When most people think of the global financial system, they think of the investment banks, the hedge funds, and the distressed-asset investment firms. These are the frenetic first-movers in the market, the players who most profit from uncertainty and panic. Pension funds prefer much longer time horizons. They eschew long-term uncertainty, and in this they are the most obvious financial allies of those who are working to curb climate change.
.. Last year, a coalition of larger and more forward-looking funds, including BlackRock, CalPERS, PensionDanmark, and Cathay Financial Holdings, representing twenty-four trillion dollars in assets, issued a statement calling on government leaders to provide “stable, reliable and economically meaningful carbon pricing that helps redirect investment commensurate with the scale of the climate change challenge,” as well as develop a plan “to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels.”
Inside the Power Plant Fueling America’s Drought
The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water — lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles — has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand.
.. In a series of reports, ProPublica has examined how the West’s water crisis is as much a product of human error and hubris as it is of nature.
.. But in pushing for dramatic changes at the Navajo plant, the EPA underestimated how intertwined the plant had become with every aspect of life in the region — from providing its power to moving its water to buttressing the tribal economy
.. The West is full of people like him. Indeed, as the region gets more crowded, drier and hotter, there is talk not of living within the current constraints but of engineering new ways to gather additional supplies of water. The West must continue to grow, Kyl says, or it will begin slipping backward. He thinks it will be necessary to shoot silver iodide into the clouds in an effort to make it rain or to build plants to desalt ocean water.
.. Wockner and others say the elaborate projects built along the river amount to expensive distractions. The more permanent solution: Put the Colorado’s limited water to the best purpose, by planting more efficient crops, irrigating with modern equipment, writing laws that incentivize conservation, and reducing energy spent moving water over large distances.
Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.
Currently, utilities plan their operations around the busiest day of the year, making sure they have the capacity to meet peak demand on the hottest August afternoon. But as Green Mountain Power modernizes one home after another—so far it’s enabled a few dozen fully remodelled “E-homes” and more than a hundred partial makeovers—the utility gains the potential ability to briefly turn down water heaters and air-conditioners during high-usage periods. This “demand management” allows the utility to avoid peak charges from the regional power grid and can save it hundreds of dollars per customer each year.
.. Aguably, the era’s most disruptive technology is the solar panel. Its price has dropped ninety-nine per cent in the past four decades, and roughly seventy-five per cent in the past six years; it now produces power nearly as cheaply as coal or gas, a condition that energy experts refer to as “grid parity.”
.. But many utilities see residential solar power as an existential threat. In 2013, an industry trade group called the Edison Electric Institute warned that utilities face what company executives were quick to call “a death spiral.” As customers began to generate more of their own electricity from the solar panels on their roofs, utility revenues would begin to decline, and the remaining customers would have to pay more for the poles and wires that keep the grid alive. That would increase the incentive for the remaining customers to leave.
Since the death-spiral session, utilities around the country have sought to slow the growth of solar: by supporting laws and regulations that would reduce targets for renewable energy; by ending “net metering” laws that force utilities to pay solar customers retail prices for the surplus energy they put back on the grid; by imposing “connection fees” to make up for lost revenues. Much of the campaigning has been spurred by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council and funded by various groups linked to the Koch brothers and their fossil-fuel fortune.
.. “The utilities were always convinced that they could throttle down solar just by tuning down the rebate they were offering,” Rive said. “What caught them off guard was when costs came down to the point where we didn’t need their rebate for solar to make sense.
.. You have to pay your dues, come up through the ranks. You become C.E.O. when you have five years, max, left. Some of them are just not worrying about ten, fifteen years in the future.”
.. But, in the odd world of regulated utilities, a company like Con Ed traditionally makes money by building more stuff: put in a billion-dollar substation and you can “rate base” it, making customers pay the cost, plus a ten-per-cent markup, for decades.
.. “It’s kind of a Hannah Arendt thing,” he said. “There’s not a lot of intentional evil in utilities. But we’ve created a golden cage for them, protected them from enormous trends.”
Frozen Assets: The Newest Front in Global Espianage Is One of The Least Habitable Locales On Earth —Thre Arctic
Like Kristoffersen and Tholfsen, the Orenburg was there to drill into undersea ranges in order to collect geological samples from the Lomonosov Ridge, a little-known underwater mountain chain that rises about 12,000 feet above the seabed and stretches for more than 1,000 miles. Under and around this formation lies nearly a quarter of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel resources.
.. Worth an estimated $17.2 trillion, an amount roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. economy, these resources have been trapped for eons under a dome of ice and snow. But now, with the Arctic warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, that dome is getting smaller and smaller. According to scientists at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, about 65 percent of the ice layer above the Lomonosov Ridge melted between 1975 and 2012.
.. The response? Three months later, in November, a Russian government spokesman announced that Moscow will build a drone base slightly south of the Arctic Circle and just 420 miles away from mainland Alaska.
.. With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect.