11 November 2017, New York Times: Lessons From Hurricane Harvey: Houston’s Struggle Is America’s Tale. The Texas city’s response to a powerful storm says much about polarized visions of the country and diverging attitudes toward cities, race, liberty and science. HOUSTON — The mayhem that Hurricane Harvey unleashed on Houston didn’t only come from the sky. On the ground, it came sweeping in from the Katy Prairie some 30 miles west of downtown. Houston has grown to be as big as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia combined, a giant spread of asphalt smothering many of the floodplains that once shuttled water from the prairies to the sea. When finished, the newest road to ring the city and propel its expansion, called the Grand Parkway, will encircle an area equivalent to all of Rhode Island. For years, the local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of six million. Read More here
Tag Archives: consumption
6 November 2017, Bloomberg, How China and Environmentalists Became Unlikely Bedfellows. If politics make strange bedfellows, few are more unlikely than the growing link between China and the environmentalists seeking to rein in climate change. The nation that spews the most pollution and is building dozens of coal-fired power plants is also winning accolades from the likes of Greenpeace and WWF for its efforts to fight global warming and steer an eventual path away from fossil fuels. “Air quality kills competitiveness, kills people — that’s a big driver for China,” said Rachel Kyte, a United Nations special representative who leads the Sustainable Energy for All program. “How that translates into their leadership beyond the way they’re already leading is something that will be important to watch.” Once a wrecker of global warming deals, China under President Xi Jinping is moving to shape the consensus on how to rein in greenhouse gases after President Donald Trump decided to scale back U.S. involvement. China’s ambitions on climate will be on display this week, when Trump arrives in Beijing on Nov. 8 to meet Xi, and on the other side of the world where envoys from almost 200 nations gather starting Monday in Bonn for UN climate talks. Read More here
18 October 2017, The Conversation, Federal government unveils ‘National Energy Guarantee’ – experts react. The federal government has announced a new energy policy, after deciding against adopting the Clean Energy Target recommended by chief scientist Alan Finkel. The new plan, called the National Energy Guarantee, will require electricity retailers to make a certain amount of “dispatchable” power available at all times, and also to reduce the electricity sector’s greenhouse emissions by 26% relative to 2005 levels by 2030. The government says it will save the average household up to A$115 a year after 2020, while also ensuring reliability. Below, our experts react to the new policy.Read more: Infographic: the National Energy Guarantee at a glance. Read More here
2 October 2017, Australian Institute, We have enough cheap, easy-to-extract gas to last 100 years. There’s just one problem. Australia has plenty of cheap gas. The problem is private companies are selling it all overseas, writes principal adviser at the Australia Institute Mark Ogge. Hard to believe, isn’t it? But it’s true: in the last decade, tens of thousands of square kilometers of Queensland farmland has been covered in gas fields. The export gas rush in Australia is one of the largest and fastest expansions of a gas industry ever seen, anywhere in the world. We are awash with gas. The problem is we are allowing almost all of the cheap and easy-to-get-at gas to be sent overseas. The gas in some areas is close to the surface, in big reserves all together, where there are no bothersome farmers, aquifers or national parks in the way. That gas is relatively cheap to extract. But some gas is deeper and harder to get at for all sorts of geological reasons. And that gas is more expensive to extract. Some gas is not just deep and hard to get at, but is underneath valuable aquifers that would need to be drilled through to get the gas. Much of it is on properties of people who don’t want a gas field on their land, or on properties a long way from where the gas is needed. That gas is very expensive to extract. So, naturally, the gas companies’ first preference is for the easily extractable, cheap gas, and they drill that and sell it first. The problem is, there is a limited amount of that cheaper to extract gas. Once that gas is gone, only the difficult, expensive-to-extract gas remains. That was OK when it was just being sold to Australian customers. There was enough reasonably easily extractable, cheap gas to last for decades at least. Read More here