EcoWatch

Electric vehicles are gaining momentum across the globe. National Geographic‘s Years of Living Dangerously sent Ty Burrell to meet with a mechanic to find out why.

EcoWatch

Electric Vehicles Will Soon Be Cheaper Than Gas Guzzlers

By Lorraine Chow     September 27, 2017

Good news for car drivers looking to go electric. In a handful of years, these zero-emission vehicles will be cheaper than traditional gas guzzlers, according to a new report from investment bankers Cowen & Co.

The analysis, compiled by Cowen managing director and senior research analyst Jeffrey Osborne, determined that electric vehicles will cost less than gasoline-powered cars by the early- to mid-2020s due to falling battery prices as well as the costs that traditional carmakers will incur as they comply to new fuel-efficiency standards.

These factors, Osbourne notes, will spur EV adoption from 1 percent of all global sales this year to 3 percent in 2020 and 7.5 percent in 2025.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported similar findings in May.

“Falling battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025,” the report said. “Batteries currently account for about half the cost of EVs, and their prices will fall by about 77 percent between 2016 and 2030.”

Osbourne pointed out that a number of major car brands are hopping onto the electric bandwagon to compete in a space carved out by industry disrupter, Tesla.

“We see the competitive tides shifting in 2019 and beyond as European [car makers] roiled by the diesel scandal and loss of share to Tesla in the high margin luxury segment step on the gas and accelerate the pace of EV introductions,” he wrote.

Volvo Cars announced in July that every car it launches from 2019 will have an electric motor, marking a “historic end” to the internal combustion engine.

And earlier this month, Volkswagen Group, the world’s biggest automaker, announced plans to offer an electric version across the company’s 300 models by 2030 and will be rolling out 80 new electric cars under its multiple brands by 2025. The German company, which is trying to rebound after its emissions-cheating scandal, is investing more than 20 billion euros ($24 billion) in zero-emission vehicles to challenge Tesla.

Not only that, the Cowen report comes as an increasing number of countries such as China, Scotland, France and India announced intentions to ban diesel and gasoline cars in order to cut fossil fuel emissions.

EcoWatch

By DeSmog 

China Is Showing the World What Renewable Energy Dominance Looks Like

By Ben Jervey         October 4, 2017

The growth of solar energy continues to outpace forecasts and this growth, according to a report published Wednesday by the International Energy Agency, (IEA) “is a China story.”

While China today is far and away the global leader in solar generation, a decade ago, the country had just 100 megawatts of solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity installed. That’s nothing. For reference, it’s actually less than is currently installed in the city of San Antonio. By the end of 2016, China had increased its solar PV capacity by nearly 800 times, with more than 77 gigawatts currently installed.

China’s solar dominance is only going to keep growing, according to the IEA report. As Dr. Paolo Frankl, one of the lead authors on the report, said on a call to reporters, “In one year, China will install the equivalent of the total history of solar development in Germany.”

The stunning growth trajectories reflected in the IEA report show how quickly the transition to renewables can be underway when aggressive policies cut through the barriers to growth.

The Renewables 2017 report takes a deep dive into renewable energy deployment across all industries and throughout the world, but the dominance of solar PV stands out. As a whole, renewables represented nearly two-thirds of new electricity capacity additions last year, far outshining coal and natural gas growth. For the very first time, solar PV additions grew faster than any other resource, surpassing coal growth.

Put simply: The world is now building more solar than coal generation, a trend that looks to continue, regardless of any uncertainty in current American energy policy. Most new demand for electricity is being supplied by renewable resources, with solar providing the most.

“The star is really becoming solar PV, which becomes the leader in renewable growth,” said Frankl.

The report forecasts out the next five years of renewable energy growth, a short time-frame that is easier to project than some forecasts—like, say, the Energy Information Agency—that are routinely criticized. Over the next five years, the IEA anticipates renewables growing by roughly 1,000 gigawatts. “That is half of the total capacity of coal fired power plants worldwide,” said Frankl, “and it has taken 80 years to build all of those.”

Did you get that? Over the next half decade, the world will install half as much renewable energy as the current entire global capacity of coal power.

As China is proving, there is a dramatic shift in how emerging economies are powering their development. From the report:

Along with new policies that spur competition in several other countries, this Chinese dynamic has led to record-low announced prices of solar PV and onshore wind, which are now comparable or even lower than new-built fossil fuel alternatives.

Developing countries are now looking to renewables as engines of economic growth. This includes India, which according to this year’s forecast, will soon leap ahead of the European Union with the third largest growth in renewable capacity, after China and the U.S. “Soon—and, we hope, very soon—African countries may see the next wave of development supported by cheap renewable power,” the IEA report anticipates.

Despite the clear trajectory of global energy supply towards renewables, as reflected in this IEA report, the Trump administration is currently threatening tariffs on cheaper Chinese solar panels and has just proposed a bailout for uneconomical coal plants. “What would the tariff accomplish?” Frankl asked rhetorically. He then answered, “One thing is for sure: they would make U.S. PV much more expensive than it is today.” Because Chinese companies account for more than 60 percent of global PV manufacturing—and thus set global PV prices—and American companies produce relatively little to the global market, it’s hard to project how the proposed tariff would effectively rescue the American companies. Rather, it would slow PV deployment in the U.S. at precisely the time the rest of the world is pivoting aggressively to solar.

Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.

#NotOnePenney in tax cuts for the rich

Bloomberg Business

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill May Be Largest Since 2010 BP Disaster

By Nico Grant      October 16, 2017

LLOG reports as much as 9,350 barrels spilled last week

Release dwarfed by multimillion-barrel Deepwater Horizon spill

Photographer: Kari Goodnough/Bloomberg

An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last week may be the largest in the U.S. since the 2010 blowout at BP Plc’s Macondo well that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig.

The Delta House floating production facility about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of Venice, Louisiana, released 7,950 to 9,350 barrels of oil from early Wednesday to Thursday morning, according to closely held operator LLOG Exploration Co. That would make it the largest spill in more than seven years, data from the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement show, even though it’s a fraction of the millions of barrels ejected in the 2010 incident.

The LLOG spill was triggered by a fracture in a flowline jumper, Rick Fowler, the company’s vice president for deepwater projects, said in an email. That’s a short pipeline used to connect nearby subsea structures. Multiple barriers placed on either side of the fracture stopped the release, but the the flowline jumper hasn’t yet been repaired, Fowler said.

Oil production from Delta House dropped to around 57,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day from more than 90,000 before the spill, he said. The subsea system affected by the fracture was shut in, though nearby connected systems weren’t. The fracture wasn’t caused by Hurricane Nate and there were no associated injuries, he said.

BSEE, the federal agency which regulates offshore energy and mineral extraction, started a five-member panel investigation into the cause of the spill, according to an online statement. The members, including inspectors, engineers and accident investigators, will issue their findings and make recommendations.

“This panel investigation is a critical step in ensuring BSEE determines the cause, or causes, of the incident and develops recommendations to prevent similar events from occurring in the future,” Lars Herbst, BSEE’s Gulf of Mexico region director, said in the statement.

The Delta House platform, floating in 4,500 feet of water, came online in April 2015 with peak capacity of 100,000 barrels a day of oil and 240 million cubic feet a day of national gas. Its oil output enters the Heavy Lousiana Sweet crude pool.

The 2010 blowout and explosion at the Deepwater Horizon ultradeep-sea drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana left 11 workers dead and set off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. BSEE, an agency of the Interior Department, was established in the wake of the incident as part of reforms designed to separate federal regulatory responsibilities from lease sales and revenue generation.

Newsweek

Is Donald Trump ‘Obsessed’ With Barack Obama?

Harriet Sinclair, Newsweek         October 14, 2017

President Donald Trump is obsessed with his predecessor, according to a number of pundits who believe many of the Republican’s policies are all about “blowing the former president’s legacy.”

Speaking on his CNN show on Saturday, following Trump’s attempt to roll back the Iran deal, Don Lemon asked the question: “Does President Trump have an Obama obsession?” and suggesting the Republican was “making it his mission to undo every last bit of the Obama legacy.”

Political analyst David Gergen told Lemon he believed the recent announcement on the Iran deal, as well as Trump killing Obamacare subsidies, was “more about blowing up the former president’s legacy than anybody wants to admit.”

Then-President Barack Obama meets with Donald Trump, who was then president elect, to discuss transition plans in the White House Oval Office, November 10. President Trump got a small bit of good news in the polls, but he’s more than a dozen percentage points behind where Obama was in 2009. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

“Anything which has the name Obama on it automatically becomes a target for Donald Trump and he’s trying to reverse as much of that as possible,” he added, warning that the tendency of presidents to reverse domestic policy set by their predecessors was now rolling into foreign policy.

Indeed, back in August, a European diplomat reportedly told BuzzFeed anonymously that in his dealings with President Trump, he had noticed the Republican was driven more by a desire to scrap Obama’s policies than to enact his own.

“It’s his only real position,” the diplomat told BuzzFeed. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.’ He won’t even want to listen to the arguments or have a debate. He is obsessed with Obama.”

Also over the summer, Trump previously shared a poll that showed he was “a better president of the United States than Barack Obama,” with the unverified results of the poll showing 61% of responders believed Trump was a better president and just 31% backing Obama.

In addition, his actual policy aims, which include his campaign pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare, but also the Iran deal, Trump’s attempt to scrap the Obama-era DACA program, and repeal of federal legislation allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, suggest the president may have an eye on targeting Obama’s policies specifically.

Indeed, Obama was the reason Trump was initially propelled into the political sphere; as one of the strong voices of the racially charged birther movement that falsely suggested Obama was not born in the U.S., Trump suddenly found himself speaking about national politics, announcing a run for office several years later.

Esquire

A Rising Constitutional Crisis No One Is Talking About

This week in the laboratories of democracy.

Getty

By Charles P. Pierce          October 12, 2017

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

We are going to do something unusual this week. Instead of skipping around the country in search of a state legislator with a duck on his head, or a state law making the date of Pat Robertson’s first orgasm a statewide holiday, we’re going to stay in this one spot and take stock of a truly dangerous bit of business that’s happening in a number of different states, and of a really long game that at the moment is perilously close to completion.

Last Sunday, Joy Reid hosted a discussion between former Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican and Teresa Tomlinson, the mayor of Columbus, Georgia. (While in the Senate, you may recall, Coburn was reckoned to be relatively normal because he served with Jim Inhofe, who is a failed replicant prototype that howls at the moon.) At issue was the proposed constitutional convention that would be called under Article V of the Constitution, a longtime conservative dreamshot that at the moment is as close to fulfillment as it ever has been. Under Article V, which deals with amending the Constitution, a constitutional convention must be called if two-thirds of the state legislatures called for it. At the moment, 27 state legislatures have done so. That leaves the plan a mere seven states short of the 34 that would meet the Article V threshold. As it happens, there are seven state legislatures with Republican majorities out there that have yet to take up the question. You can see why I’m just a little nervous.

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The movement has its roots in the drive for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a.k.a. The Worst Idea In American Politics. In his first term, President Ronald Reagan broached the idea in a televised address, causing constitutional scholars to duck and cover under their desks. By now, this is hardly an extreme position in the Republican Party; John Kasich, everyone’s favorite moderate manqué, has been a fan for years. There was no way that TWIIAP ever was going to be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then by two-thirds of the states. So this was the route its devotees took.

Many of the sharpies pushing the idea reassure the public that a convention thus called would be limited to a specific agenda. (Some even propose that the convention would pass TWIIAP and then everyone would drink up and go home.) There is no way to guarantee that; there’s certainly nothing in Article V that would support that argument, and very little in the history of the last constitutional convention that would do so, either.

The idea of a convention of Article V was one that came up very late in the proceedings. George Mason, the influential delegate from Virginia, rose to argue that the amending power as written left too much of that power to the national government. So he proposed that the several states be allowed to call a convention themselves. Mason’s colleague, James Madison, who hated revisionist constitutional conventions because he then nearly was finished hijacking one, perked right up. He immediately sussed out the difficulties:

“Mr Madison remarked on the vagueness of the terms, “call a Convention for the purpose.” as sufficient reason for reconsidering the article. How was a Convention to be formed? by what rule decide? what the force of its acts?”

All good questions, none of them ever has been answered.

A convention so called could pass TWIIAP lickety-split. That, of course, would be terrible in and of itself. But then the convention really could get down to business. There’s no apparent constitutional bar to a convention’s passing amendments allowing, say, congressional term limits, or requiring congressional supermajorities to pass any tax cut, or making raising the national debt limit dependent on the approval of a certain number of state legislatures. All of these are actual proposals floating around the various campaigns to bring this beast to life. Basically, this is the final masterwork of the conservative long game. These ideas have been around long enough to have become Republican dogma.

The party enlisted national sugar daddies like the Kochs, and regional ones like Art Pope in North Carolina. The radio and TV auxiliaries are led by Mark Levin, who wrote a whole book about the changes he wanted made, all of which would return the country to half-past the Articles of Confederation. They’ve suppressed the vote and gamed the maps. They have spent decades fashioning the state legislatures they need and now is the moment to strike. Looked at it from a distance, and ignoring the fact that the policy proposals are unworkable where they are not actually insane, it really is quite a political act of artistic creation.

teresatomlinson.com

(Here in the Commonwealth, God save it, the conservatives pushing the notion of a convention have “reached out” to their left by suggesting that some alterations in the Second Amendment might be possible. Yes, and the Sacred Cod is going to drop down into the well of the Massachusetts House and dance The Hustle.)

Last weekend, chased up a tree by Mayor Tomlinson, Coburn gave the whole game away. He began by saying that he was calling for “an amendments convention as long as you specifically state what areas you want to talk about.” This is, of course, nonsense. Here’s Article V in its entirety:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

You see anything in there that would require that a convention “specifically state what areas you want to talk about?” Neither do I. Coburn went on, though, blustering and fuming at the two women who kept pressing him for what he’s really up to here:

“We have three areas. We think there ought to be fiscal responsibility on the federal government’s part….We believe there ought to be term limits on our elected officials. (Ed. Note: Bingo!) The advantage of incumbency is unbelievable…And finally, we believe the scope and jurisdiction of the federal government ought to be what the Founders intended, which is a limited role, but very specific and very powerful, and what is not specifically set out for the federal government, left to the states.”

In other words, Coburn wants to enshrine in the Constitution itself every Republican national platform for the past 40 years. You will note that two of the three “areas” are pretty damn vague. How many amendments to the Constitution do you think it would take to roll back the federal government to a size that would satisfy Tom Coburn? Twelve? Twenty-seven? Eleventy-infinity? The mind boggles.

(Watch him as Mayor Tomlinson tells us about all the hidden jokers in this deck. Coburn looks like he’s going to float out of the studio in a burst of pure rage.)

But we’re talking about this today because all those state legislators with ducks on their heads who pass the laws making Pat Robertson’s first orgasm a statewide holiday, the people whom we’ve been mocking out the windows of the shebeen’s luxurious tour bus every Thursday for going on seven years now, these are the people who will be the delegates to this convention. Maybe you want to trade George Mason for the guy with the duck on his head, or James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for Mark Levin and Tom Coburn, but I don’t.

And we conclude right where we began, and as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Boot Scooter Friedman of the Plains was represented in the Senate for many years by both Coburn and Jim Inhofe and therefore has had enough trouble so we’ll leave him be this week.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it…while you still can.

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