Ray Kurzweil, well known futurist and inventor

Editorial from the Concord Monitor, Concord, Mass., August 29, 2019

Last week, BNP Paribas, the world’s eighth largest bank, announced that it is ending all investment in fossil fuels.

“We conclude that the economics of oil for gasoline and diesel vehicles versus wind and solar-powered EVs (electric vehicles) are now in relentless and irreversible decline, with far-reaching implications for both policymakers and the oil majors,” Paribas said in its announcement.

Is the bank right, and how soon might the transition happen?

Ray Kurzweil, futurist and inventor of the flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech machine, a musical synthesizer and more, made many predictions, including this one in 2001: “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century, it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”

Technological progress proceeds at an exponential rate as new tools like artificial intelligence create even better tools quickly, Kurzweil said.

The batting average of the former MIT professor, now director of engineering for Google, is good. Trackers say that 115 of the 147 predictions Kurzweil has made since the 1990s have proven to be essentially accurate.

If Kurzweil is even half right, technological change and its impact on the world’s economies, the nature of work, advances in medicine and alternative energy will occur far faster than most people and policymakers realize.

The pace of climate change is also proceeding far faster than scientists expected, and the race between technologies that will slow climate change and the continued or even increased burning of fossil fuels is happening on many fronts.

The fires burning in the Amazon rainforest – the lungs of the planet – are being set largely by farmers and cattle ranchers bent on expansion. The planet is home to nearly 1 billion cows, each of whom makes multiple contributions to climate change daily. Meanwhile alternatives to meat are multiplying, improving and winning consumer favor at a rate that alarms the beef industry.

Word is that Concord’s Burger King restaurants are selling as many plant-based Impossible Whoppers as beef Whoppers.

And a spokesman for German automaker Volkswagen said, earlier this month, that the day when its electric vehicles reach price parity with internal combustion vehicles is only a few years away.

The tipping point that slides gas and diesel vehicles toward history’s trash heap is approaching. Charging stations will replace gas stations.

Reinhard Fischer, head of strategy for Volkswagen in North America, told attendees at the Center for Automotive Research in Detroit this month that range anxiety has now been replaced by charging anxiety.

“A hundred years ago, gasoline was sold at pharmacies,” Fischer said. “Today we have 122,000 gas stations in the United States. It’s transformed from a bottleneck to a commodity. Electric charging is going to be exactly the same.”

When it comes to transportation, to compete with energy from solar and wind power, according to the French bank Paribas’s analysis, “the long-term break-even price for oil for gasoline to remain competitive as a source of mobility is $9 to $10 per barrel and for diesel $17 to $19 per barrel.”

After bouncing around in the $60 range, yesterday’s price for a barrel of crude was $55.68.

The lower the price goes the less it makes sense to drill for oil in the Alaskan wilderness and other environmentally sensitive places. The faster meat alternatives replace beef the less need for the slash-and-burn agriculture that worsens climate change and threatens the survival of many of the Earth’s species.

Let’s hope Paribas, Volkswagen and Kurzweil are right.

The quality of life for future generations is in OUR HANDS

From the Editorial Board, Washington Post, August 19, 2019

GLOBAL WARMING is already here, striking substantial regions of the United States with increasing severity. That is the upshot of an exhaustive Post investigation in which Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens analyzed decades of local temperature records and identified a variety of hot spots where warming has proceeded more quickly.

“A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark,” The Washington Post has found. An increase of 2 degrees Celsius — 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — is a temperature threshold that scientists warn the world, on average, should not surpass. “Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark.”

Surpassing 2 degrees locally means different things in different places. If the average world temperature were to breach the 2-degree threshold, that would mean some places would have warmed far more than 2 degrees, bringing massive changes, and some places less. But in many of the regions The Washington Post examined, substantial negative effects were clear. Global warming’s consequences are various, pervasive and not always obvious when people consider how their lives will be directly affected — until they are.

The lobster catch around Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay is down 75 percent because of warmer waters. Toxic algae blooms are making a New Jersey lake off-limits to swimmers and boaters. The lake does not freeze like it used to, deterring ice fishermen. Spurred by warmer temperatures, southern pine beetles are invading northern forests. The restless ocean is washing beach homes out to sea. People who now find that their homes and businesses are far closer to the shore than when they bought them are moving them farther back — but fear they will have to move again.

Scientists offer various reasons for the temperature hot spots that have emerged across the United States. Alaska’s breakneck heating aligns with their prediction that human greenhouse-gas-driven warming strikes higher latitudes particularly hard. In the Northeast, a shifting Gulf Stream — a massive flow of water that runs from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Atlantic coast of the United States and then toward Europe, its path influenced by melting Arctic ice — seems to explain some of the temperature anomalies.

The underlying cause, though, is human-caused global warming.

The warming will continue. Humanity has steadily shifted the chemistry of the atmosphere, in ways that could not be reversed quickly even if rational policy were being implemented. The carbon dioxide that emerges from smokestacks and tailpipes lingers in the air for decades. All the more reason to change behavior now. Yet, whether for political advantage or out of sheer pigheadedness or both, President Trump continues to deny and ignore reality. It is beyond unforgivable.

NOTE: It is hard for people to accept global warming when they live in places that are heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer. Particularly when they make money from burning carbon compounds or use huge amounts of energy generated by burning carbon. If you work out of doors, and particularly if you observe the growth of plants, its rather obvious. If you read about whats going on in other parts of the world it is obvious. Where I live, people had ice houses, filled with ice taken from streams over a century ago. Now streams hardly freeze over. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

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See also: Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It’s unforgivable | Tim Winton | Environment | The Guardian, April 20, 2019

Are birds made of paper, to be manipulated?

Editorial of the Morgantown Dominion Post, May 14, 2018

EPA & Interior policy shifts focused on economics, not health or wildlife

Protecting the environment and wildlife often calls for balancing benefits and costs. No, it’s not written as such into relevant legal codes or regulations. And though this tradeoff is almost a matter of course for wildlife, it’s also apparent in many decisions for humans. However, the nation’s Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are about to put an exclamation mark on that idea.

First, Interior is about to change how agencies under its umbrella enforce the more than 100-year-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Formerly, potential penalties served as incentive for businesses and agriculture to take reasonable measures to avoid killing birds. For instance, installing netting over oil waste pits or restricting certain pesticides spare thousands of birds annually. In other words, taking reasonable steps at a reasonable cost to protect bird populations.

But now, the Interior Department has decided it will only prosecute those that “d e l i b e r a t e l y” kill birds, not those that kill them by “accident.” This treaty has never attempted to altogether end the deaths of birds from unintentional consequences (wind turbines, skyscrapers, vehicles and power lines come to mind). There’s an unwritten understanding that such deaths are unavoidable. What this treaty does is aim to prevent those deaths that can be prevented. But to argue that gross negligence does not translate into criminal intent is as good as a blank check to ignore practical protections for birds.

Meanwhile, the EPA is intent on putting a price tag on the protections the Clean Air Act provides for breathing. The EPA now wants to calculate what the economic impact of your need to breathe clean air is.

Formerly, federal law and court decisions have required the EPA to focus on public health — not what it cost businesses or tax revenues — to set limits on pollution. Now, before defining regulations on pollution, smog, soot, etc. it will need to determine their impact on the economy. We don’t have a problem with having all the facts about such issues, but protecting public health should win every argument.

The EPA was never a perfect agency but once it cared as much about the environment as it now does the ability of polluters to get rich. This shifting of the principles of the EPA and the Interior Department to “reform” regulations can only muddy their efforts. What is clear though, is these policies tip the scales for wreaking havoc on clean air and wildlife.

Sunoco Mariner East 2 Pipeline appears “high risk” for residents

Editorial of the Delaware County Daily Times, Swarthmore (Pa), January 25, 2018

A community group has asked Delaware County Council to do a risk assessment on the Mariner East 2 pipeline project, seen in the photo during construction. Council has agreed to the request.

Don’t look now, but those who for months have opposed Sunoco’s massive $2.5 billion Mariner East 2 pipeline project have just scored a couple of significant victories.

First, the PA state Department of Environmental Protection halted all construction on the pipeline project across the state. The PA-DEP cited “egregious” problems that have plagued work on the pipeline now for months, including several discharges and spills. In at least one instance, private water wells in Chester County were disturbed.

The state also noted that Sunoco Pipeline LP, the offshoot of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, which is planning to move hundreds of thousands of barrels of volatile gases across the state, from the Marcellus Shale region to Marcus Hook, had done some work for which it was not permitted. Mostly, it involved a controversial drilling technique called Horizontal Directional Drilling, which the company utilizes in tricky areas and which they say is actually less destructive to the environment.

But they got caught doing it out near Harrisburg in an area where they were not permitted to do so. So the PA-DEP finally shut down all work until Sunoco can come in with a report telling them how they plan to avoid any more mishaps and adhere to all PA-DEP regulations. Sunoco says it plans to do just that.

Then this week a group of citizens opposed to the pipeline appeared before Delaware County Council asking them to support their push for a full risk assessment study of the project and its effects on the county.

Council, which was one of the early supporters of the pipeline plan and the economic boost it held for the county, agreed.

Council Chairman John McBlain and new Democratic Councilman Brian Zidek will set up the parameters for the study, then council will put the project out for bid for outside consultants.

It’s one of the persistent cries of those who have watched in horror as Mariner East 2 has cut an ugly path through the county. Sunoco, having been granted the crucial public utility status by the courts years ago, went about acquiring property as close as possible to an existing pipeline, Mariner East 1. That line, which used to ferry oil to the refinery at Marcus Hook, already is up and running delivering the kind of ethane, butane and propane that for the most part will be stored at the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex before being shipped to markets overseas.

Look, putting in a pipeline is not pretty. And one look at the neighborhoods where Mariner East 2 has come in – 11 miles across western Delaware County and another 25 miles across Chester County – can easily attest to that. Eventually, Sunoco insists, the landscape will be restored and no one will know the pipeline is there. After all, pipelines are not exactly a new idea in this area of the state. There are hundreds of miles of pipeline criss-crossing all kinds of neighborhoods.

But none will carry the kind – or the amount – of materials that Mariner East 2 will ferry across Delaware County. Through densely populated neighborhoods. A few hundred feet from elementary schools such as Glenwood Elementary in Middletown.

Those who stand against the pipeline don’t buy all the hype about the economic benefits of this project. They are leery of almost anything Sunoco says, and they have the scars to prove it.

But while they grudgingly admit there is an economic benefit to the pipeline, they continue to question why that necessarily overrules their safety concerns, their hardships during construction, their property values, and their worries about problems once the pipeline is up and running.

And they question why no risk assessment was done before the project was approved.

In fact, several state legislators, including state Rep. Chris Quinn, R-168 of Middletown, and Chester County Sen. Andy Dinniman, D-19 of West Whiteland, have fired off letters to Gov. Tom Wolf asking for exactly that.

“There is no example of a pipeline of that size with this sort of material running through a built-up area like our county,” George Alexander of Media told County Council.

Eve Miari, a member of the Middletown Coalition for Community Safety, one of the most vocal critics of Mariner East 2, said no governing body in the state has stepped up to answer questions or at least delve into the potential for a problem.

“We have a huge regulatory gap where no one at the federal or state level is looking out for the safety of the residents and you have an out-of-state corporation basically putting their pipeline through the regulatory hole,” Miari told council.

For their part, Sunoco and their backers among labor unions and the oil and natural gas industry, insist that they are following all state regulations in construction of Mariner East 2, and that it is being installed and will be operated to the highest industry standards.

Sunoco spokesman Jeff Shields responded to the move by County Council by saying the project has been “thoroughly vetted” by federal, state and local agencies. He pointed out that pipelines have been used to move natural gas and other materials safely across Pennsylvania for nearly 100 years, including in many areas across Delaware County, and in close proximity to schools, hospitals, senior living facilities and homes.

“We have been living with these pipelines safely for decades, and we know that pipelines are the safest way to transport petroleum products,” Shields said. Opponents remain unconvinced. And the tide just might be turning in their direction. It’s late in the game, but their questions are not going to go away. It might be the only way to resolve their concerns. Bring on the risk assessment.

The Morgantown Dominion Post on Sunday, May 22^nd had a front page article on “Expert touts drilling’s merits”, a page 3 article on the Wellsburg moratorium on drilling, an editorial on the growing public protest activity in Morgantown and a letter to the editor about Chesapeake Energy.  The “expert” is a Professor in Geology and Geography, Tim Carr, who believes that any spills of fluids from drilling near the Morgantown Industrial Park will be diluted by the current if they reach the River.  The editorial indicates that the process of granting the drilling permits is unacceptable, as seen in the summary below:  

“We the people finally showed up last week. More than 100 people rallied at the Monongalia County Courthouse against several Marcellus shale wells near the Monongahela River. By all accounts it was the first significant public protest against the booming Marcellus shale drilling operations spreading across northern West Virginia.  Another protest at Morgantown’s City Hall preceded the courthouse rally.  At least 20 people spoke out against the wells at a recent city council meeting. The wells are located about 1,500 feet from the greater Morgantown area’s drinking water intake site, near the treatment plant.”
   
“We have no evidence that Northeast Natural Energy isn’t up to the job of operating these wells safely. However, aside from the protesters, many members of this community — including this newspaper — are shocked that a site so near our community’s water intake was even considered by this company, let alone approved by state regulators. The process in which this happened is unacceptable.”

 “We call on all West Virginians to not forget legislators who, earlier this year, impeded attempts to pass a bill to alter this process. If the only recourse the public has to protect its drinking water is to stand upon our First Amendment rights — to assemble, to petition, to speak out and report on these wells — then so be it.    We urge the public — students, property owners, environmentalists and everyone else — to keep protesting these wells and this industry until regulations are on the books and inspectors are in the field to enforce them.”