Gray and damp this Monday morning on California’s north coast, another day in the life.
A bit of guilt even as we cool here on the Pacific shoreline, not far eastward temperatures way-climb, sometimes 20-30-degrees higher — meanwhile, across a big chunk of the US right now, the notorious “heat dome” is frying the citizenry, though, just one aspect of weather’s ‘new normal.’
Climate change the only real issue…
(Illustration found here).
Seeking a handle on global warning has really a two-pronged adversary — one, the becoming more-and-more-obvious weather weirdness as global temperatures climb higher by the day, and two, negative human intervention.
In the heat, the Democrats open their convention in Philadelphia today, and will attempt a sense of sense after last week’s surrealistically-terrifying, and way-unpleasant conclave of negative human intentions in Cleveland — in the text of climate change, the DNC is operating in another dimension.
The Democratic Platform Committee has released goals for the country, including efforts to combat climate change with the ‘required‘ language in the needed effort:
We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.
Case in point from Joe Romm at Climate Progress last Friday:
The platform makes for the starkest possible contrast with a party that just nominated Donald Trump — a man who has called climate change a hoax invented by and for the Chinese, who has denied basic reality such as the drought in California, and who has vowed to (try to) scuttle the unanimous agreement by the world’s nations in Paris to take whatever measures are necessary to avert catastrophic warming and keep total warming “well below 2°C.”
And speaking of outside reality, across the wide, wide divide:
The RNC Platform is completely opposite, favoring an “all of the above” energy policy that takes “advantage of all our American God-given resources.”
The RNC supports developing coal and opposes cap-and-trade legislation. It also supports offshore drilling on the Atlantic coast and the Arctic, as well as opening the outer continental shelf for oil drilling and increasing oil and natural gas exploration on federal land.
The RNC also supports the Keystone XL Pipeline.
In short, it is a recipe for an environmental nightmare.
Yet in loop of disaster — even the ‘renewable option’ doesn’t seem to be working, either.
Even in glorious California. We consume 2 million gallons of gasoline and diesel every hour, and we’re the world’s third-largest market for the products after the entire U.S. and China.
Heat no matter…
From the LA Times earlier this month:
As California pushes forward on its ambitious goal to produce 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, it will confront a wide range of potentially troubling economic, technical and political questions — though there remains strong support among public officials for the state’s climate program.
The state is demonstrating to the rest of the nation and the world that it has the deep political willpower to address climate change, but it has yet to fully understand the impacts of the program on low-income residents, economic growth and electrical grid reliability.
“There is a regressive nature to some of these things,” Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday, noting that more than 1 million state households spend more than 10 percent of their income on energy.
“We have to be sensitive to issues relating to energy costs.”
How long before this stops: The current protocols require at least some gas-fired plants to have their turbines hot and spinning, ready to deliver power to the grid in seconds if the sun should suddenly duck behind a cloud or the wind stop blowing.
Even when they aren’t producing power, they are adding to the cost of electricity.
And the heat continues as time draweth nigh…