New U.S. grid capacity in 2024 is 96% clean energy, fin whales in New York Bight, solar build-out in India, an Indigenous-led battery factory in Canada, deep-sea marvels off Chile, & more!
As usual, a smogasbord of really good news to start our day. Looks like Texas has learned the lessons of their disastrous fling with fossil fuels. On their way to becoming a major exporter of clean energy! From the wonderful revival of the whales to the winsome and charismatic toadfish-a lot of good stuff this week!
I think 2023 was a turning point for Texas: the story here is a very interesting one. Wildly extremist anti-renewables bills only narrowly failed to pass the Republican-controlled Texas state legislature in 2023, with disaster avoided mostly thanks to business interests, including dozens of Chambers of Commerce, strongly lobbying to protect clean energy. The politics of decarbonization have changed a lot in recent years!
Love the whole of this column except this bit that I need to call out. Don’t call us progressives and don’t call anyone deeply misguided. Or: do that and show the world who you are, not who they are. (For an example, birds matter. Situating of turbines matters. Colour of turbine blades matters. Using radar to detect and slow down/stop turbines during bird and bat events, matters. We’ve known this for 10+ years and we still play the same nonsense push-paper/narrative games, to avoid just taking pragmatic actions. Saying “don’t kill birds here” is not deeply misguided!)
Parsing environmentalism into left-right narratives is complete and utter warfare on the planet, and not just the planet, for every topic under the sun: It occurred to me about a decade ago (and as things usually occur to me a decade before everyone else starts head-scratching and thinking “but wait…” and I’m waiting for the shoe to drop) that political branding and marketing is exactly that, political branding and marketing. What folly y’all are practicing to allow it any play in your own lives, and in not holding your political “representative” to account over it. 1) The world is full of actual problems and so should be overwhelmingly focused on the efforts to solve them, not gallery-commentary / hand-waving about them, and 2) your democratically-elected, or even imposed, representative is there to represent you as their constituent, regardless of whether the lot of you agree, and make sure that you are listened to and your concerns conveyed into the process – but their job is to see a line through competing interests and negotiate an acceptable mandate to solve the problem, or at least come up with the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So that means everybody needs to Cut It Out with this nonsense, manufactured “progressive” “conservative” wah wah wah and really try to describe the complexities of issues from all angles. You will need them all to get that BATNA.
Almost all of these political narratives amounts to people running away with group/ running away from their own psychology, with the bottom line, in this budget-built civil society, being the cleverest bodies competing for rents and incentives (and, basically, the last oxygen in the tank). All we see is about 60-80% You/Me problems and 40%-20% Actual Problems, some of which are caused by You/Me problems. With over a century of science and well over a millennia of philosophy about understanding how humans think and behave, anyone who can’t figure out what is a You/Me problem over a Real World problem is part of the problem. Those who aren’t part of that problem, are still part of the problem, if they do not extend the critically important psychological and human-resource skill of Putting the You/Me people to Work on the Real problems to the best of their capacity. This is also the productive juncture at which one can limit the scope of how You/Me people impose You/Me problems onto things they have no business distorting; we’ve all seen and dealt with this during the normal course of business (notwithstanding academia and places where funding is hidden and clients are tractable). Good productive work will take care of that, and after a few years, former You/Me people turn into reasonable Real Problem solvers.
The most able, the most responsible, of us need to attend to what’s coming down the pipe, and to be such an adult, you have to be the most prepared to accept the outside perspective. And you don’t do that if you’re entrenched in your worldview.
I appreciate your thoughtful and passionate comment!
I very much agree with some of the points you brought up. I've written before about how wind turbine projects can and should implement wildlife-safety solutions like turbine blade color changes and ultrasonic deterrents (https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-january-10). I also agree that environmentalism, cultivating a healthy relationship between humanity and our biosphere, goes far beyond a "left/right" framing of political discourse.
Also, just for the record, I consider myself a progressive as well and I'm a big fan of President Joe Biden; some of what I try to do with my writing is my own haphazard amateur attempt to get more left-leaning people "on the same page" and actively supportive of the Biden Administration's historic green energy push.
That said, I really think that many soi-disant environmental groups are committing grave unforced errors by opposing several clean energy, public transit, and new housing projects. I think their honorable motives would be much better served by lobbying to *improve* clean energy projects and make them as "friendly neighbors" as possible to wildlife (as I wrote about the NWF is doing with some transmission line projects). Given the urgency of the climate change, I think the burden of proof for opposing a clean energy project should be *extremely* high, and that the default position of any environmentalist should be "let's make this happen, how can we make it the best/most wildlife-friendly version of itself?"
In the piece about additional grid capacity, I'm wondering why battery storage is included. It seems like double counting to me. (It's great that so much storage is being added to the grid, of course!) 48 GW of production is still great. I think that's double the total capacity additions of previous years.
White hydrogen seems curioudly undercovered so far. In this and my previous articles on it (e.g. my 2023 in Review article has a section) I include several links I found useful.
As usual, a smogasbord of really good news to start our day. Looks like Texas has learned the lessons of their disastrous fling with fossil fuels. On their way to becoming a major exporter of clean energy! From the wonderful revival of the whales to the winsome and charismatic toadfish-a lot of good stuff this week!
I think 2023 was a turning point for Texas: the story here is a very interesting one. Wildly extremist anti-renewables bills only narrowly failed to pass the Republican-controlled Texas state legislature in 2023, with disaster avoided mostly thanks to business interests, including dozens of Chambers of Commerce, strongly lobbying to protect clean energy. The politics of decarbonization have changed a lot in recent years!
https://archive.is/ULLMM
Love the whole of this column except this bit that I need to call out. Don’t call us progressives and don’t call anyone deeply misguided. Or: do that and show the world who you are, not who they are. (For an example, birds matter. Situating of turbines matters. Colour of turbine blades matters. Using radar to detect and slow down/stop turbines during bird and bat events, matters. We’ve known this for 10+ years and we still play the same nonsense push-paper/narrative games, to avoid just taking pragmatic actions. Saying “don’t kill birds here” is not deeply misguided!)
Parsing environmentalism into left-right narratives is complete and utter warfare on the planet, and not just the planet, for every topic under the sun: It occurred to me about a decade ago (and as things usually occur to me a decade before everyone else starts head-scratching and thinking “but wait…” and I’m waiting for the shoe to drop) that political branding and marketing is exactly that, political branding and marketing. What folly y’all are practicing to allow it any play in your own lives, and in not holding your political “representative” to account over it. 1) The world is full of actual problems and so should be overwhelmingly focused on the efforts to solve them, not gallery-commentary / hand-waving about them, and 2) your democratically-elected, or even imposed, representative is there to represent you as their constituent, regardless of whether the lot of you agree, and make sure that you are listened to and your concerns conveyed into the process – but their job is to see a line through competing interests and negotiate an acceptable mandate to solve the problem, or at least come up with the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So that means everybody needs to Cut It Out with this nonsense, manufactured “progressive” “conservative” wah wah wah and really try to describe the complexities of issues from all angles. You will need them all to get that BATNA.
Almost all of these political narratives amounts to people running away with group/ running away from their own psychology, with the bottom line, in this budget-built civil society, being the cleverest bodies competing for rents and incentives (and, basically, the last oxygen in the tank). All we see is about 60-80% You/Me problems and 40%-20% Actual Problems, some of which are caused by You/Me problems. With over a century of science and well over a millennia of philosophy about understanding how humans think and behave, anyone who can’t figure out what is a You/Me problem over a Real World problem is part of the problem. Those who aren’t part of that problem, are still part of the problem, if they do not extend the critically important psychological and human-resource skill of Putting the You/Me people to Work on the Real problems to the best of their capacity. This is also the productive juncture at which one can limit the scope of how You/Me people impose You/Me problems onto things they have no business distorting; we’ve all seen and dealt with this during the normal course of business (notwithstanding academia and places where funding is hidden and clients are tractable). Good productive work will take care of that, and after a few years, former You/Me people turn into reasonable Real Problem solvers.
The most able, the most responsible, of us need to attend to what’s coming down the pipe, and to be such an adult, you have to be the most prepared to accept the outside perspective. And you don’t do that if you’re entrenched in your worldview.
I appreciate your thoughtful and passionate comment!
I very much agree with some of the points you brought up. I've written before about how wind turbine projects can and should implement wildlife-safety solutions like turbine blade color changes and ultrasonic deterrents (https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-january-10). I also agree that environmentalism, cultivating a healthy relationship between humanity and our biosphere, goes far beyond a "left/right" framing of political discourse.
Also, just for the record, I consider myself a progressive as well and I'm a big fan of President Joe Biden; some of what I try to do with my writing is my own haphazard amateur attempt to get more left-leaning people "on the same page" and actively supportive of the Biden Administration's historic green energy push.
That said, I really think that many soi-disant environmental groups are committing grave unforced errors by opposing several clean energy, public transit, and new housing projects. I think their honorable motives would be much better served by lobbying to *improve* clean energy projects and make them as "friendly neighbors" as possible to wildlife (as I wrote about the NWF is doing with some transmission line projects). Given the urgency of the climate change, I think the burden of proof for opposing a clean energy project should be *extremely* high, and that the default position of any environmentalist should be "let's make this happen, how can we make it the best/most wildlife-friendly version of itself?"
In the piece about additional grid capacity, I'm wondering why battery storage is included. It seems like double counting to me. (It's great that so much storage is being added to the grid, of course!) 48 GW of production is still great. I think that's double the total capacity additions of previous years.
I'm not sure who decides, but that's how the EIA reports it. And yes, we are adding new capacity faster and faster!
Where could we read about the emerging potential of white hydrogen you wrote about. Would love to see. Thanks!
White hydrogen seems curioudly undercovered so far. In this and my previous articles on it (e.g. my 2023 in Review article has a section) I include several links I found useful.
Thanks Sam, will take a look. Has definitely caught our eye.
And here's my article on the France deposit with some more background.
https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-december-b70
Also, I have an article on the US white hydrogen startup Koloma at the end of this newsletter https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-february-1c9
This is great, thanks Sam! Will take a look over. Daresay we'll have some white hydrogen articles coming soon. Appreciate it.
Great! I'd be happy to collaborate on writing or GIS projects if you're interested!
Very interested!
I heard about a project to clear 250k acres of plants in los padre forest. Do you think it will go through? Im afraid.
I'm afraid I don't know enough to have an informed opinion there; this is the first I'm hearing of it
The environmental orgs make it sound ridiculous, almost like vandalism. After reading the plan i highly doubt it will happen honestly. I hope anyway.