Tilley's Track
by Prof Allen Tilley
Disclaimer: The material in this section is not necessarily the policy of the Sierra Club. The referenced materials are the responsibility of the publishers/writers and Mr. Tilley’s analysis is intended to provoke thought and action, but not necessarily endorsed.
Sent 4/9
1. The Antarctic is experiencing a series of unprecedented rises in temperature. If those continue past August we will have entered a new and dangerous state of the climate. The rate of sea level rise will increase. Another effect of the rise is to diminish the algae which grow around and under the floating ice shelves. They are food for the krill, which deposit their bodies and the CO2 they carry on the ocean floor. The un-sequestered CO2 will now remain in the air, and the animals who eat the krill will decline as their food supply diminishes. Our climate models have been based on slender data from the Antarctic already and now may require revision if Antarctica continues to surprise us. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/06/simply-mind-boggling-world-record-temperature-jump-in-antarctic-raises-fears-of-catastrophe
2. General Motors is in talks with Chinese battery manufacturer CATL to build plants in the US or Mexico to produce their LFP (lithium iron phosphate) battery. Ford has already announced a $3.5 billion investment in a similar plant in Michigan. The LFP battery is cheaper, safer, and much longer lasting than current lithium batteries. LFP batteries use no cobalt or other rare materials. https://electrek.co/2024/03/28/gm-catl-in-talks-cheaper-lfp-battery-tech-joint-plant/
CATL has announced that they will manufacture an LFP battery which will last for almost a million miles and carries a 15-year warranty. The battery is intended for commercial vehicles such as buses and trucks. https://electrek.co/2024/04/03/catl-launches-new-ev-battery-last-1-million-miles-15-yrs/
Sent 3/21
Florida's Citizens Property was founded in 2002 in the administration of Jeb Bush. It was intended to offer insurance to coastal property owners who could not find a commercial insurer. Insurance was hard to come by because risk was driving insurance costs beyond reach of the current market. Citizens Property passed that risk on to, as the name indicates, the citizens of Florida. If a disastrous hurricane were to exhaust the resources of Citizens Property, all property insurances owners in the state would be assessed per capita so that all homeowners would be required to pay the same amount, no matter what their resources. A webinar organized by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) this week reported that a recent study found that a major hurricane in Miami would now result in a $60,000 assessment of the state's homeowners.
So-called Fair Price insurance like Citizens Property, actuarily unsound as it is, may be found in 36 states now. In 21 of those states, according to the ELI's webinar, it is not even stated where the overrun cash would come from. A good guess is that the states will seek federal relief, and everyone would be asked, in effect, to support the uninsured risk of others. The bill could be fierce and destabilizing.
Obviously, many people in Florida would be bankrupted by a $60,000 assessment; many more will be reluctant to support beach property owners. As our failure to cope with the climate crisis is now driving a mounting number of property disasters, the cumulative financial risk is taking the shape of a national crisis. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has requested from Florida the data to support a public analysis of the situation in that state; apparently 35 other states await attention. https://thinc.blog/2024/03/20/senators-probe-florida-insurance-fund-for-climate-risk/
Sent 3/2
Success in controlling greenhouse gas emissions alone will not take us to a safe place. We also need somehow to draw down and sequester some of the carbon we have already put and are putting into the atmosphere. That will require a scalable, efficient technology, featuring a secure and harmless way to sequester the carbon. It will help if it is cheap. Methods which are covert ways of continuing to burn fossil fuels while capturing some of their emissions need not apply.
A couple of years ago SeaChange, developed at UCLA, looked as if it might rise to the occasion. Electrolysis chambers dragged by ships and powered by solar cells would fix aquatic carbon in mineral form and release it to the sea bottom. Now, after successful pilots, most recently in Singapore, the project has resulted in fixed plants along the shore and SeaChange has been renamed. Equatic and the UCLA Institute for Carbon Management are moving through a development process with the goal of scaling and commercializing the process globally.
The process produces hydrogen as a byproduct; it will be used to drive the plants once they are in operation. The plants remove atmospheric as well as aquatic carbon. https://samueli.ucla.edu/ucla-institute-for-carbon-management-and-equatic-to-build-the-worlds-largest-ocean-based-carbon-removal-plant-in-singapore/
Equatic is already the target of distortion and dismissal. Inside Climate News provides some examples, perhaps through confusion with other aquatic proposals. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01032024/todays-climate-ocean-carbon-capture-climate-change/ I take the propaganda effort which appears to lie behind the article as an indication of a promising future for Equatic and UCLA’s mission. At least someone appears to see Equatic as a threat to business as usual.
Sent 1/23
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine this month published Community-Driven Relocation: Recommendations for the US Gulf Coast Region and Beyond. https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2024/01/recovery-agencies-should-proactively-plan-for-community-relocation-before-and-after-climate-disasters-says-new-report
The report (linked at the bottom of the news notice above) looks to be occasioned by a Community-Driven Relocation Subcommittee established by the Biden Administration in 2022 and co-chaired by representatives from FEMA and the Department of the Interior. https://www.fema.gov/fact-sheet/fema-efforts-advancing-community-driven-relocation
It is time for federal agencies such as FEMA, US Army Corps of Engineers, and US Department of Housing and Urban Development to foster proactive planning for the relocation of communities under pressure from climate change. “For successful relocation, community input should drive the planning process, and policies at the federal, state, and local levels should focus on prioritizing well-being and the establishment of equitable decision-making processes.”
Relocation now is commonly undertaken reactively as disaster recovery. Pressures from wealthy interests will result only in piecemeal approaches, such as the current bill in the FL legislature to increase the general indebtedness for costly coastal property through expansion of Citizens Property Insurance. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/florida-lawmakers-looking-to-raise-citizens-property-coverage-cap-for-homes-valued-over-700k/ar-AA1n525E Just and equitable reestablishment of communities will result only from careful and deliberate planning. Determined planning now would allow us to establish sustainable communities in which we could look forward to living.