Last month, Rolls-Royce said that it expects to receive regulatory approval from the British government by 2024 for its 470-megawatt small modular reactor and that it will begin producing power on Britain's electric grid by 2029. Will that happen? Time will tell. Many nuclear projects and startups have blown past their projected in-service dates. But Rolls-Royce’s announcement is important for two reasons. First, it adds more credence to the notion that a global nuclear renaissance is, in … [Read more...]
India’s “Bad Boys” Reopen 100 Coal Mines as Demand Skyrockets
Political leaders of developing countries face constant pressure to generate enough electricity for their populations as they are being asked to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. In a bold and rebellious move, India has ordered the reopening of more than 100 dormant coal mines to meet skyrocketing domestic power demand. The action is just one of the many measures that the country has taken to ensure a seamless supply of coal to power plants that generate more than 70 percent of the … [Read more...]
Pregnant People are Birthing Distrust of Science
There’s a real concern that the public is losing trust in the scientific establishment, and maybe for good reason. A recent news article in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, Nature, contained an editor’s statement that sadly apologized for being insensitive to a new unscientific norm. The article was titled, “COVID vaccines safely protect pregnant people: The data are in.” The journal editor thought it was necessary to assure readers that, “Nature recognizes that … [Read more...]
Did Global Warming Cause Chicago Heat Wave Deaths?
Temperatures barely climbed into the 90s and only for a couple of days. But the discovery of the bodies of three women inside a Chicago senior housing facility this month left the city looking for answers to questions that were supposed to be addressed after a longer and hotter heat wave killed more than 700 people nearly three decades ago.Now, the city — and the country — is facing the reality that because of climate change, deadly heat waves can strike just about anywhere, don't only fall in … [Read more...]
States’ Opposition to Federal Social Cost of Carbon Use Survives Supreme Court Decision
For years the federal government, especially its Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has sought to use “social cost of carbon” (SCC) as justification, at the cost of billions of dollars, for regulations making it more difficult to drill for and use fossil fuels. That practice can continue—for now. On May 26, the Supreme Court declined a request from 11 states to block the Biden Administration from using the estimated SCC in regulatory activities. The states had argued that the modeling to … [Read more...]
Germany’s Green Energy Fixation Should Teach US a Lesson
Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government vice chancellor and economic minister Robert Habeck, a leading member of his country’s Green Party, has experienced a rude lesson regarding the disastrous consequences of his years of naïve opposition to fossil fuels. After tasking his top officials to assess the energy security implications of Germany’s dependence on Russian supplies in the event of a then-looming Ukraine invasion, their conclusions were desperately dispiriting. Habeck … [Read more...]
Biased Reporting Overheats Climate Fear, Ignores Cold
It was a cold May night for many in the city of Bengaluru, India. The mercury dipped to 52 degrees Fahrenheit, a low not witnessed in the last 50 years. The same week, some Indian cities made global headlines not for unusual cold but for extreme heat. Followers of international news likely have seen reports about heat waves and historic high temperatures in South Asia. “India and Pakistan are no strangers to extreme temperatures, but the current heatwave stands out for its … [Read more...]
Must Fossil Fuel Extraction Be Stopped to Limit Global Warming?
“Fossil Fuel Extraction Must Be Stopped to Limit Global Warming.” That’s the headline of an article at Earth.com, an environmental activist website. It purports to convey the message of a study published May 17, 2022, in Environmental Research Letters, “Existing fossil fuel extraction would warm the world beyond 1.5°C,” though the study makes no such claim. According to the study, the world is already committed, through its 25,000 oil and gas fields and 3,000 coal mines, … [Read more...]
CO2 Enrichment Improves Plant Water Use Efficiency
This article is the third in a series. You can read the first post here. and the second one here. “Gratefully, nature does not have to wait another century or so for the air’s CO2 concentration to double before reaping benefits from enhanced water use efficiency. It has already begun to profit in this regard from the approximate 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution began.” In my last article I wrote about increased plant … [Read more...]
Income Distribution and Inequality
Italian economist and engineer Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) conjectured that for any population, income naturally follows a log-normal distribution. The normal, or Gaussian distribution ranges from negative to positive infinity with a central mean. Because logarithms are always positive, the log-normal distribution ranges from zero to positive infinity with a positive mean, consistent with there being no upper bound for the highest incomes. Pareto’s approximation describes the distribution of … [Read more...]
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