It won’t do humanity much good to increase renewable energy to address Climate Change and still back large fossil fuel projects. [See McKibben’s recent article in The Guardian “Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet”.  Our planet (any planet, really) only cares (responds) to how much greenhouse gases are in our climate system (our atmosphere and waters) to determine how much to heat up its surface. It’s physics. [See: “How Global Warming Works”.]

Earth couldn’t care less about how much renewable energy we generate because renewable energy doesn’t trap the infrared light energy produced when the visible light energy from the sun bounces off the surface of our planet. It’s we who should care about renewable energy because we should like our planet to be habitable for quite a while longer.

This is important to remember amidst all the articles on the rapid increase in renewable energy around the world and renewables’ dramatic drop in costs. At the end of the day, however much renewable energy we produce, if we haven’t stopped and even lowered our greenhouse gas emissions, we will fry—even if we have a planet full of wind turbines and solar panels buzzing away fulfilling all our wants and needs.

It’s important that environmentalist have heralded how renewable energy is lowering costs for households and providing jobs—even compensating for those whose fossil fuel jobs have been displaced by the renewable energy industry.

But we shouldn’t be focusing exclusively on the economics of renewable energy and dropping the moral and global warming aspects of this issue just because it upsets those bound and determined to end the Climate Change discussion. We cannot communicate around the people who don’t like ‘Climate Change’ to solve Climate Change.  

It’s immoral for developed nations to have become rich by the use of fossil fuels and not help the developing nations achieve growth with our renewable energy technology and support. If they grow like we grew, we’ll all perish.

If our growth in the past two hundred years due to the use of fossil fuel is going to end all civilizations, it’s immoral (and certifiably crazy) to continue down this path. 

Climate Change Judge's Homework: Was Industrialization Worth It? Attorneys for the cities of Oakland and San Francisco and Chevron Corp.have homework from Judge William Alsup: prepare 10-page legal analyses on whether a century of American dependence on fossil fuels was worth the global warming it caused. It’s due in a week. The filings will follow almost three-hours of proceedings on Thursday in a San Francisco federal court, where the cities and the world’s biggest oil companies sparred over lawsuits seeking payment for infrastructure to protect against rising sea levels. Alsup, who’s weighing a dismissal bid by defendants including Chevron and four other companies, focused many of his questions on the “broader sweep of history,” and the crucial role oil played in America’s successes in both world wars and its subsequent economic boom. (May 24, 2018)Bloomberg [more on Energy and Climate Change in our area]

Also, it's unrealistic to expect a bright future if we warm the planet beyond our capability to live on it.

Climate Change and Rapidly Intensifying Hurricanes Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1, and last year’s season was devastating for the U.S. Damage from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria cost the U.S. $267 billion. All three hurricanes went through a rapid intensification (RI) cycle, meaning the strongest winds within the storm increased by at least 30 knots (about 35 mph) in 24 hours. Harvey jumped from a Category 2 to a Category 4 just before its first landfall. Maria’s intensification was more dramatic, going from a Category 1 to a Category 5. This type of intensification is common in major hurricanes, as 79 percent of major tropical cyclones globally go through at least one cycle of rapid intensification. We consulted with Phil Klotzbach of the Colorado State Tropical Meteorology Project to examine the historic number of Atlantic named storms that have undergone rapid intensification and to acknowledge limitations in detection. As a result, we are using two starting points for this week’s analysis. The first is 1950, a few years after reconnaissance aircraft analyses began. The second is 1980, a year after regular satellite analyses were available. These data show the active period of the 1950s and 1960s, then a lull, followed by a bigger spike, with the influence of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) driving the lower values in the 1970s and 1980s. In a further analysis, one study earlier this year found an increase in rapid intensification from 1986-2015 tied to warming water east of the Caribbean Sea. While the study suggests the AMO is the primary influence, there has also been a net ocean warming on top of that cycle. (May 30, 2018) Climate Central [more on Climate Change in our area]

We must make sure that our push for renewable energy doesn’t get lost in a fruitless attempt to convince the public that its only about lowering their energy bills. Climate Change is an environmental problem that has festered through a long history of human environmental abuse topped off by a dramatic rise in the use of fossil fuels that has seriously warmed our planet since the mid-eighteen hundreds.

Increasing the use of renewable energy must occur if we desire to maintain the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to. If we think we can continue to do so while using fossil fuels, that is the only thing Earth will respond to. But not in a good way for us.    


Time passes.