Plea for Help

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Tuesday February 20, 2024 · 6:56 PM PST

2024/02/20 · 18:56

Hello, all,

It seems that a growing number of kossacks have used this site to appeal for help to the community, and I’ve decided to do the same. In some cases, the user or a close family member has been gravely ill and in need of emergency medical help. That’s not the case with me. My emergency is more mundane: nearly three months out of work, having just gained full custody of my kids. And that’s the rub: my kids being with me full-time—something I’ve wanted for years—means my bread-and-butter income of hopping on a boat and mapping the sea floor isn’t possible. Meanwhile, it’s proving harder to get a full-time job helping build wind farms than I expected. (And like Jack Nicklaus, I’m racking up an increasingly impressive string of runner-up finishes.)

I simply want to keep my kids housed and fed during a very bleak stretch. When another job last month fell through (I contract independently), I signed up immediately to substitute teach at my local school district. It’s vacation week now and I won’t be paid for a while. So I’m trying to navigate a short-term crisis.

Any help at all which any of you can provide, I’ll be grateful for for as long as I live.

If you’re willing to help out, and prefer PayPal/Venmo, my address is:

mjwsutherland at gmail dot com .

Not-Quite-Daily Climate Awareness The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022

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Wednesday August 17, 2022 · 6:00 AM PDT

2022/08/17 · 06:00

Now that President Biden has signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, let’s take a quick look at the environmental provisions and see what they offer. The entire Act is in five parts: Subtitle A, Deficit Reduction; Subtitle B, Prescription Drug Pricing Reform; Subtitle C, Affordable Care Act Subsidies; and Subtitle D, Energy Security—that’s the one which concerns us right now.

agramante

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Sunday August 14, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/14 · 05:00

So, here we are! At the end of a year (plus a few days) of daily blurbs on science, climate, and climate’s impact on human life. When I think of the global situation, such as I’ve seen and learned of it, I think it’s grim but far from hopeless. We worry that, collectively, we humans can’t overcome our own natures to always want more. Even when it seems at times that most of the problem in global warming comes from a small subset of profiteers, even that is not entirely complete or honest. To borrow from a (REALLY) old Doonesbury cartoon, most of us don’t have the ability to create a massive oil shortage with a single phone call. Individually we don’t have that kind of influence. But collectively, we might.

agramante

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Saturday August 13, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/13 · 05:00

Economics is the study of the creation, transfer, and destruction of wealth. Natural resource economics (NRE) is a sub-discipline of this focusing on the interaction between human economic systems and the natural world. It grew out of the concern for operating the human economy within naturally sustainable bounds.

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Friday August 12, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/12 · 05:00

The Department of Defense (DoD) is charged with protecting US interests around the world. Part of that mission, as emphasized in several directives within the past decade-plus, is adapting to the changing climate around the world.

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Thursday August 11, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/11 · 05:00

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) for wind farms are like those for electric vehicles (EVs): there are many available (not as many as for the EVs, to be sure), so it would take some time to become familiar with the entire, or even most of, the body of work. For this installment I’ve chosen a 2015 study from Denmark, being reasonably recent, in a country which has led the charge toward both on- and offshore wind energy for several years, and is home to the European leader in wind power installations, Örsted.

agramante

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Wednesday August 10, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/10 · 05:00

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) for electric vehicles (EVs—let’s hear it for acronyms!), and to be honest, I can’t claim to be any kind of expert in them, or in the relative merits of the many different ones available. The same premise in LCAs holds true of any peer-reviewed science: transparency in sources and methods allows other researchers to verify or dispute your work. Scientists can be a jealous lot, so this system works reasonably well. A number of LCAs have been suggested to me and I have to admit I’ve only gone through a few. With time, I’ll review more, but unlike Tony Stark, I didn’t become an expert overnight. So the rest of you Avengers can just lay off for now. I need an espresso.

agramante

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Tuesday August 09, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/09 · 05:00

A life cycle assessment (LCA) is a systematic look at the environmental impacts of a product, installation, service or process. It focuses on energy and materials, both as input and output. Industries tasked with producing them complain about the time and expense, which has led to streamlining of the process through the decades. LCAs focus on one specific item, and its overall environmental impact from creation to decomposition. An LCA is not location-specific. It will examine the effects of resource acquisition, transport, manufacture, use, and waste disposal—wherever they occur. Essentially, an LCA answers the question: “how green is it?”

agramante

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Monday August 08, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/08 · 05:00

On June 6, 1978—more than 44 years ago—an internal report entitled “The Greenhouse Effect” was delivered to the vice president the Exxon Research and Engineering Company. The report itself was the written version of the presentation by the author, J.F. Black, to the Exxon board the previous July (1977). It details then-current (1978) science on global warming, and is positively damning of the petroleum producer’s deliberate fraud in concealing, refusing to act on, and actively hindering action on global warming. Exxon’s internal report is the clearest example we have of a major oil producer knowingly putting profits above all consideration of global welfare.

agramante

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Sunday August 07, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/07 · 05:00

Cryptocurrency is a digital form of money based in an encrypted (coded) data string stored across a distributed network of many computers. The distributed data string, or distributed ledger, is known as “blockchain”. The blockchain is a complete record of all buying and selling transactions performed on the currency, with individual transactions linked into one long “chain” of data. Because it is encrypted and stored on a distributed peer-to-peer (i.e. no central, coordinating computer) network—two powerful layers of security—it is extremely difficult to steal or double-sell. Theoretically, cryptocurrency offers a secure form of money independent of government interference.

agramante

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Saturday August 06, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/06 · 05:00

Technological development and innovation can be double-edged swords, depending on their application. The drive for more efficient and low- to no-carbon energy sources has provided undeniable progress in lightening society’s carbon footprint. However, as with the mixed benefits of computerizing industry and services: increased speed and efficiency can also lead to higher overall consumption as the market grows along with, or beyond, its greater speed and efficiency. Improved technology by itself is not sufficient to avert the climate crisis.

agramante

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Friday August 05, 2022 · 5:00 AM PDT

2022/08/05 · 05:00

International cooperation on environmental issues has led to demonstrable results on the global scale. One of the best examples, and directly relevant to the issue of climate change, is the handling in the 1970’s and 80’s of acid rain, the product of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emitted from smokestacks which made rain droplets acidic. This acidified water destroyed forests, killed fish populations and damaged buildings (particularly old and ancient) around the world. The 1979 Long-Range Transboundary Air-Pollution (LRTAP) addressed this and related problems, which states parties (including the United States and much of Europe) then remediated, dramatically reducing the problem.

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Plea for Help

Not-Quite-Daily Climate Awareness The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022

365 Days of Climate Awareness 366 – Conclusion

365 Days of Climate Awareness 365 – Natural Resource Economics

365 Days of Climate Awareness 364 – US Department of Defense Climate Change Readiness

365 Days of Climate Awareness 363 – Life Cycle Assessment of a Wind Farm

365 Days of Climate Awareness 362 – Life Cycle Assessment of Electric Vehicles

365 Days of Climate Awareness 361 – Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs)

365 Days of Climate Awareness 360 – The Exxon Climate Fraud

365 Days of Climate Awareness 359 – Cryptocurrency and global warming

365 Days of Climate Awareness 358 – Innovation and Technology Development and Transfer

365 Days of Climate Awareness 357 – International Cooperation