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Chemistry and Global Issues
Grades 9 - 12

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Chapter 2 Oil and Gas: The Quest for Energy Dominance

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Chapter 2 Oil and Gas: The Quest for Energy Dominance

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The Coal Trap book. Read reviews from world's largest community for readers. Between 2009 and 2019, West Virginian politicians aligned themselves with th...

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What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia

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What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia

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A Rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy
While reading Hillbilly Elegy was a fun read, I also saw it as a book that held the same ideals as those of a certain segment of our society that believe that you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get religion, and then all will be okay.

Hillbilly Elegy also stereotyped those living in the Appalachian Mountains. For some reason they were all white Scot-Irish when they are also from other European countries, and are also American Indians, Blacks and...more

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What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

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A Rebuttal to Hillbilly ElegyWhile reading Hillbilly Elegy was a fun read, I also saw it as a book that held the same ideals as those of a certain segment of our society that believe that you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get religion, and then all will be okay.

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Chapter 3 Renewable Energy: Setbacks, Successes and Strategies for the Energy Transition

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Chapter 3 Renewable Energy: Setbacks, Successes and Strategies for the Energy Transition

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Please highlight text, graphics, or insights from the introduction. (Include page numbers when appropriate to help others.)

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1. Will the strategy lead to energy independence and more prosperous Americans?
2. Does the strategy share benefits broadly or concentrate wealth?
3. Does rulemaking weigh facts appropriately?

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Chapter 4 Public and Private Lands: Extraction and Infrastructure versus Competing Economic Pursuits

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Chapter 4 Public and Private Lands: Extraction and Infrastructure versus Competing Economic Pursuits

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Chapter 5 Native American Lands: Respect for Tribes' Rights versus Encroachment

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Chapter 5 Native American Lands: Respect for Tribes' Rights versus Encroachment

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Oceans: Drilling versus Competing Use of Coasts and Seas

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Oceans: Drilling versus Competing Use of Coasts and Seas

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Chapter 7 Backtracking on Safety: Risking Another BP Oil Spill

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Chapter 7 Backtracking on Safety: Risking Another BP Oil Spill

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Chapter 8 Science: Undermining Facts to Understate Regulatory Benefits

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Chapter 8 Science: Undermining Facts to Understate Regulatory Benefits

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science denial has become a major problem in the United States, from climate denial to COVID-19 denial, Science teachers can play a key role in teaching students about scientific knowledge - what is a scientific fact? what does scientific uncertainty mean? how can science deniers amplify scientific uncertainty to cast doubt on climate science?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02800-9

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People packed in by the thousands, many dressed in red, white and blue and carrying signs reading "Four more years" and "Make America Great Again". They came out during a global pandemic to make a statement, and that's precisely why they assembled shoulder-to-shoulder without masks in a windowless warehouse, creating an ideal environment for the coronavirus to spread.

US President Donald Trump's rally in Henderson, Nevada, on 13 September contravened state health rules, which limit public gatherings to 50 people and require proper social distancing. Trump knew it, and later flaunted the fact that the state authorities failed to stop him. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the president has behaved the same way and refused to follow basic health guidelines at the White House, which is now at the centre of an ongoing outbreak. The president spent 3 days in a hospital after testing positive for COVID-19, and was released on 5 October.

Trump's actions - and those of his staff and supporters - should come as no surprise. Over the past eight months, the president of the United States has lied about the dangers posed by the coronavirus and undermined efforts to contain it; he even admitted in an interview to purposefully misrepresenting the viral threat early in the pandemic. Trump has belittled masks and social-distancing requirements while encouraging people to protest against lockdown rules aimed at stopping disease transmission. His administration has undermined, suppressed and censored government scientists working to study the virus and reduce its harm. And his appointees have made political tools out of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ordering the agencies to put out inaccurate information, issue ill-advised health guidance, and tout unproven and potentially harmful treatments for COVID-19.

"This is not just ineptitude, it's sabotage," says Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York City, who has modelled the evolution of the pandemic and how earlier interventions might have saved lives in the United States. "He has sabotaged efforts to keep people safe."

The statistics are stark. The United States, an international powerhouse with vast scientific and economic resources, has experienced more than 7 million COVID-19 cases, and its death toll has passed 200,000 - more than any other nation and more than one-fifth of the global total, even though the United States accounts for just 4% of world population.

Quantifying Trump's responsibility for deaths and disease across the country is difficult, and other wealthy countries have struggled to contain the virus; the United Kingdom has experienced a similar number of deaths as the United States, after adjusting for population size.

But Shaman and others suggest that the majority of the lives lost in the United States could have been saved had the country stepped up to the challenge earlier. Many experts blame Trump for the country's failure to contain the outbreak, a charge also levelled by Olivia Troye, who was a member of the White House coronavirus task force. She said in September that the president repeatedly derailed efforts to contain the virus and save lives, focusing instead on his own political campaign.

As he seeks re-election on 3 November, Trump's actions in the face of COVID-19 are just one example of the damage he has inflicted on science and its institutions over the past four years, with repercussions for lives and livelihoods. The president and his appointees have also back-pedalled on efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, weakened rules limiting pollution and diminished the role of science at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Across many agencies, his administration has undermined scientific integrity by suppressing or distorting evidence to support political decisions, say policy experts.

"I've never seen such an orchestrated war on the environment or science," says Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under former Republican president George W. Bush.

Trump has also eroded America's position on the global stage through isolationist policies and rhetoric. By closing the nation's doors to many visitors and non-European immigrants, he has made the United States less inviting to foreign students and researchers. And by demonizing international associations such as the World Health Organization, Trump has weakened America's ability to respond to global crises and isolated the country's science.

All the while, the president has peddled chaos and fear rather than facts, as he advances his political agenda and discredits opponents. In dozens of interviews carried out by Nature, researchers have highlighted this point as particularly worrisome because it devalues public trust in the importance of truth and evidence, which underpin science as well as democracy.

"It's terrifying in a lot of ways," says Susan Hyde, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the rise and fall of democracies. "It's very disturbing to have the basic functioning of government under assault, especially when some of those functions are critical to our ability to survive."

The president can point to some positive developments in science and technology. Although Trump hasn't made either a priority (he waited 19 months before appointing a science adviser), his administration has pushed to return astronauts to the Moon and prioritized development in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In August, the White House announced more than US$1 billion in new funding for those and other advanced technologies.

But many scientists and former government officials say these examples are outliers in a presidency that has devalued science and the role it can have in crafting public policy. ( A timeline chronicles Trump's actions related to science.)

Much of the damage to science - including regulatory changes and severed international partnerships - can and probably will be repaired if Trump loses this November. In that event, what the nation and the world will have lost is precious time to limit climate change and the march of the virus, among other challenges. But the harm to scientific integrity, public trust and the United States' stature could linger well beyond Trump's tenure, says scientists and policy experts.

As the election approaches, Nature chronicles some of the key moments when the president has most damaged American science and how that could weaken the United States - and the world - for years to come, whether Trump wins or loses to his opponent, Joe Biden.

Climate harmed

Trump's assault on science started even before he took office. In his 2016 presidential campaign, he called global warming a hoax and vowed to pull the nation out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, signed by more than 190 countries. Less than five months after he moved into the White House, he announced he would fulfil that promise.

"I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump said, arguing that the agreement imposed energy restrictions, cost jobs and hampered the economy in order to "win praise" from foreign leaders and global activists.

What Trump did not acknowledge is that the Paris agreement was in many ways designed by - and for - the United States. It is a voluntary pact that sought to build momentum by allowing countries to design their own commitments, and the only power it has comes in the form of transparency: laggards will be exposed. By pulling the United States out of the agreement and backtracking on climate commitments, Trump has also reduced pressure on other countries to act, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. "Countries that needed to participate in the Paris process - because that was part of being a member in good standing of the global community - no longer feel that pressure."

After Trump announced his decision on the Paris accord, his appointees at the EPA set about dismantling climate policies put in place under former president Barack Obama. At the top of the list were a pair of regulations targeting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants and automobiles. Over the past 15 months, the Trump administration has gutted both regulations and replaced them with weaker standards that will save industry money - and do little to reduce emissions.

In some cases, even industry objected to the rollbacks. The administration's efforts prompted objections from several carmakers, such as Ford and Honda, which last year signed a separate agreement with California to maintain a more aggressive standard. More recently, energy giants such as Exxon Mobil and BP opposed the administration's move to weaken rules that require oil and gas companies to limit and eliminate emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

According to one estimate from the Rhodium Group, a consultancy based in New York City, the administration's rollbacks could boost emissions by the equivalent 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2035 - roughly five times the annual emissions of the United Kingdom. Although these measures could be overturned by the courts or a new administration, Trump has cost the country and the planet valuable time.

"The Trump era has been really a terrible, terrible time for this planet," says Leah Stokes, a climate-policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Trump administration formally filed the paperwork to exit the Paris agreement last year, and the US withdrawal will become official on 4 November, one day after the presidential election. Most nations have vowed to press forward even without the United States, and the European Union has already helped to fill the leadership void by pressing nations to bolster their efforts, which China did on 22 September when it announced that it aims to be carbon neutral by 2060. Biden has promised to re-enter the agreement if he wins, but it could be difficult for the United States to regain the kind of international influence it had under Obama, who helped energize the climate talks and bring countries on board for the 2015 accord.

"Rejoining Paris is easy," Victor says. "The real issue is credibility: will the rest of the world believe what we say?"

War on the environment

Trump hasn't just gone after regulations. At the EPA, his administration has sought to undermine the way the government uses science to make public-health decisions.

The scale of the threat came into focus on 31 October 2017 - Halloween - when then EPA administrator Scott Pruitt signed an order barring scientists with active EPA research grants from serving on the agency's science-advisory panels, making it harder for people with the most expertise to help the agency assess science and craft regulations. The order made it easier for industry scientists to replace the academic researchers, who would be forced to either give up their grants or resign.

"That was when I said, 'Oh my god, the fix is in," says John Bachmann, who spent more than three decades in the EPA's air-quality programme and is now active in a group of retired EPA employees that formed to advocate for scientists and scientific integrity at the agency, after Trump officials began their assault. "It's not just that they have their own views, it's that they are going to make sure that their views carry more weight in the process."

Pruitt's order, which would eventually be overturned by a federal judge, was part of a broader effort to accelerate turnover and appoint new people to the panels. And it was just the beginning. In April 2018, Pruitt revealed a "science transparency" rule to limit the agency's ability to base regulations on research for which the data and models are not publicly available. The rule could exclude some of the most rigorous epidemiological research linking fine-particulate pollution to premature death, because much of the underlying patient data are protected by privacy rules. Critics say that this policy was aimed at raising doubts about the science and making it easier to pursue weak air-pollution standards.

Pruitt resigned in July 2018, but the trend at the EPA continues. Under its new administrator, Andrew Wheeler, the agency has accelerated efforts to weaken regulations targeting chemicals in water and air pollution.

Whitman, the former EPA chief, says there's nothing wrong with revisiting regulatory decisions by past administrations and altering course. But decisions should be based on a solid scientific analysis, she says. "We don't see that with this administration."

One of the biggest recent decisions at the EPA came in the air-quality programme. On 14 April this year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the EPA p roposed to maintain current standards for fine-particulate pollution, despite evidence and advice from government and academic scientists who have overwhelmingly backed tighter regulations.

"It's devastating, totally devastating," says Francesca Dominici, an epidemiologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, whose group found that strengthening standards could save tens of thousands of lives each year. "Not listening to science and rolling back environmental regulations is costing American lives."

Pandemic problems

The coronavirus pandemic has brought the perils of ignoring science and evidence into sharp focus, and one thing is now clear: the president of the United States understood that the virus posed a major threat to the country early in the outbreak, and he chose to lie about it.

Speaking to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on 7 February, when only 12 people in the United States had tested positive for the coronavirus, Trump described a virus that is five times more lethal than the even the most "strenuous flus". "This is deadly stuff," Trump said in the recorded interview, which was released only in September.

In public, however, the president presented a very different message. On 10 February, Trump told his supporters at a rally not to worry, and said that by April, when temperatures warm up, the virus would "miraculously go away". "This is like a flu," he told a press conference on 26 February. In a TV interview a week later: "It's very mild."

In another recorded interview with Woodward on 19 March, Trump said he had played down the risk from the beginning. "I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic," Trump said.

After the tapes were released, Trump defended his efforts to keep people calm while simultaneously arguing that he had, if anything, "up-played" the risk posed by the virus. But health experts say that explanation makes little sense, and that the president endangered the public by misrepresenting the threat posed by the virus.

All the while, scientists now know, viral transmission was surging across the country. Rather than marshalling the federal government's power and resources to contain the virus with a comprehensive testing and contact-tracing programme, the Trump administration punted the issue to cities and states, where politics and a lack of resources made it impossible to track the virus or provide accurate information to citizens. And when local officials started to shut down businesses and schools in early March, Trump criticized them for taking action.

"Last year, 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu," he tweeted on 9 March. "Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on." Within a month, the US coronavirus death toll had topped 21,000, and the pandemic was in full stride, killing around 2,000 Americans every day.

Shaman and his colleagues at Columbia decided to investigate what might have happened had the country acted sooner. They developed a model that could reproduce what happened county by county across the United States from February to early May, as state and local governments shut down businesses and schools in an effort to halt the contagion. They then posed the question: what would have happened if everybody had done exactly the same one week earlier?

Their preliminary results, posted as a preprint on 21 May ( S. Pei et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/ghc65g; 2020), suggested that around 35,000 lives could have been saved, more than halving the death toll as of 3 May. If the same action had been taken two weeks earlier, that death toll could have been cut by nearly 90%. Reducing the initial exponential explosion in cases would have bought more time to roll out testing and address the inevitable outbreaks with targeted contact-tracing programmes.

"There's no reason on Earth this had to happen," Shaman says. "If we had gotten our act together earlier, we could have done much better."

Gerardo Chowell, a computational epidemiologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, says that Shaman's study provides a rough approximation of how earlier action might have changed the trajectory of the pandemic, although pinning down precise numbers is difficult given the lack of data early in the pandemic and the challenge of modelling a disease that scientists are still trying to understand.

Trump responded publicly to the Columbia study by dismissing it as a "political hit job" by "an institution that's very liberal".

Control the message, not the virus

With the economy in freefall and a mounting death toll, Trump increasingly aimed his vitriol at China. The president backed an unsubstantiated theory suggesting that the virus might have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, and argued that international health officials had helped China cover up the outbreak in the earliest days of the pandemic. On 29 May, he made good his threats and announced that he was pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization - a move that many say weakened the country's ability to respond to global crises and isolated its science.

For many experts, it was yet another counterproductive political manoeuvre from a president who was more interested in controlling the message than the virus. And in the end, he failed on both counts. Criticism mounted as COVID-19 continued to spread.

"The virus doesn't respond to spin," says Tom Frieden, who headed the CDC under Obama. "The virus responds to science-driven policies and programmes."

As the pandemic ground forward, the president continued to contradict warnings and advice from government scientists, including guidance for reopening schools. In July, Frieden and three other former CDC directors issued a sharp rebuke in a guest editorial in The Washington Post, citing unprecedented efforts by Trump and his administration to undermine the advice of public-health officials.

Similar concerns have arisen with the FDA, which must approve an eventual vaccine. On 29 September, seven former FDA commissioners penned another editorial in The Washington Post raising concerns about interventions by Trump and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar in a process that is supposed to be guided by government scientists.

This kind of political interference doesn't just undermine the public-health response, but could ultimately damage public trust in an eventual vaccine, says Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and vice-provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Everybody is wondering: 'Am I going to be able to trust the Food and Drug Administration's decision on the vaccine?'" says Emanuel. "That fact that people are even asking that question is evidence that Trump has already undermined the agency."

Elias Zerhouni, who headed the US National Institutes of Health under former president Bush from 2002 to 2008, says the Trump administration failed to control the coronavirus, and is now trying to force government agencies to use their prestige and manipulate science to buttress Trump's campaign. "They don't really get the science," says Zerhouni of Trump and his appointees. "This is the rejection of any science that doesn't fit their political views."

The White House and the EPA did not respond to several requests for comment. The HHS issued a statement to Nature saying: "HHS has always provided public health information based on sound science. Throughout the COVID-19 response, science and data have driven the decisions at HHS." The department adds: "President Trump has led an unprecedented, whole-of-America response to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Isolationist science

On 24 September, the US Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule to restrict how long international students can spend in the United States. The rule would limit visas for most students to four years, requiring an extension thereafter, and impose a two-year limit for students from dozens of countries considered high-risk, including those listed as state-sponsors of terror: Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Although it is not yet clear what effects this rule might have, many scientists and policy experts fear that this and other immigration policies could have a lasting impact on American science. "It could put the US at an enormous, enormous competitive disadvantage for attracting graduate students and scientists," says Lizbet Boroughs, associate vice president of the Association of American Universities in Washington, DC, a group representing 65 institutions.

It fits in with previously implemented travel restrictions that have made it more difficult for foreigners from certain countries - including scientists - to visit, study and work in the United States. These policies mark a sharp shift from previous governments, which have actively sought talent from other countries to fill laboratories and spur scientific innovation.

Researchers fear that the latest proposal will make the United States even less attractive to foreign scientists, which could hamper the country's efforts in science and technology.

"How we intersect with students from other countries has been hugely impacted," says Emanuel. If the best and brightest students from other countries start to go elsewhere, he adds, US science will suffer. "I fear for the country."

The proposed rule provides a glimpse of what a second Trump term might look like, and highlights the intangible impacts on US science that could endure even if Biden prevails in November. Biden could reverse some of the Trump administration's regulatory decisions and move to rejoin international organizations, but it could take time to repair the damage to the reputation of the United States.

James Wilsdon, a science-policy researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK, compares the US situation under Trump to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, saying both countries are at risk of losing influence internationally. "Soft power is driven a lot by perception and reputation," Wilsdon says. "These are basically the intangible assets of the science system in the international arena." Whether or how quickly that translates into loss of competitiveness in attracting international scientists and students is unclear, he says, in part because scientists understand that Donald Trump doesn't represent US science.

On the domestic front, many scientists fear that increased polarization and cynicism could last for years to come. That would make it harder for government agencies to do their jobs, to advance science-based policies, and to attract a new generation to replace many of the senior scientists and officials who have decided to retire under Trump.

Re-establishing scientific integrity in agencies where government scientists have been sidelined and censored by political appointees won't be easy, says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has documented more than 150 attacks on science under Trump's tenure. "Under Trump, political appointees have the authority to override science whenever they want if it doesn't conform to their political agenda," Rosenberg says. "You can reverse that, but you have to do it very intentionally and very directly."

At the EPA, for example, it would mean rebuilding the entire research arm of the agency, and giving it real power to stand up to regulatory bodies that are making policy decisions, says one senior EPA official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press. The problem pre-dates Trump, but has accelerated under his leadership. Without forceful action, the official says, the EPA's Office of Research and Development, which conducts and assesses research that feeds into regulatory decisions, might simply continue its "long decline into irrelevance."

If Trump wins in November, researchers fear the worst. "The Trump folks have poured an acid on public institutions that is much more powerful than anything we've seen before," says Victor.

"People can shake some of these things off after one term, but to have him elected again, given everything he has done, that would be extraordinary. And the damage done would be much greater."

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The US president's actions have exacerbated the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 people in the United States, rolled back environmental and public-health regulations and undermined science and scientific institutions. Some of the harm could be permanent.

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Chapter 9 Economics: Skewing Analyses to Justify Weaker Regulations

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Chapter 9 Economics: Skewing Analyses to Justify Weaker Regulations

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Chapter 10 Law: Anti-regulatory Statutory Interpretations and Reshaping the Judiciary

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Chapter 10 Law: Anti-regulatory Statutory Interpretations and Reshaping the Judiciary

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Chapter 11 Endangering the Climate: Attacking Global Cooperation, State Governments' Leadership and the Private Sector's Economic Restructuring

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Chapter 11 Endangering the Climate: Attacking Global Cooperation, State Governments' Leadership and the Private Sector's Economic Restructuring

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"Every region in the United States has suffered climate change induced droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, water scarcity, flooding, crop failures or smog (Table 11.1)."

Table 11.1 pg. 419

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Reducing US emissions: $1 - $4 trillion (total)

Averting climate damages: $170 - $206 billion (annually, estimated)

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Carbon is the foundation of all life on Earth, required to form complex molecules like proteins and DNA. This element is also found in our atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon helps to regulate the Earth's temperature, makes all life possible, is a key ingredient in the food that sustains us, and provides a major source of the energy to fuel our global economy.

The carbon cycle describes the process in which carbon atoms continually travel from the atmosphere to the Earth and then back into the atmosphere. Since our planet and its atmosphere form a closed environment, the amount of carbon in this system does not change. Where the carbon is located - in the atmosphere or on Earth - is constantly in flux.

On Earth, most carbon is stored in rocks and sediments, while the rest is located in the ocean, atmosphere, and in living organisms. These are the reservoirs, or sinks, through which carbon cycles.

Carbon is released back into the atmosphere when organisms die, volcanoes erupt, fires blaze, fossil fuels are burned, and through a variety of other mechanisms.

In the case of the ocean, carbon is continually exchanged between the ocean's surface waters and the atmosphere, or is stored for long periods of time in the ocean depths.

Humans play a major role in the carbon cycle through activities such as the burning of fossil fuels or land development. As a result, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rapidly rising; it is already considerably greater than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

Video Transcript

What is the carbon cycle? Carbon is the chemical backbone of all life on Earth. All of the carbon we currently have on Earth is the same amount we have always had. When new life is formed, carbon forms key molecules like protein and DNA. It's also found in our atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide or CO2. The carbon cycle is nature's way of reusing carbon atoms, which travel from the atmosphere into organisms in the Earth and then back into the atmosphere over and over again. Most carbon is stored in rocks and sediments, while the rest is stored in the ocean, atmosphere, and living organisms. These are the reservoirs, or sinks, through which carbon cycles. The ocean is a giant carbon sink that absorbs carbon. Marine organisms from marsh plants to fish, from seaweed to birds, also produce carbon through living and dying. Over millions of years, dead organisms can become fossil fuels. When humans burn these fuels for energy, vast amounts of carbon dioxide are released back into the atmosphere. This excess carbon dioxide changes our climate - increasing global temperatures, causing ocean acidification, and disrupting the planet's ecosystems.

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national oceanic and atmospheric administration

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The carbon cycle describes the process in which carbon atoms continually travel from the atmosphere to the Earth and then back into the atmosphere. Since our planet and its atmosphere form a closed environment, the amount of carbon in this system does not change.

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From NASA Kids!

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How does the greenhouse effect work?

As you might expect from the name, the greenhouse effect works ... like a greenhouse! A greenhouse is a building with glass walls and a glass roof. Greenhouses are used to grow plants, such as tomatoes and tropical flowers.

A greenhouse stays warm inside, even during the winter. In the daytime, sunlight shines into the greenhouse and warms the plants and air inside. At nighttime, it's colder outside, but the greenhouse stays pretty warm inside. That's because the glass walls of the greenhouse trap the Sun's heat.

The greenhouse effect works much the same way on Earth. Gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, trap heat similar to the glass roof of a greenhouse. These heat-trapping gases are called greenhouse gases.

During the day, the Sun shines through the atmosphere. Earth's surface warms up in the sunlight. At night, Earth's surface cools, releasing heat back into the air. But some of the heat is trapped by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That's what keeps our Earth a warm and cozy 58 degrees Fahrenheit (14 degrees Celsius), on average.

How are humans impacting the greenhouse effect?

Human activities are changing Earth's natural greenhouse effect. Burning fossil fuels like coal and oil puts more carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.

NASA has observed increases in the amount of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Too much of these greenhouse gases can cause Earth's atmosphere to trap more and more heat. This causes Earth to warm up.

What reduces the greenhouse effect on Earth?

Just like a glass greenhouse, Earth's greenhouse is also full of plants! Plants can help to balance the greenhouse effect on Earth. All plants - from giant trees to tiny phytoplankton in the ocean - take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen.

The ocean also absorbs a lot of excess carbon dioxide in the air. Unfortunately, the increased carbon dioxide in the ocean changes the water, making it more acidic. This is called ocean acidification.

More acidic water can be harmful to many ocean creatures, such as certain shellfish and coral. Warming oceans - from too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - can also be harmful to these organisms. Warmer waters are a main cause of coral bleaching.

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Learn more about this process that occurs when gases in Earth's atmosphere trap the Sun's heat.

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Adverse impacts 1.5 vs. 2 degrees Celsius

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Adverse impacts 1.5 vs. 2 degrees Celsius

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Table 11.2

Decline in coral reefs 70 - 90% vs. 99%

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Obama Administration Finalizes Historic 54.5 MPG Fuel Efficiency Standards

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Obama Administration Finalizes Historic 54.5 MPG Fuel Efficiency Standards

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Obama Administration Finalizes Historic 54.5 MPG Fuel Efficiency Standards

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Consumer Savings Comparable to Lowering Price of Gasoline by $1 Per Gallon by 2025

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The Auto Rule Rollback Nobody Wants, Except Trump

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The Auto Rule Rollback Nobody Wants, Except Trump

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The president is trying to sabotage an enormous climate achievement that much of the car industry supports.

Credit... Lisk Feng

Ms. Freeman was a counselor on energy and climate change to President Barack Obama.

Auto companies prize certainty in how the government regulates them because of the long timelines involved in designing and manufacturing cars and trucks.

Now the Trump administration has upended that certainty by going to extraordinary lengths to roll back Obama-era greenhouse gas and fuel efficiency standards that even much of the industry supports.

It's a senseless exercise ofapparent presidential pique. Worse, it threatens to undo what would be the country's most important climate achievement, the doubling of vehicle fuel efficiency to about 55 miles per gallon by 2025.

Those standards all told would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by six billion metric tons, cutting auto sector emissions in half by 2025, and saved American families more than $1.7 trillion in gas, with an average fuel savings, for instance, of more than $8,000 for a 2025 model vehicle over its average lifetime.

The Trump administration is reportedly close to finalizing its proposal to freeze the standards at 2020 levels, stalling fuel efficiency at about 37 miles per gallon. It also intends to revoke California's permission to set its own standards, which the Obama administration had approved.

California has always enjoyed the power to set stricter vehicle pollution standards than the federal ones, which other states may opt into. The Clean Air Act gives California this special power because it has faced extraordinary air quality problems and been a leader in air pollution regulation. California must, however, first obtain a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency and meet certain conditions. For nearly 50 years, the state has received these waivers routinely from administrations of both parties. Never has one been revoked.

To block California's vehicle greenhouse gas standards, the Trump administration has adopted a disputed legal theory - already rejected by two Federal District Courts - that only the Department of Transportation may set standards related to fuel economy. But pollution standards are about improving public health, and fuel economy standards are about increasing vehicle efficiency, distinct goals that the Supreme Court has said can be achieved compatibly.

In another striking step, the Department of Justice is investigating four auto companie s - Ford, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen - that voluntarily agreed to comply with California's rules, suggesting that it may amount to an illegal conspiracy.

This summer, those companies pledged to increase the average fuel economy of their fleets from 2021 levels by 3.7 percent per year, reaching an average of about 51 miles per gallon by 2026. This is less strict than the Obama standards but still makes meaningful progress. California offered incentives beyond those in the Obama rules, including extra credits for making electric and low- emission vehicles and other measures easing the compliance burden on the industry, changes the industry had been seeking.

By reaching an agreement with California, the auto companies want to avoid a situation in which the Trump administration requires one thing, and California (with the dozen or so states that usually follow it) requires another. The fear is that a divided market would, at a minimum, put automakers to the trouble and expense of certifying they meet two different sets of standards, and, at worst, manufacturing different vehicle models for different markets. Other auto companies also reportedly expressed interest in the California alternative. The settlement sidestepped the president's plan, reportedly enraging him.

Antitrust prohibits companies from conspiring to restrict competition. But under well-established legal principles, they may jointly lobby government for rules they prefer, and comply with those rules once adopted. And companies may independently and unilaterally meet whatever voluntary standards they wish.

The Justice Department's antitrust division has a long and proud history of independence from the White House. But circumstances surrounding the investigation have raised suspicion that its motivation is less than pure. It may succeed in squelching the California initiative through intimidation. For emphasis, lawyers for the Transportation Department and the E.P.A. sent a menacing letter to California officials warning that the state's agreement with the car companies appears to violate federal law.

All this adds uncertainty and delay over the rules the auto industry must follow. Now, the question of whether the E.P.A. can revoke a waiver it has already granted will be thrown to the courts, along with the administration's theory that, regardless, California's greenhouse gas standards illegally conflict with the Transportation Department's authority, questions that may take perhaps years to resolve. And if the Justice Department's investigation progresses, it could produce a blockbuster antitrust lawsuit. All of these conflicts could wind up in the Supreme Court.

This mess is the opposite of what the auto companies want. They supported the Obama standards and joined the administration in federal court to defend them because they delivered certainty and predictability. Since they took effect, automakers have steadily produced cleaner models while enjoying some of the best sales years in history.

At the same time, the transportation sector is responsible for the largest and fastest-growing share of greenhouse gas emissions in our economy. Ambitious national standards are even more critical for this industry than in the electricity sector, where cheap natural gas and a surge in renewables are helping to reduce emissions.

The auto industry is not looking for the drastic rollback that Mr. Trump seems determined to deliver. The White House has repeatedly pressured auto company chief executives to support his plan, yet not one has publicly endorsed it, and several have defected. The industry's trade association has said it remains committed to increasing fuel economy and strongly supports a program aligning federal and California standards. To stay competitive globally, companies know they must develop the next generation of fuel-saving technologies here in the United States.

There is a path forward. Adopting the California plan nationally would keep the industry on a sustainable trajectory to make cleaner cars, spare the states worsening air quality, cut the country's oil consumption and save consumers money at the pump.

If only the Trump administration was smart and bold enough to embrace it.

Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, was President Barack Obama's counselor for energy and climate change from 2009 to 2010.
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Opinion | The Auto Rule Rollback That Nobody Wants, Except Trump (Published 2019)

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The president is trying to sabotage an enormous climate achievement that much of the car industry supports. Ms. Freeman was a counselor on energy and climate change to President Barack Obama. Auto companies prize certainty in how the government regulates them because of the long timelines involved in designing and manufacturing cars and trucks.

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Please highlight text, graphics, or insights from Chapter 12. (Include page numbers when appropriate to help others.)

Feel free to share related resources too.

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"The Corps had rejected the initial pipeline route that passed 10 miles from the city of Bismarck on the grounds that the pipeline posed unacceptable risks to Bismarck's water supply but concluded that the pipeline did not pose risks to the tribes' water resources." pg. 173

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America's Energy Gamble - Book Launch Discussion

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America's Energy Gamble - Book Launch Discussion

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America's Energy Gamble-Book Launch Discussion

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Why America's Fossil Fuel Gamble Was A Financial Failure (with Dr. Shanti Gamper-Rabindran)

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Why America's Fossil Fuel Gamble Was A Financial Failure (with Dr. Shanti Gamper-Rabindran)

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The Climate Pod hosts Shanti Gamper-Rabindran!

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‎The Climate Pod: Why America’s Fossil Fuel Gamble Was A Financial Failure (w/ Dr. Shanti Gamper-Rabindran) on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show The Climate Pod, Ep Why America’s Fossil Fuel Gamble Was A Financial Failure (w/ Dr. Shanti Gamper-Rabindran) - Feb 16, 2022

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Congressional Research Service

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This is a great place to get started if you are interested in learning about native land territories in your area.

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Mapping

We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.

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Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life. We welcome you to our site.

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Instructional Lead Teacher HS - Science, Technology and Advanced Trades. Grades 9-12.

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Science methods - Undergraduate
Language arts -7th and 8th grade

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Overnight Energy - Executive Orders  / Battle of the Presidents?!

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Overnight Energy - Executive Orders  / Battle of the Presidents?!

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p. 5.

Candace Slobodnik

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/overnights/363208-overnight-energy-trump-shrinks-two-utah-national/

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Is Nuclear Power part of the Green Energy Future? p. 76

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Is Nuclear Power part of the Green Energy Future? p. 76

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https://www.npr.org/2022/01/18/1073726137/the-us-is-divided-over-whether-nuclear-power-is-part-of-the-green-energy-future

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Bear Ears Again?  Uranium and Sanctions on Russia!? pp 182-184, 196-197

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Bear Ears Again?  Uranium and Sanctions on Russia!? pp 182-184, 196-197

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Consequences of war for indigenous groups - we often overlook.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/28/native-americans-ban-russian-uranium

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Environmental Studies Program
University of Pittsburgh

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1st-4th Grade Science/Engineering & Design

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10th Grade World History
11th-12th Grade Women's History & Psychology

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Teaching Activities (Free)

Teaching Activity. By Julie Treick O'Neill and Tim Swinehart. 16 pages. Rethinking Schools.
A role play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change asks students to develop a list of demands to present to the rest of the world at a climate change meeting.

Time Periods: 21st Century, 2001 - Present

Themes: Climate Justice, Environment, Native American, Pacific Islander, Science, World History/Global Studies

What does it mean to take Axam's question seriously? For many of us in the wealthy and so-called "developed" countries of the world, it means learning about the very real and life-threatening ways that climate change is affecting some of the world's poorest populations.

We used materials from the Zinn Education Project, Rethinking Schools, and Teaching for Change with our 7th grade to create an interdisciplinary, experiential project that explored Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change. It was the perfect way to tie together our humanities unit on Indigenous Perspectives on American History with the STEM unit on deep time and extinction-level events.

Our students prepared for the 'Don't Take Our Voices Away' indigenous people's climate summit simulation as a final learning demonstration. Taking on the perspectives of various indigenous groups was something our students took seriously as they researched both the cultures and climate challenges faced by the groups. Then, at the summit, they did presentations that explained the priorities and needs of those groups before launching into negotiations about how to best communicate those perspectives with the rest of the world.

Leading up to the summit, we took a climate justice gallery walk using photos shared on the ZEP website, researched indigenous climate activists, and also did the Meet Today's Climate Justice Activists mixer. Those activities were the perfect scaffold to the summit. Overall, I saw my students develop deep understanding and empathy through the interactive and experiential materials provided by the Zinn Education Project.

I am grateful to have participated in a workshop where I learned how to use them. Now that I am at a school where our model centers experiential project based learning, these materials have become an invaluable resource.

Middle School Humanities and Math Teacher, Washington, District of Columbia

I'm a Participation in Government teacher at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a public 6-12 school in Queens, New York. We have some latitude to design our own curriculum at my school, and given our motto as a "school for a sustainable city," with a focus on designing learning experiences around environmental and social justice, we work to thread the climate crisis into many of our case studies across the disciplines.

This year, we wanted to kick off the semester in Government class by thinking about ways in which people traditionally, and non-traditionally, "participate in government." We also wanted to explore on-going fights where communities rise up against the confluence of big business, fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, and dark money to fight to protect the Earth. The Zinn Education Project's Teach Climate Justice resources were a boon to spark our curricular thinking.

Using the Don't Take Our Voices Away role play as inspiration, we decided to teach and learn deeply about the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight as a way to better understand indigenous peoples' perspectives on climate, and also to analyze the heroic methods and strategies used by #noDAPL protesters to make their voices heard. Teaching the role play over a few days to build background knowledge, we wanted students to be able to empathize with the stakeholders in this fight in order to better understand the stakes, and the resources, both natural and financial, at play in this particular issue. Without much other context, we jumped right into the role play. Once all of the DAPL stakeholders were named and their arguments analyzed, we were then able to dig into the context behind each of these positions.

In order for students to understand the ways in which people power with limited resources (as the Standing Rock Sioux exemplified) can strategize and make their voices heard, students needed to investigate the levers of power. So, we introduced our students to an old chestnut of community-based organizing strategy: power mapping.

Using the Midwest Academy framework and the resources from Zinn to provide primary and secondary source support, students power-mapped (and backwards power-mapped) the DAPL fight. They thought about specific targets - or stakeholders they wanted to move - as they designed short-, medium-, and long-term goals to achieve their organizational aims and to move stakeholders.

These frameworks allowed students to explore the roots of grassroots organizing. With with the examples provided by the Standing Rock Sioux and the curricular supports provided by the Zinn Education Project, the power mapping exercise was not just theoretical for my students, but was a case of real stakes and the struggle for climate justice.

High School Social Studies Teacher, New York

There are few lessons that I enjoy teaching more than ' Don't Take Our Voices Away': A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change in my science classroom. In part, because it gives tangible details and a human face to the issue, not just a story of polar bears or talk about temperature. This is missing in a lot of the science curriculum we are provided. Likewise, the voice of indigenous people in the world is something quite absent in our westernized science curriculum, which is maybe not surprising because these voices are also being left out of world decisions. Those points are what drew me to teaching the lesson. I keep teaching it because of how my students respond. They enjoy the structure of the activity, that they have some agency and control in what happens, as they get to take on the roles and make proposals.

Middle Science Teacher, Durham, North Carolina

Additional Resources

Paradise Lost. PBS NOW traveled to the nation of Kiribati to see up close how climate change affects residents' daily lives and how they are dealing with the reality that both their land and culture could disappear from the Earth. NOW also traveled to New Zealand to visit an I-Kiribati community that has already left its home, and to the Pacific Island Forum in Niue to see how the rest of the region is coping with the immediate crisis of climate change. [Producer's description.] This film can be viewed for free online. It was used in the classroom and is recommended by the teachers who wrote "'Don't Take Our Voices Away': A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change."

The Island President tells the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. After leading a 20-year pro-democracy movement, surviving repeated imprisonments and torture, Nasheed becomes president at 41, only to encounter the crisis of climate change. Considered the lowest lying country in the world, a rise of a mere three meters in sea level would inundate the 1,200 islands of the Maldives, rendering the country practically unlivable. [Producer's description.]

Democracy Now! interview withMohamed Axam Maumoon, the 15-year-old environmental ambassador from the Maldives, challenging Western viewers by asking, "Would you commit murder?"

Democracy Now! clip featuring youth activistKari Fulton speaking at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico: "We want people to know that whether you live in the forest, whether you live in the hood, you will be impacted by false solutions."

Coup in Maldives: Adviser to Ousted Pres. Mohamed Nasheed Speaks Out from Hiding as Arrest Sought. Democracy Now! broadcast, 2/9/2012.

Lessons, books, films, and websites for teaching about climate change in K-12 classrooms.

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'Don't Take Our Voices Away': A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change - Zinn Education Project

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Teaching Activity. By Julie Treick O'Neill and Tim Swinehart. 16 pages. Rethinking Schools. A role play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change asks students to develop a list of demands to present to the rest of the world at a climate change meeting.

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Informal STEM educator
All age groups

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Regulation of Environmental Justice Issues pp. 381 - 389

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Regulation of Environmental Justice Issues pp. 381 - 389

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In this case, energy efficiency means creating "Flint Gas City"  - how does this help   Flint become a "clean city".  Are we trading one environmental disaster for another?

I think it is significant that the author does not directly discuss the impact of reducing the power of federal regulatory agencies, such as EPA, on low-income, disadvantaged minority communities.  For example, the decisions  by private energy companies,  continue to create the potential for harm to residents of towns such as Flint, Michigan.

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FLINT, MI -- Consumers Energy broke ground Wednesday morning on a $10.1 million gas training facility in Flint that will train more than 1,500 employees who operate natural gas infrastructure.

The multi-million-dollar investment called "Flint Gas City" will be located at the Flint Service Center, 3201 E. Court St.

It will be a mock neighborhood where training scenarios like gas leak simulators and service hook ups can be exercised.

Expected to be completed and opened for training in 2022, "Flint Gas City" was a concept that Consumers Energy employees often fantasized about in the break room and on the job, Tim Gohr, VP of Michigan State Utility Workers, said.

"The concept has now become a reality," Gohr said.

The facility is a perfect opportunity to teach and train employees about what dangers they can expect on the job, Tonya Berry, vice president of Gas Operations, said.

The 1.4-acre complex will also include a space to train using heavy equipment and an outdoor controlled space to fight natural gas fires.

"(Trainees) will start in the classroom then they will go out and test for leaks, do pipe maintenance and construction out in the field," said Gwen Holman, "Mayor" of Flint Gas City and Training Program manager. "All of that hands on experience is going to make them more confident and more comfortable."

There are less than 10 facilities like this across the country, LeeRoy Wells, senior vice president of Operations and Flint native, said. The Flint Service Center is one of Consumers' largest in Michigan, he said.

U.S. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, called the project a "great idea."

"This required some vision," Kildee said. "This required someone to imagine what this could mean to our community as we continue to invest in infrastructure and the workforce -- to provide them the skills and agility to work in a matter that is safe and effective."

Mayor Sheldon Neeley thanked Consumers Energy for its partnership and the investment with the city.

"They are training individuals to be able to take great jobs right here in the city of Flint," Neeley said. "I can only say 'Thank You' to the vision and the team that is putting this together. This is a great day in the city of Flint and a lighthouse of hope."

Consumers Energy provides power to 6.8 million Michigan residents.
Read more on MLive: Judge pauses discovery in criminal Flint water cases until ruling on motion Water shutoff near Dort Highway and Carpenter Road planned for Oct. 13 Affordable housing project in Carriage Town approved with 50-year tax break Mott Community College celebrates Indigenous Peoples Day with Peace & Dignity Ceremony

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Consumers Energy to build $10M gas training facility called 'Flint Gas City'

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FLINT, MI -- Consumers Energy broke ground Wednesday morning on a $10.1 million gas training facility in Flint that will train more than 1,500 employees who operate natural gas infrastructure. The multi-million-dollar investment called "Flint Gas City" will be located at the Flint Service Center, 3201 E. Court St.

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History and Global Studies
Grades 9-12

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Mark Jacobson - focus on deploying wind, solar, demand response and energy efficiency; highlights downsides of nuclear
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/21/us-can-get-to-100percent-clean-energy-without-nuclear-power-stanford-professor-says.html

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A prominent Stanford University professor has outlined a roadmap for the United States to meet its total energy needs using 100% wind, water and solar by 2050.

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, has been promoting the idea of all renewable energy as the best way forward for more than a decade. His latest calculations toward this ambitious goal were recently published in the scientific journal Renewable Energy.

Transitioning to a clean-energy grid should happen by 2035, the study advises, with at least 80% of that adjustment completed by 2030. For the purposes of Jacobson's study, his team factored in presumed population growth and efficiency improvements in energy to envision what that would look like in 2050.

Jacobson first published a roadmap of renewable energy for all 50 states in 2015.

This recent update of that 2015 work has a couple of notable improvements.

First, Jacobson and his colleagues had access to more granular data for how much heat will be needed in buildings in every state for the coming two years in 30-second increments. "Before we didn't have that type of data available," Jacobson told CNBC.

Also, the updated data makes use of battery storage while the first set of calculations he did relied on adding turbines to hydropower plants to meet peak demand, an assumption that turned out to be impractical and without political support for that technology, Jacobson said.

Reliability of four-hour batteries

In the analysis, Jacobson and his team used battery-storage technology to compensate for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind power generation - those times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.

The Achilles' heel of a completely renewable grid, many argue, is that it is not stable enough to be reliable. Blackouts have become a particular concern, notably in Texas this year and during the summer of 2020 in California.

That's where four-hour batteries come in as a way to generate grid stability. "I discovered this all just because I have batteries in my own home," Jacobson told CNBC. "And I figured, oh, my God, this is so basic. So obvious. I can't believe nobody has figured this out."

Jacobson said that he observed his batteries stayed charged if they weren't plugged in when they are off.

To get more than four hours of charge, multiple four-hour batteries can be stacked to discharge sequentially. If a battery needs more charge output at one time than the battery can provide, then the batteries need to be used simultaneously, Jacobson told CNBC.

With this observation, Jacobson and his colleagues at Stanford produced scenarios showing it is possible to transition to a fully renewable system without any blackouts or batteries with ultra-long-duration battery technology.

That's key because technology for ultra-long-duration batteries that would hold energy for several days have yet to be commercialized. Start-ups like Form Energy are working to bring such batteries to market.

Planning, of course, is also key to keeping the grid stable. "Wind is variable, solar is variable," Jacobson said. "But it turns out, first of all, when you interconnect wind and solar over large areas, which is currently done, you smooth out the supply quite a bit. So it's because, you know, when the wind is not blowing in one place, it's usually blowing somewhere else. So over a large region, you have a smoother supply of energy."

Similarly, wind and solar power are complimentary. And hydropower "is perfect backup, because you can turn it on and off instantaneously," he said.

Also, there needs to be changes in pricing structures to motivate customers to do high energy demand activities at off-peak times.

"Demand response is a very big component of keeping the grid stable," Jacobson said. "It's used some today. But a lot of places a lot of states in the US right now, the electricity price is constant all day ... and that's a problem."

Calculating the breakdowns

So far, Jacobson and his team have run simulations for the all renewable, four-hour battery roadmaps for six individual states - Alaska, Hawaii, California, Texas, New York and Florida, and the contiguous 48 states taken together. (For the rest of the states, Jacobson has approximate simulations, which are available here.)

According to his models, California's energy mix would include 14.72% on-shore wind energy, 18.28% off-shore wind, 21.86% solar panels on roofs, 34.66% solar panels operated by a utility, 5.32% hydropower, 2.91% geothermal electricity and 0.25% wave energy.

Texas would be 37.66 on-shore wind, 14.77% off-shore wind, 20.87% roof solar, 23.85% solar panels operated by a utility, 0.1% hydropower and 0.19% wave energy.

Jacobson and his colleagues use three types of models for the calculations.

First, they use a spreadsheet model to project business-as-usual energy demand in each sector in each state to 2050 and then to convert the business-as-usual energy demand in 2050 to electricity provided by wind, water and solar.

Second, they use a weather model to predict the wind and solar fields in each state every 30 seconds. This weather-prediction model runs on a supercomputer and is written in Fortran computing language.

And the third component of his modeling matches the 2050 energy demand with the weather modeling of energy that can be supplied from wind, water and solar every 30 seconds. The third component is also written in Fortran, but this portion of the process can run on virtually any computer.

The resulting models use no fossil fuels, carbon capture, direct air capture, bioenergy, blue hydrogen or nuclear power.

And in that, Jacobson's roadmaps are different from many clean-energy proposals, which advocate for using all technologies possible.

"So we're trying to eliminate air pollution and global warming, and provide energy security. So those are the three purposes of our studies," Jacobson told CNBC. And that "is a little different than a lot of studies that only focus on greenhouse gases. So we're trying to eliminate air pollution as well, and also provides energy security."

Addressing all three issues has been Jacobson's focus for more than a decade. His first major work in the area was published in 2009 in Scientific American magazine, and four years later he appeared on NBC's "Late Night with David Letterman" to promote his renewable-only approach. Jacobson and longtime progressive political candidate Bernie Sanders co-authored a clean-energy op-ed in The Guardian in 2017.

Combating fears of blackouts

Jacobson knows that his viewpoint is not the loudest. The promise of next-generation nuclear power plants, for example, has gotten government and private funding of late.

Nuclear innovation is "pushed mostly by the industry people, people like Bill Gates, who has a huge investment in small modular reactors," Jacobson said. "He has a financial interest. And he wants to be known as somebody who tries to help solve the problem."

Gates addressed the criticism that he's a "technocrat" looking to solve climate change with new innovations, instead of with political legislation supporting technology like wind and solar which already exists, in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS' "60 Minutes" earlier in the year. "I wish all this funding of these companies wasn't necessary at all. Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won't even come close," Gates said.

Also, the timeline for getting some of these technologies to commercialization is too long to be useful. Gates' advanced reactor company, TerraPower, announced in November that it has chosen the frontier-era coal town Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the preferred location for its first demonstration reactor, which it aims to build by 2028.

"Even if it's seven years, that's just a demonstration plant," Jacobson said. "That's not even close to a commercial plant and on the scale we need."

TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque said the technology, specifically the Natrium nuclear reactor, will make a meaningful difference in combating climate change.

"The Natrium technology was chosen as the first mover of TerraPower's technologies because we believe it will be operational in time to offer significant benefit toward the country's decarbonization goals," Levesque said in a statement.

Winning over clean-energy skeptics afraid of blackouts is a challenge, but Jacobson believes he can convince people to accept that a future like he has modeled is possible.

Renewable solutions for long-distance ships and aircraft are not available yet, he said. "But those are on the drawing board. And we know technically it can be done just as those haven't been commercialized."

Education is a key hurdle, as Jacobson sees it. "I am optimistic. But the thing I find that's the biggest difficulty is the fact that it is an information issue, because most people are not aware, most people are not aware of what's possible," he said.

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U.S. can get to 100% clean energy with wind, water, solar and zero nuclear, Stanford professor says

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A prominent Stanford University professor has outlined a roadmap for the United States to meet its total energy needs using 100% wind, water and solar by 2050. Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, has been promoting the idea of all renewable energy as the best way forward for more than a decade.

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Prof Miranda Schreurs discusses risks from the absence proper management for nuclear waste. also worth thinking about risks from nuclear power plant (did we anticipate Ukraine nuclear power plants under attack by Putin)
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-658-08962-7_2

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Part of the Energiepolitik und Klimaschutz. Energy Policy and Climate Protection book series (EPKS)

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, when commercial nuclear energy was first being developed, it was portrayed as an almost miraculous and limitless form of energy that would in the future be able to meet the world's growing energy demands. While nuclear energy did indeed grow to become an important element of electricity systems in some countries, it has been plagued by many problems and challenges. Today, the nuclear energy industry is facing challenging times that are linked to past failures in nuclear reactors, in energy utilities' planning, competition from alternative sources of energy, concerns about safety, and the Achilles' heel of nuclear waste.

Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

References

Åhäll, K.-I., Linström, M., Holmstrand, O., Helander, B., and Goldstick, M. (1988). Nuclear Waste in Sweden - The Problem is Not Solved! The Peoples' Movement Against Nuclear Power and Weapons. http://www.folkkampanjen.se/nwfront.html#Contents, last accessed 11 August 2014.

Asahi Shimbun, The (2013, November 20). Government changes tack on finding disposal site for radioactive waste. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/politics/AJ201311200060, last accessed 8 August 2014.

Bergmans, A., Elam, M., Kos, D., Polič, M., Simmons, P.; Sundqvist, G., and Walls, J. (2008). Wanting the Unwanted: Effects of Public and Stakeholder Involvement in the Long-Term Management of Radioactive Waste and the Siting of Repository Facilities (Final Report CARL-Project). http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/carlresearch/docs/20080222112500ZGYI.pdf, last accessed 16 September 2014.

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Achim Brunnengräber & Miranda Schreurs

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Brunnengräber, A., Schreurs, M. (2015). Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Waste Governance Perspectives after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. In: Brunnengräber, A., Di Nucci, M., Isidoro Losada, A., Mez, L., Schreurs, M. (eds) Nuclear Waste Governance. Energiepolitik und Klimaschutz. Energy Policy and Climate Protection. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08962-7_2

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Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Waste Governance Perspectives after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

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Attack on federal agencies and deregulation

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Attack on federal agencies and deregulation

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How federal agencies are under attack is detailed in the chapter on Law. The 6:3 Supreme Court is advancing legal arguments to narrow the powers of federal agencies to regulate (for the protection of public health and the environment) and the powers of Congress to delegate powers to federal agencies to regulate. The attack on federal agencies (BLM, EPA, BSEE) are discussed in chapters on land and oceans. Investigative journalists have documented how corporate interests that want to limit regulatory powers have poured dark money to influence the selection of judges. See Jane Mayer's Dark Money.

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In Fighting King Coal , Shannon Elizabeth Bell examines an understudied puzzle within social movement theory: why so few of the many people who suffer from industry-produced environmental hazards and pollution rise up to participate in social movements aimed at bringing about social justice and industry accountability. Using the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia as a case study, Bell investigates the challenges of micromobilization through in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis, geospatial viewshed analysis, and an eight-month "Photovoice" project-an innovative means of studying, in real time, the social dynamics affecting activist involvement in the region. Although the Photovoice participants took striking photographs and wrote movingly about the environmental destruction caused by coal production, only a few became activists. Bell reveals the importance of local identities to the success or failure of local recruitment efforts in social movement struggles, ultimately arguing that, if the local identities of environmental justice movements are lost, the movements may also lose their power.

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Delusional, anti-capitalist tirade by a man who would like to see the world go back to subsistence farming. The author views the primitive, agrarian as an Eden and modern society as a debauchery. While many of the crimes he describes against the people of Appalachia are real, he views them all as inherent in capitalism, and the author says as much over and over and over.
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Don't Waste Your Time Delusional, anti-capitalist tirade by a man who would like to see the world go back to subsistence farming. The author views the primitive, agrarian as an Eden and modern society as a debauchery.

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Hinkley plant in the UK. 'Hinkley C now to cost £25bn-£27bn compared to an estimate of £18bn when it received the go-ahead in 2016.'' Vogtle plant in Georgia
https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-nuclear-expansion-price-tag-tops-30-billion/

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An updated financial report from one of the owners of the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion in Georgia shows the cost to build two new reactors has now topped $30 billion, more than double the original price tag expected for the project.

The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG), one of four groups with an ownership stake in the Vogtle expansion, on May 6 raised its total cost forecast for the project to $7.8 billion, up from $7.5 billion. The group's updated figures, when combined with cost estimates from the other owners, push the cost to build two new 1,100-MW reactors at the site in Waynesboro, Georgia, to at least $30.3 billion.

The owners' updated cost estimate does not include the $3.68 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the project's owners after Westinghouse declared bankruptcy, putting total spending for the expansion in the range of $34 billion.

More Cost Overruns

MEAG, which provides power to city-owned utilities, owns 22.7% of Vogtle. The group in the report released Friday said its cost forecast includes capital spending and borrowing costs. MEAG's new cost figure comes after Georgia Power, the lead owner of the project, in March announced another $920 million in cost overruns, putting its outlay for the project at an estimated $13.8 billion. Georgia Power, part of Southern Co., owns 45.7% of the project.

Oglethorpe Power Corp., which owns a 30% stake in the expansion, in March said its costs for the project had increased by $250 million, to $8.5 billion. The city of Dalton, Georgia, has a 1.6% ownership stake in Vogtle. Officials last year estimated Dalton's costs at $240 million.

The addition of two new AP1000 reactors at Vogtle is the only utility-scale nuclear power construction project underway in the U.S., and when complete would represent the first U.S. major new nuclear power plant project finished in more than 30 years. The cost of the expansion has ballooned due to construction delays and other problems, including workforce reductions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Years Behind Schedule

The project is years behind its original schedule and billions of dollars above its original budget. The two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were expected to enter service as early as 2016, at a cost of about $14 billion, after construction was approved in 2012.

Southern Co. CEO Tom Fanning in the company's first-quarter earnings call in late April said both new reactors should be online by the end of 2023, with fuel loading for Unit 3 expected later this year.

Plant Vogtle has two existing reactors, with combined generation capacity of 2,450 MW. Unit 1 began operation in 1987, with Unit 2 coming online in 1989.

Chuck Goodnight, who leads the U.S. Nuclear Energy team at Arthur D. Little as part of the firm's global Energy & Utilities Practice, recently told POWER the Vogtle expansion remains important to the nation's nuclear power sector. He acknowledged the project's cost overruns, and continued delays, but said, "The reason I think it should continue is a sunk cost issue. If we look back five years from now and say we didn't finish this project, and we were so close ... it would be a tremendous waste of money."

Goodnight added: "For Vogtle, I'm exactly excited to see those plants completed and come online. Southern [Co.] has a historic reputation, well-earned, they run the plants well. They've been good at this. I would be confident that when they get these across the finish line, we're looking at 80 years of 2,400 MW of generation. That's exciting."

'Cost Sharing is Imminent'

Each ownership group, in a procedural move, voted in late February to continue construction. The three minority ownership groups in 2018 signed an agreement with Georgia Power that said if costs reach a certain level, the other owners can choose to freeze their costs at that figure. Georgia Power would take a larger ownership share of the projects if the utility pays more of the costs of the expansion.

MEAG on Friday said it wants to freeze its costs, though the group did not specify what amount it would want to shift to Georgia Power. Oglethorpe earlier said it wants to freeze its costs at $8.1 billion, with the group selling a 2% stake to Georgia Power in exchange for Georgia Power paying an additional $400 million toward construction.

Southern Co. earlier said it will pay at least $440 million more to cover other owner's costs; another $460 million in costs is being disputed. Georgia Power has questioned the cost threshold of its liability, and has said it should not have to pay other owners' share of costs related to issues with the pandemic.

Talks are continuing among the parties regarding those costs. Oglethorpe CEO Mike Smith in March said, "Cost sharing is imminent, however, until the parties reach agreement, Oglethorpe will continue to pay its full share of the construction costs as billed by Georgia Power, but will do so under contractual protest."

-Darrell Proctor is a senior associate editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).

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Vogtle Nuclear Expansion Price Tag Tops $30 Billion

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An updated financial report from one of the owners of the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion in Georgia shows the cost to build two new reactors has now topped $30 billion, more than double the original price tag expected for the project. The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG), one of four ...

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nuclear plants closed in france because of corrosion issues

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nuclear plants closed in france because of corrosion issues

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https://www.montelnews.com/news/1322042/corrosion-edf-rvle-les-4-units-quelle-arrtera-en-2023

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Les dates de ces arrêts, qui surviendront au deuxième trimestre 2023, doivent être publiées imminemment sur Remit, a déclaré le directeur adjoint de la direction production nucléaire d’EDF Régis Clément lors d’une conférence de presse à Paris.

Le groupe français entend vérifier le reste de ces 56 réacteurs d’ici fin 2023, voire début 2024, durant les arrêts planifiés qui seront prolongés et les visites décennales, dont sept sont programmées pour le reste de cette année, a-t-il ajouté.

Plus tôt jeudi, EDF a révisé jeudi les dates de treize arrêts prévus dans les centrales nucléaires en 2022-23 en raison de contrôles et des réparations liés à la corrosion.

Problème de design
M. Clément a par ailleurs affirmé que la cause « prépondérante » de fissures dues à de la corrosion sur les tuyauteries auxiliaires au circuit primaire de certains réacteurs du parc nucléaire était le design de ces circuits, développé par la filiale d’EDF Framatome.

« Aujourd’hui ce qu’on a comme conviction claire, c’est que le design [des circuits auxiliaires] nous apparaît comme une cause prépondérante », a-t-il dit.

Et « la configuration des lignes d’un circuit d’injection de sécurité (RIS) sur un palier N4 (1,5 GW), 1 300 MW ou 900 MW est complétement différente », a-t-il ajouté.

Les lignes des circuits de 900 MW – conçues par le fabricant d’équipements nucléaires américain Westinghouse – sont par exemple « plus courtes », donc beaucoup moins affectées par les problèmes de corrosion sous contrainte (CSC), a expliqué le responsable de la production.

Au contraire, celles de paliers 1 300 MW et N4 – dont le design a été effectué par l’entreprise française spécialisée dans le nucléaire Framatome – sont plus touchées, car plus « plus longues ».

« Plus le circuit est long, plus ce phénomène [de contrainte sur la tuyauterie] s’amplifie », a précisé M. Clément. Il est dû au fait que l’eau du circuit primaire, plus chaude, pénètre dans le circuit RIS et ce mélange à son eau plus froide, ce qui engendre des contraintes et, au final, de la corrosion.

Jusqu’à maintenant, « aucune trace de corrosion n’a ainsi été retrouvée sur les circuits RIS » des 900 MW, des circuits importants en termes de sûreté, a-t-il affirmé. Il a toutefois confirmé que les ingénieurs d’EDF avaient retrouvé de la corrosion sur le circuit de refroidissement à l’arrêt RRA d’une de ces tranches, Chinon 3, comme une source syndicale l'avait signalé.

Cette découverte porte à quatre les unités du parc pour lesquels de la corrosion a été clairement identifiée sur un total de douze réacteurs subissant des contrôles actuellement, selon le responsable.

Interrogé par Montel, l'expert et critique du nucléaire Yves Marignac a de son côté estimé que s'il était plausible que les tranches de 900 MW soit moins affectées par de la corrosion, il était « très prématuré » de tirer des conclusions car de nombreux contrôles restent à venir.

Selon lui, les problèmes de design « interrogent sur le fait que l’ingénierie française n’ait pas repéré ces éléments lors de la qualification » des matériels.

Les portions de tuyaux où de la corrosion a été détectée devant être remplacées, EDF a récemment transmis son dossier de réparation à l’Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN) qui doit se prononcer dans les prochaines semaines.

« On aimerait disposer de ce feu vert (…) courant du mois de juin ou fin juin au plus tard », a dit M. Clément.

L’électricien, qui a revu son objectif nucléaire pour cette année à son niveau le plus bas depuis 34 ans, à 280-300 TWh, estime néanmoins que sa stratégie de vérification durant les arrêts planifiés « permet de garantir l’exigence de sûreté du parc nucléaire ».