Equilibrium/Sustainability — Solar panels to cover California canals

by Sharon Udasin and Saul Elbein - 08/25/22 5:56 PM ET

A set of solar panels will soon be afloat in two key California canals — in a bid to both reduce evaporation and provide power to the state’s electricity grid.

The $20 million Project Nexus, funded by the state, is deploying solar panels in two canals about 100 miles inland from San Francisco, according to Reuters.

The first of the two pilot projects is a 500-foot span of a canal in Hickman, while the second is a mile-long straightaway in nearby Ceres, Reuters reported.

If eventually scaled up, the initiative could save billions of gallons of otherwise evaporated water while providing electricity to millions of homes, according to Reuters.

Lining the canals with solar panels would also eliminate the need to use other land for such purposes, as well as reduce aquatic weed and algae growth, University of California Merced project scientist Brandi McKuin told Reuters.

The project is based on a similar venture in the west Indian state of Gujarat, but is the first of its kind in the U.S., according to Reuters.

Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. We’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Send us tips and feedback. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Today we’ll start with new findings on Mars by NASA’s Perseverance rover, followed by a look at why Texas’s head oil regulator is crowing about his state’s war on “woke capital.” Then we’ll see why deadly heat might be here to stay.

Rover reveals water-altered rocks on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent the past year collecting Martian rock samples — an endeavor that could provide long-awaited answers about the planet’s geological history.

And while scientists will have to wait a decade for the arrival of those samples back to Earth, they are already making some key discoveries by means of the rover.

Surprise discovery: A surprise finding, presented in a study in Science on Thursday, was the presence of “igneous cumulate rocks,” the authors explained.

What are those? Such rocks form by the cooling of molten magma, according to the scientists.

They’re the best type of rocks for precise age determination.
The rocks also show evidence of having been altered by water.

Probing past life: “From a sampling perspective, this is huge,” co-lead author David Shuster, a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

The evidence of water alteration is something that scientists “are very excited about,” added Shuster.
This finding, he continued, could provide insight into the environment that “could potentially have supported life at some point.”

Where did Perseverance find the rocks? The rover explored four sites on the floor of the Jezero Crater, just north of the Martian equator, according to the study.

Jezero was an ideal target because it contained what appeared to be a river delta that formed inside a lake bed.
Such a landscape could provide insight into how long ago water flowed on the planet’s surface.

What specifics can the rocks reveal? “One great value of the igneous rocks we collected is that they will tell us about when the lake was present in Jezero,” co-lead author Kenneth Farley, a geochemist at Caltech, said in a statement.

This knowledge, Farley continued, will help scientists address some major questions:

When was the planet’s climate conducive to lakes and rivers on its surface?
When did Mars develop the very cold and dry conditions that exist today?

A decade of anticipation: While some of this research can occur remotely, precise calculations as to when geological layers formed can only be revealed by lab analysis on Earth, the authors acknowledged.

But that will involve very long-distance shipping.

The European Space Agency’s “Earth Return Orbiter” and NASA’s “Sample Retrieval Lander” will carry the samples back to Earth, and have respective launch dates of Fall 2027 and Summer 2028, according to NASA.
The samples are expected to arrive on Earth in 2033, the agency confirmed.

Texas oil regulator joins war against ESG

Texas’s leading oil and gas regulator on Thursday applauded a new push by the state against companies deemed environmental, social and governance (ESG) “extremists” like BlackRock and UBS.

While these companies have continued to inject billions into fossil fuel development, the Texas Railroad Commission accused them of attempts to starve the industry of capital.
It’s the latest attack on an investment strategy that Republican leaders increasingly tar as financially irresponsible and politically motivated.

Calling on reinforcements: “I’m thrilled to see my conservative colleagues join the defense against ‘woke’ Wall Street bankers,” Texas Railroad Commission Chairman Wayne Christian said in the statement.

“Rally the troops: Here in Texas is where we will draw the line against ESG’s detrimental impact on oil and gas,” he added.

Catching up: Christian’s statement is part of a larger state campaign against banks that the Republican leadership accuses of boycotting oil and gas.

On Wednesday, State Comptroller Glenn Hegar banned state and local entities from doing business with 10 banks that the state accused of boycotting oil and gas, the Texas Tribune reported.
That’s part of a larger Republican move against ESG, which statewide party members portray in militaristic terms as a threat to fossil fuels, as The Hill reported over the weekend.

“I am leading the charge on this, but there is an army behind me,” West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore told The Hill.

Falling on deaf ears: Texas’s ban is “not a fact-based judgment,” a BlackRock spokesperson told the Tribune.

“BlackRock does not boycott fossil fuels — investing over $100 billion in Texas energy companies on behalf of our clients proves that,” the spokesperson added.

To read the full story, please click here.

Deadly heat to surge by 2100: study

Much of the world will face an uptick in deadly heat waves by the end of the century, even if countries manage to meet their agreed-upon emission reduction goals, a new study has found.

Widespread heat: Such heat events will be three to 10 times more common in 2100 than they are today in the U.S., Western Europe, China and Japan, according to the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday.

And that’s regardless of efforts to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius
(3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Global commitments may not be enough: As part of the Paris climate agreement — signed at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference — participating countries agreed to adhere to the 2-degree Celsius limit.

To improve their chance of success, each nation submitted its own climate action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
But the authors of Thursday’s study fear that these efforts will be insufficient to minimize an increase in temperatures.

Rarities could become the norm: “The record-breaking heat events of recent summers will become much more common in places like North America and Europe,” lead author Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, a doctoral student at the University of Washington at the time of the study, said in a statement.

“For many places close to the equator, by 2100 more than half the year will be a challenge to work outside,” added Zeppetello, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

Extreme danger: Zeppetello and his colleagues evaluated projections for the future “heat index” — a combination of air temperature and humidity that measures the impact of heat on the human body.

A “dangerous” heat index is defined by the National Weather Service as
103 degrees Fahrenheit.
An “extremely dangerous” heat index is 124 degrees Fahrenheit and is considered unsafe to humans for any amount of time.

By 2053, conditions above 125 Fahrenheit will be at least occasionally present in over 1,000 U.S. counties, The Hill reported earlier this month.

Tropics, equator at greatest risk: Looking toward the tropics, the authors found that even if countries met their Paris agreement commitments, these regions could see their “dangerous” days double — covering half the year.

And in worst-case circumstances — in which emissions remain unchecked until 2100 — “extremely dangerous” conditions could become common near the equator, particularly in in sub-Saharan Africa and India, the authors determined.

To read the full story, please click here.

Australia’s Black Summer fires fortified ozone hole

Australia’s massive 2020 Black Summer bushfire, prolonged a spinning hole in the ozone above Antarctica a new study has found.

The blazes around New Years 2020 were particularly large, giving birth to what the report described as a massive smoke infused thunderstorm.

Like an eruption: The study, published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, showed how the massive fires taking place under climate change can grow to the scale of meteorologically significant events.

Such growth can influence weather and atmospheric phenomenon far from the site of the fires.
One such storm created a vortex that maintained shape for two months, helping inject, nearly a million tons of soot and other particulate into the stratosphere
The last such soot-caused warming event was the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

Heating air, killing ozone: But the fires also had a contradictory, cooling impact — which helped give new strength to an old environmental threat.

BUSHFIRES BRING BACK BLAST FROM THE PAST

The chemicals released by fire — like those emitted by volcanos — are also destructive to the ozone layer, which shields the earth from solar radiation, the scientists noted.

The ozone layer is a high-altitude belt marked by higher than usual presence of ozone, or triads of oxygen atoms fused together.
An unusual and strangely stable “hole” in the ozone above Antarctica reached near record proportions in the period before the fires — and stuck around unusually long after them.

That Antarctic “hole” is the same one that aroused alarm in the 1980s, leading to the banning of the refrigerant chemicals chlorofluorocarbons under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

The hole is actually an area of lower ozone concentrations above Antarctica.
The layer is not expected to fully recover until 2041.

By 2021, the hole had grown to larger than average — reaching the size of North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

End result: The study released Thursday argues that the bushfires were responsible for that growth, as they disrupted a complex relationship between high altitude ozone layers and the polar vortex.

The breakdown of ozone by chemicals that the bushfires released helped keep the existing ozone hole in place longer than usual.

To read the full story, please click here.

Thursday Threats

Pakistan’s “epic” flood disaster impacts tens of millions, wolf pups carry the weight of their species’ survival in the wild and how climate change cranked up the damage from Hurricane Harvey.

Thirty million impacted by Pakistan’s record monsoon

Pakistan’s climate change minister said the country’s record monsoon rains have affected more than 30 million people in just a few weeks and put the country’s south “underwater,” Reuters reported. Minister Sherry Rehman called the flooding “a climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions,” according to Reuters.

Mexican wolves survival may rest on a few tiny pups

Conservation groups transported Mexican wolf pups from their birthplace in the El Paso Zoo to a new home with a wild pack in the mountains — part of an attempt to keep the critically endangered population from vanishing, The Washington Post reported. “Rarely is conservation so hands-on,” a zoo veterinarian said, rubbing one of the pups with a wet cotton ball to encourage her to urinate.

Climate change worsened Hurricane Harvey’s damage, with disproportionate effects

Without the impacts of climate change, 50-percent fewer homes in Houston’s Harris County would have been flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, according to a study in Nature Communications. The research, from Louisiana State University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also found patterns of racial and economic disparities among those most affected.

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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