Tag: Climate Change

Rolling Power

Electricity moves down a wire at close to the speed of light. In March, a tiny tech firm in San Francisco drew a crowd to witness power moving 100 million times slower, at the very modest pace of a freight train bumping around a rail yard. And I mean literally at freight speed, because the aptly-named startup, SunTrain, convened us to watch a diesel locomotive hauling solar energy.

The star of this demonstration at the Port of San Francisco’s Pier 96 rail yard was a freight container that SunTrain had crammed full of lithium ion batteries and mounted on a standard 27-meter railcar…

So begins my latest feature for the solutions-oriented Anthropocene Magazine, profiling the creative thinkers who see railroads — the ultimate industrial dinosaur — as a lever to equip power grids for a wind and solar-powered future. SunTrain would turn railroads into a power transmission solution, using railroads to make an end run around grid congestion that’s holding up power projects across the U.S.

Imagine mile-long trains with 120 or more battery cars, charging up where wind and solar power is cheap and making daily deliveries of over two gigawatt-hours of clean energy each—enough to power a small city, port, or datacenter for days. 

I also cover a slightly more mature rail-to-grid concept: feeding power lines through rail corridors, thus avoiding the environmental impacts, cost and community upset that delay and frequently kill grid expansion. A handful of transmission projects in New England and New York already co-locate power lines beside rails. And the proposed SOO Green transmission project would follow rails for nearly all of its 560-kilometer journey from Iowa’s wind belt to Chicago.

The ultimate challenge facing both approaches is getting railroads to think outside the box and to make room for cleaner power. That will get easier if, as expected, even President Trump’s pro-carbon policies can’t keep the railroads’ rolling boxes full of coal.

Read the full story @Anthropocene

by pfairley

“They Had to Break the Law to Try to Save Humanity”

Finalist, 2025 Digital Publishing Awards

The climate clock ticks toward midnight, yet US fossil fuel output keeps setting records and Canada goes on chopping Old Growth forests. Under such circumstances it’s hardly surprising that many climate activists have turned to civil disobedience, blocking highways and attacking masterworks to amplify their message. What is surprising is that courts seem to be listening.

My exposé for Vancouver’s premier public-interest news outlet, The Tyee, explores one case where precedent-setting judicial compassion could embolden activists across Canada to ratchet up pressure on governments.

In this courtroom drama a pair of climate activists deploy the ‘defence of necessity’, arguing that they should be excused for blockading highways, airports, banks and ports because the dire threat posed by climate change left them no legal alternative. My exposé explores the moral and practical considerations that go into determining when such premeditated lawbreaking should be legally tolerated — and whether it might actually strengthen the rule of law.

The result is “powerfully informative” according to one informed reviewer. “You give readers a deep and clear look at all the moving parts of this defence of necessity and the profound issues it raises – but you do that as a master storyteller, so it is gripping, easygoing, and compelling.”

UPDATE: On May 3, 2024 Judge Ronald Lamperson ruled that the activists’ civil disobedience did not qualify for the necessity defense. You can read why in my day-of news filing for The Tyee.

by pfairley

Can U.S. Grids Handle 100% Renewables?

Four Days in 2055: Dynamic heat and power supply on the mid-century wind, water and sunlight-fuelled U.S. grid simulated by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson

A battle royale between competing visions for the future of energy blew open today on the pages of a venerable science journal. The conflict pits 21 climate and power system experts against Stanford University civil and environmental engineer Mark Jacobson and his vision of a world fuelled 100 percent by renewable solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy. The criticism of his “wind, water and sun” solution and an unapologetic rebuttal from Jacobson and three Stanford colleagues appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, while both sides claim to be objectively weighing the energy options, the arguments and backgrounds of the protagonists belie well-informed affinities for various energy sources (and informed biases against others). As sociologists of science would say, their choice of data and their reading of it reflects hunches, values, and priorities.

Continue reading “Can U.S. Grids Handle 100% Renewables?”

by pfairley

Commentary: Photo Ops with Miners No Substitute for Climate Policy

President Donald Trump surrounded himself with coal miners at the EPA yesterday as he signed an executive order calling for a clean sweep of federal policies hindering development of fossil fuel production in the United States. The order instructs EPA to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan and thus, according to Trump’s rhetoric, revive coal-fired power generation and the miners who fuel it. The electric power sector, however, responded with polite dismissal. What separates President Trump and some of his top officials from power engineers and utilities? The latter operate in a world governed by science and other measurable forces. Unlike President Trump, scientists, engineers, and executives suffer reputational and financial losses when they invent new forms of logic that are unsupported by evidence. And a world of fallacies underlies the President and his administration’s rejection of climate action. Continue reading “Commentary: Photo Ops with Miners No Substitute for Climate Policy”

by pfairley

Micro-Satellite Spies on Carbon Polluters

Attention greenhouse gas emitters: There’s a new eye in the sky that will soon be photographing your carbon footprint and selling the images to any and all. It’s a micro-satellite dubbed “Claire” (clear, bright, and clean in French) by its Montreal-based developer, GHGSat. This microwave-oven-sized pollution paparazzo rocketed to a 512-kilometer-high orbit in mid-June care of the Indian Space Agency, with a mission to remotely measure the plumes of carbon dioxide and methane wafting up from myriad sources on Earth’s surface. Claire’s targets include power plants, natural gas fracking fields, rice paddies, and much more—just about any emissions source that someone with a checkbook (corporations, regulators, activists) wants tracked, according to GHGSat president Stéphane Germain. Continue reading “Micro-Satellite Spies on Carbon Polluters”

by pfairley

How Paris Happened and Why It Matters

One month after the terror attacks that traumatized Paris, the city has produced a climate agreement that is being hailed as a massive expression of hope. On Monday the U.K. Guardian dubbed the Paris Agreement, “the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” Distant observers may be tempted to discount such effusive language as hyperbole, yet there are reasons to be optimistic that last weekend’s climate deal finally sets the world on course towards decisive mutual action against global climate change. The birthing process clearly sets Paris apart from earlier efforts at global climate action, such as the Kyoto Protocol crafted in 1997. Only last-minute intervention by then U.S. Vice President Al Gore clinched a deal at Kyoto, and its impact faded as major polluters declined to ratify the treaty or dropped out. High-level diplomacy to secure a Paris deal, in contrast, began building in earnest last year with a bilateral climate agreement between U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s Xi Jinping—representing the largest climate polluters. Global buy-in grew over the following 12 months as one nation after another anted in with their own emissions reduction plans.

Continue reading “How Paris Happened and Why It Matters”

by pfairley

Paris Talks Face a Credibility Gap

Three weeks before the start of the Paris climate talks, negotiators working to craft an international agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions are staring into a wide gulf between what countries are willing to do and what they need to do. Most countries have stepped up with pledges to meaningfully cut carbon emissions or to at least slow the growth of emission totals between 2020 and 2030. However, national commitments fall short of what’s needed to prevent the average global temperature in 2100 from being any more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer than at the start of this century—the international community’s consensus benchmark for climate impact. Worse still, national pledges employ a hodgepodge of accounting methods that include some significant loopholes that ignore important emissions such as leaking methane from U.S. oil and gas production and underreported coal emissions from China. How promised reductions will be verified post-Paris is “a big debate right now and it makes a massive difference in the numbers,” says Jennifer Morgan, global director for the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization.

Continue reading “Paris Talks Face a Credibility Gap”

by pfairley