2050s.

In recognition of this kind of forecast a plan to build a resiliency wall around much of Manhattan surfaced last year. It has an attention-getting price tag of $52 Billion. You can see more about it here.

But ... back to the local meeting I was sitting in on in my area. As I said, it was all about resilience. There was no discussion of climate mitigation or climate change in general.

That meeting has caused me to step back and view the focus on extreme weather and resilience in a different way. I am suddenly realizing that that we might be in danger of taking a great leap forward on recognition of resilience and supporting efforts to increase it. But in doing could people start losing sight (or never gain it is the first place) on why we are having to talk about resilience? It makes me wonder whether people can easily get into a mindset that climate change “has happened”, and there is nothing we can do about it, and so now the job at hand is resilience.

In all the media coverage last year on extreme weather (and I include droughts and heat waves here in addition to wildfires and storms) I heard little mention of how the world is doing on getting control over rising greenhouse gas emissions and how it is doing relative to reducing them. There were no statistics or reference to emissions and/or climate change markers. Climate change was mentioned as though it was a given, and all the focus was on extreme weather and resilience.

This is not good.

If people think we have reached “peak climate” how will they push their governments, businesses, and other entities to focus on emissions reductions?

It is important to understand that the average person could likely not explain to someone else the greenhouse effect. They could not cite any statistics relative to concentrations of CO2 and the fact that emissions in most of world are still rising and those concentrations in the atmosphere are building up and not staying static. They would not be able to answer a question as to how long CO2 stays in the atmosphere before dissipating.

They don’t know that most, if not all, countries and companies are not meeting emission reduction goals or that in the case of countries, even if they met their goals most are set lower than the need for reduction identified by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and acknowledged by climate scientists far and wide.

They don’t understand the lag effect of emissions build-up, as in the fact that there are effects already baked in that we haven’t felt yet.

If people ever begin thinking that job #1 is now resilience, then they are not understanding that we need to stop digging the hole that got us into this mess. They need to understand that we need to do two big jobs at the same time: mitigation and resilience. That will be hard, and it will take a lot of personal resilience on the part of all of us (and on our wallets). But if there is another alternative, I haven’t come across it yet.

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If you were forwarded this email, click the button below to sign up to receive these Blog Posts.

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Links to Past Posts:

There is no "O" in Climate Change

It was an Instagram COP - And I am Finally OK with That

How to Talk About Climate With Your Crazy Uncle at Thanksgiving

Monty Python and Climate Change

What You Need to Know About NIMBYism

H mm..So How Much Did My Heat Pump Really Cost?

What it Means to Be a Climate Voter