News & Articles on Fossil Fuels
Fossil Fuels ares not renewable, obviously. They are listed here for organizational reasons. I don’t write about fossil fuels–as a rule. However, fossil fuels and those who promote them are not going away quietly. Thus, I felt it necessary to include the topic to distinguish articles that are not about nuclear power or renewable energy.

A Feast of Fools: What happens when politics gets lost?
By
Alan Simpson
Sunak’s next distraction will be ‘pylon wars’. Thousands of miles on high voltage cabling are needed to ship electricity from off-shore wind farms to towns and cities. This requires hundreds of thousands of new pylons. Everything that was off-shore and out-of-sight suddenly becomes an environmental battleground. Communities are already mobilising to challenge the process.

Zeroing In: Pathways to an affordable net-zero grid in Alberta
By
External Source
By the end of this year, Alberta will have successfully phased out coal-fired generation, which was the dominant source of electricity just six years ago. Alberta is already becoming the renewable energy capital of Canada. More than three-quarters of solar and wind generation capacity built in Canada last year was in Alberta.

How Many Things Must One Analyst Get Wrong In Order To Proclaim A Convenient Decarbonization Minerals Shortage?
By
Michael Barnard
Yesterday, as I’m writing this, Dave Borlace of Just Have a Think dropped a new video. This one was debunking the somewhat infamous Simon Michaux un-peer reviewed document which purported to prove that there weren’t enough minerals in the world to enable us to get off of fossil fuels.

The Climate Aspect of Plastics (and Other Nasty Tidbits of the Cycle)
By
External Source
Plastics! The 1970’s movie, “The Graduate,” talked about the business prospect and the future of plastics. Did anyone at that point in time have any idea how much our use of plastics would grow? Plastics have contributed to the convenience of our lives while also adding to a major pollution problem. Walk through a grocery store and it is incredible how many products are packaged in plastics. Not all plastics can be recycled and not all communities take all types of plastics to be recycled. As such, the trash problem grows and grows. Much of this plastic trash ends up in the marine environment and now turning into micro and nano plastics entering the food chain. But do enough people know or understand the climate aspect of the continued use of plastics?

The revolving door at public utilities commissions? It’s alive and well
By
External Source
Of the 473 commissioners for whom Heern could find information on what they did after they left utility regulation, 50% of them went to work for one of the industries they regulated, or in an industry-adjacent role such as consulting. “That revolving door is definitely alive and well,” Heern told me.
Hydrogen Pipelines Studies Keep Making The Same Mistakes
By
Michael Barnard
Recently a variety of studies and memes have been expressing an odd distortion of reality, supported strongly by oil and gas industry lobbying and PR groups. The claim is that gas pipelines move a lot more energy a lot more cheaply than high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission.