If America really doesn’t want refugees any more, we could reduce the number of people who must flee their homes by getting serious about mitigating climate change:
Extreme weather events impacted close to 62 million people in 2018 and displaced more than two million as of September of that year. That’s just one of the alarming findings in the UN World Meteorological Organization‘s (WMO) Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2018.
“The physical signs and socio-economic impacts of climate change are accelerating as record greenhouse gas concentrations drive global temperatures towards increasingly dangerous levels,” the WMO wrote in a press release announcing the report Thursday [Olivia Rosane, “UN Report: Extreme Weather Displaced 2 Million People in 2018,” Desmog, 2019.03.31].
If we don’t take our foot off the gas, we’ll melt the Siberian permafrost, and then climate change will really accelerate:
Temperatures in the Arctic continue to warm twice as fast as the rest of the world; that’s according to the U.S. government’s latest climate report. The past five years in the Arctic have been the warmest there since records began in 1900. Decades ago, an eccentric Russian geophysicist warned that frozen soil, called permafrost, contained enough greenhouse gas itself to pose a threat to the climate if it ever melted. Science scoffed at Sergey Zimov’s warning but now that the permafrost is collapsing the world is listening.
…Sergey Zimov: In the past, all our soil, which was melted in summer, freeze everywhere totally and it happened usually in November, December. Now, in all winter it did not freeze.
Scott Pelley: What does that tell you?
Sergey Zimov: It means permafrost is melt.
This is a warning to the world because organic matter in the permafrost, plants and animals, has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. As it thaws, microbes consume that organic matter and release carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases which contribute to a warmer climate [Scott Pelley, “Siberia’s Pleistocene Park: Bringing Back Pieces of the Ice Age to Combat Climate Change,” 60 Minutes, 2019.03.31].
Citing climate change, Dr. Jesse Keenan thinks it’s time Duluth brands itself, again, as a destination for people seeking cooler temperatures in a warming world — climate refugees or “climigrants.”
Keenan, a climate change adaptation expert at Harvard University, even has marketing lines he’s tested for the city: “The most climate-proof city in America” and “Duluth: not as cold as you think.”
Through his research, Keenan believes two cities along the Great Lakes would be well-positioned sanctuaries for those fleeing warming or worsening climates: Buffalo, N.Y. and Duluth.
“Their sources of energy production are stable, they have cooler climates and they have access to plenty of fresh water,” Keenan told the Guardian last year. “They also have less vulnerability to forest fires, as compared to somewhere like the Pacific north-west. They also have a legacy of excess infrastructural capacity that allows them to diversify their economy in the future. Land prices are cheap and they have a relatively well-educated and skilled labor force” [Jimmy Lovrien, “Duluth as a Destination for Climate Refugees?” Duluth News Tribune, 2019.03.20].
A haven for climate refugees… could that be the real “Next Big Thing” Governor Noem has in mind for South Dakota as she boosts the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline? But she’ll only want the highest-paying climate refugees, of course.
Could this someday expose long dormant disease? They were very careful when they took tissue samples from people who had the pandemic flu and buried in the permafrost. It was still there they took it back for study under lock and key.
happy,
The answer is yes. Here’s an article from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-earth-warms-the-diseases-that-may-lie-within-permafrost-become-a-bigger-worry/
If climate change is truly important, then we would support all technologies that could mitigate it sooner rather than later.
It is important to note that we must solve climate change whether or not an energy storage revolution occurs. If we have to wait for energy storage to happen at a large enough scale, I fear we will be waiting too long.
One alternative favored by many here is telling people not to use energy when renewables are not enough or not available….but good luck winning elections if that is the messaging.
3. United States at number 3 for investment in renewable energy.
Forget the Paris Agreement and all the drama surrounding it.
The country’s renewable industry doesn’t need a global initiative to keep right on growing. We’re already second only to China in wind capacity, and we’re fourth in installed solar PV capacity behind China, Germany, and Japan, according to the IEA.
In 2016, newly installed renewable capacity accounted for 61.5% of the country’s total new energy installations, meaning clean energy outpaced all fossil fuels and nuclear combined!
The Energy Information Administration estimates that total installed renewable capacity will surpass U.S. nuclear capacity by 2020, and we’ll have more renewables than coal running by 2040.
And while all of this is going on, California recently made its own deal with China to cooperate on the development of ever cheaper, more efficient clean energy technologies.
Probably not a necessary move for the industry, but it never hurts to have such a big investor on your side.” https://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/5-countries-with-the-most-invested-in-renewable-energy/77063
Even Republicans are coming around to the facts of climate change and the need for renewable energy. In Rapid City, Gen Pro announced expansion of its business footprint “Plans include the addition of 25 to 40 skilled manufacturing positions including sheet metal fabrication, electronic assembly, electromechanical and testing.”
This is the same company that builds municipal solar collectors like this one in Atkinson, Nebraska on a debris site. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/01/rpcs-genpro-energy-partner-for-solar-project-on-nebraska-fill-site/
Doc, Doc. Doc: “One alternative favored by many here is telling people not to use energy” like mansplaining protestors shouldn’t drive to the protest. And, “If climate change is truly important”. Do you not accept that other than nuclear annihilation, climate change will/is killing more world population than any other approaching catastrophe? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/east-antarctica-s-ice-melting-unexpectedly-rapid-clip-new-study-suggests
“I fear we will be waiting too long.” Exactly what the right wing hopes. Just like removing scammer trump. Your nuclear industry has been twiddling its thumbs for decades. Our energy policy pivoted from fossil fuels in anticipation of climate change, despite the fossil fuel industry’s best efforts of obfuscation, obstruction, lobbying and collusion for the billionaire class, the one percent that owns the right wing.
Renewables can indeed be part of the solution…they just cannot be the whole solution.
One does not dispatch renewable energy to respond to a demand in electricity. Instead, renewable energy is pushed onto the grid whenever it is made. Grid operators are then responsible to make up the difference between supply and demand.
Today that means consuming natural gas. Want to build ever more renewables? Then be comforted by the ever more carbon emissions from your natural gas. In the long term both gas and coal will need carbon capture to work. So if you do not like nuclear, you should love carbon capture….which like energy storage is not ready yet.
Pushing the elevator button more doesn’t make the elevator come up or down any quicker, and simply building more renewables won’t solve climate change if you end up with more carbon than we have today.
Fossil fuel and renewable energy interests have both lobbied heavily against incorporating more nuclear into our energy mix. #GimmeABreak
Not using fossil fuels to get to any protest, nor to power activities once there, is an opportunity to show that fossil fuels are not necessary…or at least show that there use can be significantly reduced. In my opinion (and apparently just my opinion), that would send a more powerful message to folks viewing activities outside the blog bubble. If you cannot even power a protest, how are you going to power a small town?
Sorry…I was indeed expressing sarcasm. I am saying actually that climate change is important, and we should be generating as much clean energy as we can to match supply with demand. And we shouldn’t wait.
We could generate all of the energy we demand along with energy storage and carbon capture. That would match supply with demand while reducing carbon. Sadly, we cannot do that today.
Given that we will be backing up our renewables with natural gas for the foreseeable future, we are set to emit more carbon than today. It is just that without coal it will take a little longer to get to the higher numbers….but don’t worry, we will get there.
The Emotion of Climate Change https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=315&v=MYFlRxJ5Sh0
Climate change is having more devastating impact in the US than recognized. The ELCA church in Shishmaref, Alaska, is no more because Shishmaref is no more. The small island off the west coast is mostly under water now.
Even closer to home, Louisiana loses a football field of land to rising water and subsiding land every hour. Not every day– Every Hour. (My URL shortener is malfunctioning, sorry.)
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/land-loss-in-louisiana/
There is a map comparison showing how much of the delta has disappeared. It’s really shocking and the pace is picking up.
So let me get this straight….our response is to burn more natural gas without carbon capture to keep pace with our increasing renewables? To burn more carbon in the name of not burning carbon?
Right or wrong, that is ironically the current price of having more renewables. We’ll see if that bonus carbon is a good investment or not.