Many solar farms designed to generate electricity without emitting vast amounts of the climate-altering greenhouse gases the way fossil fuel operations do have been installed where their presence clashes with other environmental values, such as protecting endangered wildlife. A study published in October in Nature found that 51% of utility-scale solar facilities are located in deserts, 33% on croplands, and 10% in grasslands and forests. Just 2.5% of U.S. solar power has been installed in urban areas.
As Richard Conniff writes at Yale Environment 360, this approach is understandable but problematic. Building large solar facilities on undeveloped land costs less and can be done more quickly and managed more easily than installing it on thousands of rooftops or parking lots canopies.
But that doesn’t necessarily make it smarter. Undeveloped land is a rapidly dwindling resource, and what’s left is under pressure to deliver a host of other services we require from the natural world — growing food, sheltering wildlife, storing and purifying water, preventing erosion, and sequestering carbon, among others. And that pressure is rapidly intensifying. [...]
Despite the green image, putting solar facilities on undeveloped land is often not much better than putting subdivisions there. Developers tend to bulldoze sites, “removing all of the above-ground vegetation,” says Rebecca Hernandez, an ecologist at the University of California at Davis. That’s bad for insects and the birds that feed on them. In the Southwest deserts where most U.S. solar farms now get built, the losses can also include “1,000-year-old creosote shrubs, and 100-year-old yuccas,” or worse. The proposed 530-megawatt Aratina Solar Project around Boron, California, for instance, would destroy almost 4,300 western Joshua trees, a species imperiled, ironically, by development and climate change. (It is currently being considered for state protected status.) In California, endangered desert tortoises end up being translocated, with unknown results, says Hernandez. And the tendency to cluster solar facilities in the buffer zones around protected areas can confuse birds and other wildlife and complicate migratory corridors.
Rooftop and parking-lot solar have the advantage of being placed close to the user on land that has already been “stripped of much of its biological value” and is still a mostly unused source for sun-fueled electricity. A 2018 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—Rooftop Solar Technical Potential for Low-to-Moderate Income Households in the United States—found that of the 116.9 million residential buildings in the U.S., 57% are suitable for solar photovoltaic installations. Total generation potential was calculated at 1,000 terawatt-hours, around 75% of the nation’s residential consumption. Currently, however, rooftop solar has only been installed on roughly 2.6 million U.S. homes, with close to 500,000 new homes being added each year.
As for parking-lot solar, it barely exists despite huge potential. Not only would widespread use of canopies covered with solar panels provide large amounts of power from already degraded land, they would also shade vehicles. Coniff cites a study by Swaraj Sanjay Deshmukh and Joshua M. Pearce at Western University in Ontario. They point out that if Walmart installed 3-megawatt solar arrays on canopies at its 3,571 U.S. super centers, it would create a capacity of 11.1 gigawatts of electricity. For reference, the total U.S. electricity-generating capacity from all sources, renewable and otherwise, is about 1,100 gigawatts.
Not only would the canopies shade cars, power stores and parts of the nearby community, the solar panels could also generate the electricity for 346,000 electric vehicle charging stations, covering 90% of the U.S. population that lives within 15 miles of a Walmart.
And yet few parking lots have solar-covered canopies. Such installations aren’t cheap. But while the two lots covering 368 parking spaces at the Evansville (Indiana) Regional Airport cost $6.5 million to install, in its first year of operation, it earned $310,000 selling power to the local utility at wholesale prices. At its Piscataway, New Jersey, campus, Rutgers University installed solar arrays with a total capacity of nearly 10 megawatts and a business plan the university’s energy conservation manager labeled “pretty much cash-positive from the get-go.”
While several states offer significant incentives for solar installations, resistance to these in parking lots or on rooftops is still strong in some states, with governments favoring fossil fuel interests to throw up every obstacle they can think of—regulatory and financial—to nix such operations. A 2017 study—Blocking The Sun—scrutinized such opposition, noting, for example, that anti-solar lobbying by the Edison Electric Institute, representing utilities, and the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council’s practice of getting state legislators to insert anti-solar language into state laws. In a 2018 study—Throwing Shade—the Center for Biological Diversity found that 10 states actively discourage rooftop solar. About a third of U.S. rooftop solar potential is found in these states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Not only does this resistance hamper the transition away from burning the fossil fuels that are warming the planet, it harms people financially and literally kills many of them every year via pollution. Lawmakers who actually care about their constituents should be cutting ties to fossil fuel operations and doing what they can to boost the speed of the transition to clean energy. Countering the industry and their marionettes in state legislatures obviously is a project for activists and lawmakers to undertake in those states—as well as other states with less onerous but still problematic regulations.
The world’s tallest mountains are home to the third largest deposits of ice and snow on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctic. The meltwater from its many glaciers feed numerous rivers including Asia’s longest, the Yangtze. According to a study published by scientists at the UK University of Leeds—Accelerated mass loss of Himalayan glaciers since the Little Ice Age—after millenia of growth, those glaciers have been retreating for about four centuries. But it’s recently worsened. Said co-author Jonathan Carrivick in a news release, “Our findings clearly show that ice is now being lost from Himalayan glaciers at a rate that is at least 10 times higher than the average rate over past centuries. This acceleration in the rate of loss has only emerged within the last few decades, and coincides with human-induced climate change.”
While the Himalayas might sound remote to people in the West, their glaciers are hugely consequential to millions of people who live in South Asia. Because they release meltwater that forms the headwaters of several major rivers that traverse Asia—including the Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Indus rivers—their disappearance could threaten agriculture, drinking water, and energy production in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.
Brian Kahn and Molly Taft at Gizmodo give him a mix of grades for his first year.
The president alone doesn’t hold all the cards to address climate change in the U.S., let alone the world. The Republican party and fossil fuel industry have thrown their full weight behind ensuring Biden has as little help as possible. But the occupant of the White House and the federal agencies they oversee have an enormous amount of power to shape the response to the crisis we face. With that in mind, Earther has put together a report card to gauge if Biden has delivered on his “all of government” promise to fix the world’s most pressing problem. And we’re not grading on a curve because physics doesn’t believe in grade inflation.
On fossil fuel reductions: C minus
Fixing Trump mistakes by appointing climate champions and boosting efficiency rules: A
Federal lands: C
Pipelines: C
Clean Energy: B minus
Build Back Better: F
Courts: F
Environmental Justice: B minus
Quick hits
Germany Shuts Down Half of Its 6 Remaining Nuclear Plants: Early in her lengthy chancellorship Angela Merkel reversed her predecessor’s decision to phase out Germany’s nuclear power operations as part of the nation’s Energiewende (energy transition). After the 2011 Fukushima, Japan, earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear power reactors, she changed her mind. A 2022 deadline was agreed to for shutting down Germany’s six reactors. Last week, three of them were. While the Greens, along with some other environmental advocates, are glad of the move they have pushed for decades, other German environmentalists aren’t so sure. They think the move will hamper German efforts to get off coal and be powered with 80% renewables by 2030 and be “climate neutral” by 2045. A steep climb. This year coal generated 24% of Germany’s electricity, with nuclear, coal, and natural gas producing 51% of total electricity.
Can a Tiny Territory in the South Pacific Power Tesla’s Ambitions? The South Pacific island of New Caledonia is a French territory that once served as a penal colony and has a 175-year history of colonialism that is still reflected in its population of 289,000 Indigenous Kanak, European, Asian, and people from other Pacific islands. Economic inequalities are rife, with dark-skinned Kanak people more likely to be impoverished and jobless. The island contains what has been calculated as a quarter of Earth’s known reserves of nickel now being excavated at the Goro mine. That metal is crucial for transitioning to clean energy sources, especially the electrification of transportation, with nickel being a component of the batteries that replace gasoline and diesel to make EVs run. Mining nickel on the island—and elsewhere—is a messy, toxic, destructive business, quite the opposite of the green world that advocates hope EVs will be part of. A 100,000-liter leak of acid used to process nickel killed thousands of fish in New Caledonia in 2014.
Eager to gain access to supplies that aren’t controlled by China, Tesla has cut a deal with New Caledonia for a new nickel mine that it says will avoid the environmental and social damage previous operations have caused. A tall order. But many New Caledonians most critical of past mining believe Tesla will achieve it, and they have good things to say about the company’s promises. Some Kanaks, however, oppose the operation. André Vama, leader of a local environmental coalition, was part of protests that shut down the Goro mine’s operations last year. He said, “From the start, we have been against this mine. This is our national patrimony, our assets, and the Kanaks, who are victims of history, are not in control of what should be ours.”
New York Adopts ACT Rule Bringing Clean Trucks to the State. New York has become the fifth state to adopt the Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule. This will boost the number of zero-emission vehicles by as much as 40% to 75% of new sales, depending on the type of truck. State officials project that the ACT rule will produce more than $19 billion in net societal benefits through 2050.
Greta Thunberg calls out Biden for climate action failures: In an interview with KK Ottesen at The Washington Post, climate activist Greta Thunberg displayed her usual bluntness about climate crisis, the COP26 talks in Glasgow, on using compromises and diplomacy to make progress on reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and on what she considers hypocrisy and unwarranted delay by world leaders in confronting the devastating climate changes the world is beginning to see the terrifying and frequently lethal impacts of.
Ottesen: Are you inspired by any of the world leaders, by President Biden?
Thunberg: If you call him a leader—I mean, it’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing. The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Why is the U.S. doing that? It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.
People ask us, “What do you want?” “What do you want politicians to do?” And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency. We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand. For example, in Sweden, we ignore— we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative. It’s all about, what are we actually trying to solve? Is it this emergency, or is it this emergency?
In my point of view, this is one of the best Harry Reid obituaries. Jon Christensen and Graham Chisholm at High Country News write:
Because of the political moment we are in, Reid will be remembered for political purposes, that is, differently depending on where you stand. Many epitaphs conjured the image of a pugilistic politician — Reid was a boxer in his youth — who grew up in a shack in Searchlight, a busted down gold mining town in southern Nevada, then fought his way to the center of power in America. Others focused on his relatively conservative views on social issues, and how he had moved more to the left over the years. But all of that will eventually fade into history. What will be left is the land, where Reid’s legacy will endure. [...]
As the junior member of Nevada’s congressional delegation, Reid was at the center of creating Nevada’s first and only national park — Great Basin National Park — on Oct. 27, 1986. It showed Reid that the art of compromise was crucial in politics. The park was smaller than he wanted and grazing was still allowed, but he would come back and fix that later. And it showed the nation that Nevada was far more than a wasteland suited only for blowing up bombs and storing nuclear waste.
It also boosted Reid’s campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat, which he won the following week.
Things We’re Grateful for in 2021: As part of the “Covering Climate Now” project co-founded by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope in 2019, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC, a panel of distinguished panel of judges from around the world scrutinized more than 600 journalists’ and photographers’ entries on the climate crisis from 38 countries. It honored a stellar dozen: “The Sound of Icebergs Melting: My Journey into the Antarctic” by Jonathan Watts at The Guardian; “Heart of Fire,” photography by Josh Edelson for Agence France-Presse;“ How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era” by Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone; “Road to Change: America’s Climate Crisis” with CNN host Bill Weir; “Alaska Natives on the Frontlines” by Alice Qannik Glenn and Jenna Kunze; “The Great Climate Migration: A Warming Planet and a Shifting Population” by a team of journalists at ProPublica; “Bangladesh’s Hidden Climate Costs,” a photo essay by Zakir Hossain Chowdhury for The New Humanitarian; “Who Killed the Supergrid?” by Peter Fairley at InvestigateWest and The Atlantic; “The Mad Men” by Amy Westervelt for the podcast Drilled by Critical Frequency; Jake Spring’s breaking news coverage for Reuters about deforestation in Brazil; “The Media Isn’t Ready to Cover Climate Apartheid” by Michelle García for The Nation. Freelancer Rahma Diaa was named the 2021 CCNow Emerging Journalist for her coverage of climate change impacts in Egypt.
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CLIMATE RESOURCES
CLIMATE BRIEFS FOR THE PAST TWO WEEKS
Climate Brief - Let's write some letters, by Rise above the swamp
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Earth Matters: Tribes object to green revolution mining plans; Chile remakes itself over climate, by Meteor Blades
Climate Brief: News Roundup, by eeff
The Arctic’s food web has broken due to repeated stress from 'intense heating and cooling,' by Pakalolo
Climate Brief: Big Money Bets on Nuclear Fusion to Save the Planet, by boatsie
Climate Brief: News Roundup, by eeff
Climate Brief holidays: Recycling for the planet, by Angmar
Climate Brief: UN confirms record temperature for the Arctic at 100.4 degrees F, by Angmar
Earth Matters: Climate activism needs to be ramped up; pollution hits people of color harder, by Meteor Blades
Climate Brief: News Roundup, Hill climate hawks plot next steps after bill’s collapse, by eeff
Climate Brief: News Roundup, by eeff
Heavy rain, enhanced by climate change, triggered Indonesia's deadly volcano eruption, by Pakalolo
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis worldwide while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality politics arts.