TITLE: The War on Solar Is Coming to a Town Near You
https://www.notus.org/policy/solar-farm-culture-war-biden-climate-change
EXCERPT: Battling medical debt and unpaid bills from their family farm, Wayne and Sara Greier thought they had a chance to start over when they signed a lease to lend their farmland to a $150 million solar project.
Solar company Alpin Sun’s proposal would have erased their financial hardship. Instead, it became the target of a conservative culture war that turned the Greiers into social pariahs and ended with a solar ban in their ruby red northwest Ohio community.
“We’re absolutely hated here. They surrounded our house with signs. Our kids got harassed at school,” Wayne Greier said of Green Township, a community that voted for Donald Trump by 45 points. “I got called a liberal. They kept asking: ‘When did you turn into a liberal? You’ve never been liberal. Why do you want green energy?’”
Two years after the Greiers signed a lease with Alpin Sun, the company was pushed out. The Greiers had to sell 40 acres of land to make ends meet.
A new political reality — one that threatens to doom President Joe Biden’s climate change agenda before it can really begin — has settled in across red America.
In Green Township, where the Greiers live, Alpin Sun’s plan would have powered more than 25,000 homes and given local public schools hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue. Partisan opposition to all things green beat out those incentives.
Ohio’s huge swaths of very flat rural land, already equipped with transmission infrastructure, should be an obvious place to build large, affordable solar projects. But the state has become an early warning sign for those trying to combat climate change. In April 2024, 10 more townships in Mahoning County, Ohio, where Green Township is located, banned all solar development. All told, at least 25 of Ohio’s 88 counties have placed prohibitions on solar development since 2021. Some also include bans on wind.
Renewable energy projects used to be broadly popular among both Democrats and Republicans. Eighty-four percent of Republicans and 94% of Democrats said they supported more solar power just before Biden took office; now 70% of Republicans do, while the Democratic number remained the same, according to a June 28 Pew Research Center survey. The trend was nearly identical for wind power, with Democrats remaining largely in support and Republican support dropping about 15 points.
“I would call this the unnecessary politicization of technology that has environmental, economic and reliability benefits, and we’ve seen that with transmission as well,” said Elise Caplan, the vice president of regulatory affairs for the American Council on Renewable Energy. “It is concerning to a lot of solar developers.”
The Inflation Reduction Act provided massive incentives for clean energy development, and the Biden agencies have been trying to shovel the money out the door before a possible Trump presidency. That money means nothing if local communities turn against the developers.
Across the country, nearly 400 communities (whether that be counties, townships or other municipalities) have passed laws restricting wind and solar development, according to a June 2024 report from Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center. That’s nearly a 75% increase in the number of identified restrictions compared to a previous version of the same report from last year.
Renewable energy developers say that about one-third of their projects proposed over the last five years have been canceled, and local opposition and local laws are two of the top three reasons for those cancellations, according to a January 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The increasing depth and breadth of local opposition across the United States has become one of the largest and most concerning barriers for a clean energy future, energy developers and policy experts told NOTUS.
TITLE: Jordan Peterson tells Brits burning fossil fuels is ‘good for the planet’
https://www.westernstandard.news/agriculture/jordan-peterson-tells-brits-burning-fossil-fuels-is-good-for-the-planet/55860
EXCERPTS: In a podcast with equally controversial UK politician Nigel Farage this week, Peterson said NASA data shows “the influx of carbon dioxide from the fossil fuel industry into the atmosphere is actually a net ecological good.”
“In the last 20 years alone, the planet has greened by an area factor of 20%.”
According to NASA data most of that ‘greening’ has come from a least likely source: China. Satellite data has shown China alone has contributed a net 25% to the planet’s increase in green leafy area.
But Peterson critics said the net greening was due to a massive geo-engineering program to halt — and reverse — the growth of the Gobi Desert. Since the 1970s, the Chinese military has planted tens of billions of trees to halt desertification within its own borders and has redeployed soldiers from front line positions to undertake the task.
Dubbed the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, or ‘the Great Green Wall,’ the project aims to construct large strips of woodland to prevent damaging dust storms.
But more recent studies indicate that any of the benefits to global vegetation gained from higher levels of greenhouse gases from 1982-1998 — due to either China and India's agricultural revolutions — have now taken a sharp turn for the worse.
In fact, global vegetation levels are now ‘browning’ due to what researchers are calling a deficit of atmospheric water vapour due to higher global temperatures, according to satellite data
“It's like there's a pump in the air, and the pump extracts the water from the soil and plants via the vascular tissue. When the (water vapour deficit) increases,” lead study author Dr. Wenping Yuan from Peking University told Newsweek. “Then the pump extracts the water faster and stronger.”
“The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will increase if other conditions do not change, which will result in a stronger greenhouse gas effect.”
TITLE: We've had 12 months of record-breaking global heat. How close are we to passing the 1.5 C limit?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/global-warming-copernicus-1-5-c-1.7257223
EXCERPT: Zeke Hausfather, a scientist with Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that works on data analysis for climate science, says the temperature rise is in line with what their climate models predict and the acceleration of global warming being seen over the past 15 years.
"It is a pretty dire sign that the world will soon exceed the 1.5 C target, and that we have effectively waited too late to reduce emissions to avoid it," he said in an email.
"The recent 12-month period above 1.5 C is also in line with an apparent recent acceleration in the rate of warming which is in line with what our climate models expect in a world where planet-cooling aerosol emissions (e.g. of sulfur dioxide) are being rapidly reduced while emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases remain at record high levels."
Those aerosol emissions refer to air pollutants from things like burning coal and shipping fuel. New regulations have reduced the emissions of these pollutants — which are harmful to human health, but also reflect heat and have a cooling effect on the atmosphere.
Reducing their emissions, some models are suggesting, could be having a warming effect.
The magnitude of heat in 2023 has scientists looking more seriously at the impact of removing these aerosols from the atmosphere — and the long-term impact on climate change, according to Bill Merryfield, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
"2023 was so extraordinary that there's been a lot of speculation that there may have been effects on top of the greenhouse gas driving of global warming," said Merryfield, referring to the impact of the new fuel regulations.
"The magnitude of the effect is still being studied and debated. Some scientists think it's very small, some think it may be significant," Merryfield said.