• Hill Heat
  • Posts
  • A crowd of people stood and stared

A crowd of people stood and stared

The penguins are dying, wind power is growing, more corpses found

Author

Brad Johnson
May 10, 2022

PRESENTED BY EMPEROR CHICKS

I read the news today…

It’s my solemn duty to report that Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, was the victim of a walk-by chalking on Saturday. Fortunately she survived the calcitic assault and was able to call 911 in time.

It’s primary election day in Nebraska and West Virginia.

There’s an even chance the world will reach 1.5°C of global warming over pre-industrial temperatures in the next five years.

Emperor chicks in Halley Bay. Credit: Peter Fretwell

From 2016 to 2018 at the Halley Bay colony in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, the second-largest emperor penguin colony in the world, all the chicks died because of the melting ice. Penguin scientist Marcela Libertelli is warning that the emperor penguin, which requires solid sea ice from April through December to nest fledgling chicks, is headed for extinction.

“If the water reaches the newborn penguins, which are not ready to swim and do not have waterproof plumage, they die of the cold and drown.”

Libertelli notes that the increasing number of tourist boats are also hastening the penguins’ demise.

A new report by the California Energy Commission “has unveiled an ambitious set of offshore wind targets as part of a broader statewide push to make electricity 100 percent renewable by 2045,” expecting 3 gigawatts of power by 2030 and 10-15 gigawatts by 2045.

Maxine Joselow visited the launch of a wind farm in West Virginia on Friday, turns out the state’s politicians are hypocrites.

Fossil-fueled storms hailed down in Minnesota.

Lake Mead, the artificial reservoir near Las Vegas, is disappearing due to fossil-fueled desertification. The receding waters exposed more corpses over the weekend, less than a week after a body in a barrel was discovered.

Hungary’s fascist president Victor Orban is blocking the European Union plan to cut off Russian oil imports.

Though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all…

The Securities and Exchange Commission has extended the public comment period on its proposed climate-disclosures rule until June 17th. The original deadline was May 20th. You can submit comments here.

The “Scope 3” reporting required in the SEC rule is supposed to be a measure of companies’ downstream climate pollution, for example from the burning of oil sold by ExxonMobil or the financing of coal plants by Bank of America. But guess what—the way it’s defined, Scope 3 doesn’t really work. AQR Capital Management has developed its own measure of “supply-chain risk” that more accurately captures the economic linkages between companies and how much they rely on or support the fossil-fuel sector, Tim Quinson reports. The SEC should use that!

The green side of McKinsey has produced a nice-looking net-zero scenario.

The new site Global Plastic Watch maps thousands of the world’s plastic waste sites in near real-time, using satellite imagery.

The Environmental Defense Fund has a new report that finds Big Oil is offloading their most polluting projects to companies and state-owned concerns with even less concern about climate pollution. As Hiroko Tabuchi reports, “of 3,000 oil and gas deals made between 2017 and 2021, more than twice as many involved assets moving from operators with net-zero commitments to those that didn’t, than the reverse.” The report calls this the “transferred emissions loophole,” because there’s nothing like anodyne euphemisms to spur action.

FOX NEWS UPDATE:

Tom Vilsack is before the Senate to present the Department of Agriculture’s request for $31.1 billion in discretionary funding and $164.8 billion in mandatory funding. This includes 40-percent increase in wildfire funding to $2.7 billion, and $6.5 billion for rural electric loans. A significant amount of the climate-related funding is going into USDA’s “climate-smart agriculture” program, which is mostly bad.

Pete Buttigieg presents the Department of Transportation’s $142 billion budget request that includes $18 billion for intercity rail and $1 billion for electric vehicle chargers, but is mostly for traditional highway, freight, air, and port projects. Like the USDA, the DOT under Biden remains mostly on an unsustainable track, with modest reforms.

Hearings on the Hill:

Climate Action Today:

Although the news was rather sad, I had to laugh.

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. DMs are open—@climatebrad

Subscribe to Hill Heat

Climate science, policy, politics, and action

Reply

or to participate.