Extractive cf. regenerative fuels

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the marine biologist and activist, now living in down east Maine, offered the commencement address at my college, Middlebury, in the spring of 2023, and a week later Time magazine reprinted her address in full—a wise choice, I think, as it lays out a serious case for a certain kind of hope. “To address the climate crisis, the all-encompassing challenge that will touch whatever life and work you will go on to, requires that we not just change or adapt, but that we transform society, from extractive to regenerative,” she said. “This is a monumental task. And it requires that we focus not on endless analysis of the problem, but on summoning an expansive sense of possibility, on harnessing our imaginations and our creativity.” 

McKibben, Bill; Green, Jaime. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024: A Thought-Provoking Anthology with Award-Winning Environmental Insights (p. xxiv). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Words matter. What we call things matters. Vocabulary becomes expert jargon unique to a specialized discourse. Things can’t be managed if they can’t be named so naming things accurately, validly, meaningful has a tremendous power. So choose your words carefully.

In discussing our choice of fuel to meet our energy needs, Ayana, Elizabeth Johnson suggests that we categorize those fuels into two categories: extractive and regenerative. Extractive fuels would be coal, oil, gas, peat. Regenerative would be wind, solar, hydro.

Extractive fuels contribute CO2 to the atmosphere and contribute to climate warming. Regenerative fuels don’t. 

1. In this age of climate change endangering the health and well being of living things on the planet which should humans use?

2. What kinds of policies would contribute to the transformation of the Earth’s societies from extractive to regenerative fuels? 

3. Which political parties in the US favors which types of fuels? Which kind do you favor and support?

EV sales around the world

 Click on image to enlarge.

$5 billion funding for EV charging stations in U.S.

 

The Biden administration announced yesterday $5B in funding for states to construct charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. It marks the first tranche of funding drawn for such projects under the $1.2T bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year.    Initial funds will be focused on fast-charging stations located along major interstate highways, an attempt to address a disconnected and difficult to access charging infrastructure across the country. The administration has set a goal of 500,000 new chargers by 2030, an elevenfold increase over current stations.    Electric vehicles sales in the US jumped 83% in 2021 year-over-year, accounting for 3% of the market (hybrids notched another 5% of light vehicle sales). Still, EVs make up less than 1% of the more than 250 million passenger vehicles on the road today—see a visualization of the challenges facing the industry here. For more click here.

Offshore wind farms becoming an increasingly bigger thing.

From the New York Times on 05/11/21:

Construction on the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm is expected to begin this summer, after the Biden administration gave final approval Tuesday to a project it hopes will herald a new era of wind energy across the United States.

The Vineyard Wind project calls for up to 84 turbines to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Together, they could generate about 800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 400,000 homes. The administration estimates that the work will create about 3,600 jobs.

The project would dwarf the scale of the country’s two existing wind farms, off the coasts of Virginia and Rhode Island. Together, they produce just 42 megawatts of electricity.

In addition to Vineyard Wind, a dozen other offshore wind projects along the East Coast are now under federal review. The Interior Department has estimated that by the end of the decade, some 2,000 turbines could be churning in the wind along the coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

For more click here.

Climate change and the environment is one of the topics that MarkhamsSlowNews tracks. To keep up with our articles subscribe to the blog to get daily notices when new articles are posted.