Thursday, May 30, 2019

Forget Paris: On the Second Anniversary of Trump’s Pullout

Two years ago, President Trump announced he would begin the formal process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. At the time, the media and climate alarmists went ballistic—for example, famed physicist Stephen Hawking said Trump’s action would push Earth “over the brink.” And yet, as I’ll show in this article, the Paris Agreement has always been a giant exercise in symbolism over substance; it wouldn’t come close to solving the climate “problem,” even on the terms of the alarmists. Whether one thinks climate change is a minor issue to watch, or a full-blown existential crisis, either way Trump’s action should be welcomed. By challenging the reverence for the Paris Agreement, Trump’s pullout gave permission for scientists and others to think about alternative approaches rather than globally-coordinated political control over energy and transportation.

Paris Agreement Was Going to “Fail” Even On Its Own Terms

The most important point to emphasize is that the Paris Agreement was not going to deliver humanity from the scourge of climate change, if we stipulate the alarmist rhetoric for the sake of argument. From the website ClimateActionTracker.org, here is the latest estimate of the Paris pledges and the implied level of global warming through the year 2100:

As the figure shows, even if all of the countries (including the U.S., which is still technically part of the Agreement) met their Paris pledges, warming is projected to hit 3.0 degrees Celsius—well beyond the “safe” levels of either 1.5 or at most 2.0 degrees, which are the now-fashionable targets.

What’s worse, the figure also shows that the actual policies now in place will yield projected warming of 3.3 degrees Celsius, because it’s easier to promise to do something than to actually do it.

For another piece of evidence, consider that back in April 2017, David Roberts at Vox updated his article arguing that no country on Earth was taking the then-popular 2 degrees Celsius target seriously. Note that this was before Trump made his announcement about Paris.

For these reasons, we shouldn’t take seriously the argument that Paris would’ve worked just great, thank you very much, except that Donald Trump came along and ruined it. (Rob Bradley patiently dismantles that particular claim over at MasterResource.)

Empty Pledges Are a Feature, Not a Bug

Now to be sure, the fans of the Paris Agreement would dismiss my criticism above, by arguing that once the basic framework of a global agreement is in place, then we can tighten down the screws and get some serious emission reductions.

Yet this is foolish optimism. The only reason so many countries signed up for Paris is that the pledges were non-binding, and beyond that, in many cases the pledges were virtually meaningless.

For example, Oren Cass back in 2015 explained that the “Intended National Determined Contributions” (INDC) of India and China were arguably less ambitious than what would probably happen under business-as-usual. In other words, India and China’s initial “bids” for what they could do to help in the battle against climate change, involved no actual sacrifice since it’s normal for countries to reduce their emissions-per-unit-of-GDP over time.

Even more hilarious, in a 2017 article Cass quoted from Pakistan’s pledge, which was “committed to reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.” If you think about it, every country could quite confidently make such a pledge: Once emissions reach their peak, they would come down thereafter. That’s why the peak level would be a peak, after all.

To repeat, this is not a coincidence. The only way to get all of the governments of the world to sign on to Paris, was for them each to realize that they weren’t actually on the hook for anything. (Incidentally, the reason it’s the Paris Agreement and not the Paris Treaty is that the framers didn’t want the U.S. Senate during the Obama years to get a crack at rejecting it—the way they voted down the Kyoto Protocol during Bill Clinton’s Administration. This isn’t my conspiracy theory; the fans of aggressive government intervention on climate say the same thing.)

For this reason, it’s duplicitous for fans of Paris to cite it as a robust political framework with which to “get serious” about emission reductions. The near-unanimity of the deal would fall apart, once individual countries were expected to sacrifice their economic growth and take one for the team. Just look at the squabbling and chaos as more and more governments experience voter backlash against restrictions on conventional energy. Here’s how a lamenting New York Times article explained the situation back in December:

In August [2018], an effort in Australia to transition away from coal…resulted in the ouster of the prime minister. The man who succeeded him, Scott Morrison, endeared himself to the industry by bringing a lump of coal into Parliament.

In November, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro, who had pledged to promote agribusiness interests in the Amazon forest…

In Poland, the host country of the latest United Nations talks, the right-wing president, Andrzej Duda, opened the negotiations by saying flatly that his country did not intend to abandon coal.

…Emissions in China have grown for the past two years, signaling the difficulties of shifting the country away from its coal-dependent industrial economy. Germany is having a hard time moving away from lignite because of political opposition in the country’s coal-rich east. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, faces unrest at home over a layer cake of taxes that working-class people say burdens them unfairly.

As the examples above indicate—and they ignore the plunging fortunes of aggressive climate action in Canada too—this is certainly not the fault of Donald Trump. Around the world, the natives are getting restless, and finally saying “enough is enough” to the technocratic “solutions” that drive up energy prices without even solving the ostensible problem of climate change.

Conclusion

President Trump has followed through on his campaign promises to roll back counterproductive regulations on energy, far more than most of us thought would be politically feasible. The Paris Agreement never had a chance of seriously denting global emissions, and all along has been a vehicle to redistribute wealth, to the tune of trillions of dollars, as I explained here at IER several years ago.

Since even the most ardent environmental activists admit that the Paris Agreement hasn’t come close to “solving” the problem of climate change, they should actually be thanking Trump for being the first to announce that it doesn’t work and ending this farce.

The post Forget Paris: On the Second Anniversary of Trump’s Pullout appeared first on IER.

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#25: Bob Murphy on the economics of climate change

IER’s senior economist Bob Murphy recently visited Connecticut College to present on the economics of climate change. His lecture addresses the disconnect between “mainstream” climate models and proposals like the Green New Deal.

Links:

More from the talk

Robert Murphy on IPCC data

Bob Murphy on DICE model created by William Nordhaus

The Bob Murphy Show

The post #25: Bob Murphy on the economics of climate change appeared first on IER.

What I Told College Students About the Economics of Climate Change

I recently gave a talk to a student group at Connecticut College on the economics of climate change. (The video is broken up into three parts on my YouTube channel: one, two, and three.) In this post I’ll summarize three of my main points: (1) There is a huge disconnect between what the published economics research actually says about government policies to limit global warming, and how the media is reporting it. (2) President Trump taking the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement doesn’t really affect anything on the margin, even if we stipulate the alarmist position on climate change. And (3) If I’m wrong, and human-caused climate change really does pose a dire threat to humanity in the next few decades, then scientists are currently working on several lines of research of practical ways to actually deal with the problem.

The “Consensus Research” Does Not Justify Radical Political Intervention

I first clarified to the students that throughout my talk, I wasn’t going to grab results from right-wing think tanks, or from “fringe” scientists who were considered cranks by their peers. On the contrary, I would be relaying results from sources such as the work of a Nobel laureate William Nordhaus (whose model on climate change policy had been one of three used by the Obama Administration) and from the UN’s own periodic report summarizing the latest research on climate change science and policy.

To demonstrate just how wide the chasm is between the actual economics research and the media treatment of these issues, I described to the students the spectacle I observed back in the fall of 2018, when on the same weekend news came out that William Nordhaus had won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the economics of climate change and that the UN released a “Special Report” advising governments to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The media treatment (sometimes in the same story) presented these events with no sense of conflict or irony, leading regular citizens to assume that Nordhaus’ Nobel-winning work supported the UN’s goals for policymakers.

But that is not true at all. Here’s a graph from a 2017 Nordhaus publication that I included in my presentation:

As the figure shows, Nordhaus’ model—and again, this isn’t cooked up by the Heritage Foundation, but instead was one selected by the Obama Administration’s EPA and was the reason he won the Nobel Prize—projects that if governments “did nothing,” total global warming would reach about 4.1 degrees Celsius. In contrast, if governments implemented the “optimal carbon tax,” as Nordhaus would recommend in a perfect world, then total warming would be about 3.5 degrees Celsius.

Anyone remotely familiar with the climate change policy debate knows that such an amount of warming would terrify the prominent activists and groups advocating for a political solution. They would quite confidently tell the public that warming of this amount would spell absolute catastrophe for future generations.

My point here isn’t to endorse Nordhaus’ model. My point is simply that Americans never heard anything about this when the media simultaneously covered Nordhaus’ award and the UN’s document calling for a 1.5°C limit. And yet, Nordhaus’ own work—not shown in the figure above, but I spell it out here—clearly concludes that such an aggressive target would cause far more damage to humans in the form of reduced economic output, that it would be better for governments to “do nothing” about climate change at all.

With or Without the United States, the Paris Agreement Was Going to “Fail”

To continue with the theme of how they’ve been misinformed, I reminded the students of the media’s apoplexy when Trump announced his intention to remove the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (or treaty, in lay terms). I showed them a headline in which famed physicist Stephen Hawking said Trump was pushing the planet “over the brink.”

I then asked the students rhetorically, “You would think that the Paris Agreement was going to ‘work’ to contain the threat of climate change, except for Trump pulling out and wrecking it, right?”

And yet, the pro-intervention group ClimateActionTracker.org nicely illustrates that even if all countries met their pledges (including the U.S.), it wouldn’t come close to limiting warming to the weaker benchmark of 2°C, let alone the newer, more chic target of 1.5°C. Things were even worse if we evaluated the actual policies of governments (as opposed to what they stated they intended to do, about limiting their emissions).

 

Further, I included a screenshot (in the top left of the slide) from a Vox article published before Trump’s Paris announcement, which said not a single country on Earth was taking the 2°C target seriously.

Technological Solutions

After spending so much time showing that the political “solutions” were failing even on their own terms, I summarized a few avenues of research (see this article for details) where scientists are exploring techniques to either remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflect some incoming sunlight. Although I personally do not think human-caused climate change is a crisis, and do think that adaptation coming from normal economic growth will be more than sufficient to deal with any problems along the way, nonetheless scientists do have these other techniques in their back pocket, should they become necessary to “buy humanity a few decades of breathing room” while technology advances in the transportation and energy sectors.

Conclusion

Americans, especially students, are being whipped into a panic over the allegedly existential threat of climate change. Yet the actual research, summarized in the UN’s own periodic reports and in the research of a Nobel laureate in the field, shows that at best only a modest “leaning against the wind” could be justified according to standard economic science.

By their own criteria, the alarmist activists are admitting that political measures are nowhere near achieving their goals. Their own rhetoric says that these activists are wasting everyone’s time pushing solutions that will end in catastrophe. Occasionally they slip up, as for example when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admits that her “we have 12 years left” was not to be taken literally.

In order to bring light to the climate change debate, at this point one just needs to actually screenshot and explain the evidence from the establishment sources. The rhetorical framing of the issue is so far removed from the underlying research that this alone is heretical.

The post What I Told College Students About the Economics of Climate Change appeared first on IER.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Hitting the Open Road

“Nearly 43 million Americans will start their summers on a high note with a Memorial Day weekend getaway,” the American Automobile Association reports. “This long holiday weekend, marking the unofficial start of summer vacation season, will see the second-highest travel volume on record since AAA began tracking holiday travel volumes dating back to 2000, trailing only the bar set in 2005.”

Compared to last year, 1.5 million additional people will drive, fly, or rail. Higher fuel prices (averaging $2.85/gallon for regular nationwide) are being offset by lower hotel and rental-car expenses, according to AAA.

The strong economy translates into more people and more miles traveled this year. Top destinations are Orlando, New York City, and Las Vegas. Internationally, flyers are targeting Rome, London, Dublin, and Paris.

Peak Demand Not

Predictions of Peak Oil Demand (POD) are falling by the wayside. Some 281 million registered vehicles are currently operating in the US versus 249 million six years ago, a 11 percent increase. Vehicle usage is at an all-time high, with the average driver traveling more than 1,300 miles per month.

Yet new predictions of an oil crash (based on fanciful projections of electric-vehicle growth) continue. A new Bloomberg study, Electric Vehicle Outlook 2019, forecasts Peak Oil Demand in 2030. “Astonishing,” wrote Joe Romm at Climate Progress, who several years ago quoted an earlier Bloomberg study that oil’s “big crash” could begin in 2023.

Like Peak Oil Supply, POD adherents just fill-in the blanks with a year further out.

The total vehicle miles travelled in the U.S. last year, 3.2 trillion, is 7 percent higher than 2013 and nearly 20 percent above 1998.

Interestingly, one source of the increase appears to be Uber, Lyft, and other micro-transit upstarts displacing mass transit and bike riding in metropolitan areas. So-called Transportation Network Companies “have added 5.7 billion miles of driving annually in the Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC metro areas,” one study found.

The Joy of Automobility

Hitting the open road on Memorial Day is red, white, and blue for tens of millions of Americans. It is an environmental experience as urbanites head for the water, hills, or countryside for vacation. It is manifested freedom as Professor Cotten Seiler explains in Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (University of Chicago Press: 2008).

Seilers’s thesis was summarized by Paul Atchley:

… cars have, from the very beginning, represented more than just transportation to most Americans. Cars have historically represented the freedom to go places, to make choices and to pursue many paths, perhaps even those leading to the unknown or the unexplored.

He explains:

A look at the early history of car advertising and car clubs that lobbied for better roads and more access to the great American landscape reveals that cars were sold as machines of freedom. Every driver has the opportunity to be mobile and unrestricted, able to “hit the open road,” or, if you have the means, to get off the road altogether in vehicles made for that very purpose.

The last word of traveling Americana belongs to “America’s world poet” Walt Whitman, who wrote “Song of the Open Road,” which reads in part:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The post Hitting the Open Road appeared first on IER.

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Wednesday, May 22, 2019

#24: Hunter Pearl on climate litigation

Hunter Pearl joins the show to discuss the trend of cities across the country suing producers of fossil fuels in an attempt to get fast cash. The team also dives into the potential harms of the practice known as atmospheric trust litigation, through which activist groups are seeking political change on climate through court order.

Links:

• Read more on atmospheric trust ligation.

• Read more on cities joining climate lawsuits.

The post #24: Hunter Pearl on climate litigation appeared first on IER.

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Lack of Competition Leaves Maine’s Energy Consumers Frustrated

Last week, lawmakers in Maine held a public hearing on a bill that would seize the private assets of two of the largest electric utilities in Maine (Central Maine Power and Emera Maine) and replace them with a consumer-owned utility. If passed, this decision is likely to exacerbate the cost and reliability problems that ratepayers are currently facing in the state.

Before diving into the problems with L.D. 1646, it’s worth explaining how Maine’s electricity market is presently set up. Currently, customers in Maine enjoy some degree of freedom in their electricity markets as the generation phase of the industry was deregulated in 2000. However, when the laws were changed, deregulation did not extend to the retail phase, leaving the existing regulated monopolies intact at the retail level.

Under this current system, the investor-owned, regulated utilities handle the transmission and distribution phases of the electricity market. If passed, the bill would seize the assets of these companies and set up a quasi-governmental organization with an “independent board” that would oversee the operations of the transmission and distribution phases of the electricity market.

The formation of this bill is in response to legitimate concerns by ratepayers in Maine. Earlier this year, it came to light that Central Maine Power has had problems with its metering and billing procedures, generating hundreds of flawed bills on a daily basis. This alone would be a major failure on the part of the utilities in Maine, but the bigger picture shows that it is part of a trend of generally poor performance by the utilities as the state routinely ranks last in terms of the average frequency and duration of electric distribution outages. On top of all of this, over the past few years, customers have seen steadily increasing prices as well. With all of these compounding factors, it’s easy to understand why people in Maine would like to see something done about the electricity markets in their state. With that said, L.D. 1646 is unlikely to solve these problems, and, instead, it is likely to make them worse.

L.D. 1646 does not address the underlying problem

It’s politically advantageous for advocates of L.D. 1646 to blame the profit motive for the poor performance of Maine’s utilities as it is frequently the scapegoat of populist economic movements. However, this criticism is misplaced because there is plenty of evidence that shows that investor-owned utilities are more than capable of providing quality service for their customers at reasonable prices. The problem that Maine’s electricity market faces has nothing to do with the profit motive but rather a lack of competition at the retail phase of their energy markets.

Although customers in Maine have some choice over who is generating their power, they do not have a choice over whom they deal with at the retail level. Maine’s electricity market is best thought of as an example of how deregulation can be done poorly, as the monopoly utilities retain control over significant aspects of the supply process such as transmission and billing. By shifting those monopolized services from an investor-owned setting to a publically owned setting, L.D. 1646 fundamentally does not address this problem. Instead, it takes an uncompetitive system out of private hands and lets the government run it. When combined with the other provisions outlined in L.D. 1646, under this institutional arrangement, the problems that are currently plaguing ratepayers in Maine are likely to get worse.

Problems with municipalizing utilities and unintended consequences of L.D. 1646

By shifting ownership from an investor-owned setting to a public setting, L.D. 1646 would introduce new obstacles that are likely to further erode the quality of utility service in Maine. The new system would replace the profit-and-loss calculus that disciplines decision-making in a private setting with a political board comprised of 10 members appointed by the governor of Maine. Service is likely to be worse under this system for a number of reasons, the most important of which is outlined below.

For starters, there’s little reason to believe that appointees to this board will be selected based on their knowledge of electricity markets or a commitment to operating in the public interest. Given the opportunities the board has to facilitate rent-seeking and political exchange and the information asymmetries that exist between the industry and the public at large, the proposed system is extremely susceptible to regulatory capture. In other words, these appointees will likely be made based on appeasing special interests rather than doing what is best for the ratepayers in Maine. Furthermore, L.D. 1646 does not limit the number of times these appointees can be reappointed, making it even easier for special interests to retain their influence within the bureaucracy over time.

The proposal also requires the new authority to retain,

any person who was an employee of the investor-owned transmission and distribution utility at the time the authority acquired the investor-owned transmission and distribution utility who is a qualified, nonexempt employee subject to collective bargaining agreements of the acquired investor-owned transmission and distribution utility, to the extent of the contractor’s need for personnel to provide sound operation, and shall retain these employees for a period of 5 years after the beginning of operations.

In other words, the proposal would place strong restrictions on the new authority’s ability to fire existing employees of the investor-owned utilities once their assets are taken under public control. This creates additional incentive problems that go beyond those that already exist under public management. By making it difficult to fire employees at the new authority, employees have less of an incentive to provide quality service, making it even more unlikely that ratepayers would see an improvement under this new authority.

Finally, setting aside the constitutional questions that would arise if the government were to seize the private assets of the current utilities, the economic effects of such an action would likely be detrimental to Maine as it would signal to businesses that property rights are not secure in the state. Businesses will be less likely to invest in Maine if they can’t be certain that their ownership of those assets is secure from government seizure.

What should Maine do? 

The current state of electricity markets in Maine is not ideal to say the least, but the proposed course of action is likely to make things worse. L.D. 1646 does not address the underlying issues in Maine’s electricity market, namely the lack of competition and choice at the retail level. Instead, the proposal simply takes an uncompetitive system out of private hands and turns it over to bureaucrats and special interests, introducing a litany of additional bad incentives along the way. Instead, Maine should introduce competition at the retail and transmission phases, providing ratepayers more options than what exists under the status quo.

The post Lack of Competition Leaves Maine’s Energy Consumers Frustrated appeared first on IER.

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Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Economists Have Been “Useful Idiots” for the Green Socialists

In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used[i] the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies. The radical environmentalists were quite happy to embrace the economic concepts of “Pigovian negative externalities” and a carbon tax in the past, but now that it is impossible for economic science to endorse their desired agenda, the activists have discarded the entire field as hopelessly out of touch. Economists who still support a carbon tax and other climate “mitigation policies” should be aware of the bigger picture.

Using the UN’s Own Document to Defeat the Climate Change Agenda

I have been making this case for years. For example, back in 2014 I used the latest (and still most recent) UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to show that the then-popular climate change target of 2 degrees Celsius of warming could not be justified by the research summarized in the report. In other words, I used the UN’s own report to show that the popular climate change “cures” would be worse than the disease.

Yet even though they had spent years berating the critics of government action as “climate deniers” who rejected the “consensus science,” in this case—once they realized that the economic models of climate change wouldn’t support aggressive intervention—the environmental activists all of a sudden began pointing out all the things that the UN-endorsed studies left out. Rather than summarizing the cutting edge knowledge on climate science and mitigation policies, the IPCC document turned into a bunch of misleading nonsense that would give ammunition to deniers.

Nobel Laureate Inconveniently Blows Up the Paris Agreement

Last fall, we had another demonstration of the chasm between the actual research and the media/political treatment: William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on climate change, on the same weekend that the UN released a “special report” advising governments on how to try to limit global warming to as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius.

There was just one little problem: Nordhaus’ Nobel-winning work clearly showed that the UN’s goal was insane. According to his model, it would literally be better for governments around the world to do nothing about climate change, rather than enact policies limiting warming to 1.5°C. Rather than aiming for a 1.5°C target, Nordhaus’ most recent model runs indicated that the “optimal” amount of warming to allow was closer to 3.5°C. (To an outsider this might not seem like a huge discrepancy, but it is absolutely gigantic in the context of the climate change policy debate. Many activists would confidently predict that even 2.5°C of warming would spell disaster for our grandchildren.)

The Guardian’s Slam Dunk

Ah, but I got the best confirmation of my quixotic position just last week, when the Guardian ran an editorial with this subtitle (my highlighting):

Guardian Headline

 

Does everybody see that? The people at the Guardian already know what the policy answers are, without needing any help from the economists.

Conclusion

My economist colleagues who continue to urge for a “carbon tax swap deal” in order to get rid of “onerous top-down regulations” and enact a simple “price on carbon” are fooling themselves. Whether it’s in a ballot initiative in Washington State—literally designed by an environmental economist, or in the wonky columns of Vox’s climate expert, in the political calculus of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, or in the FAQ on the Green New Deal itself, the environmental activists in US politics are making it quite clear that they will not settle for such half-measures.

Market-friendly economists chiming in on the American political scene should stop being useful idiots for the green socialists. Whatever the possible merits of a theoretical carbon tax package—in which a regressive hike in energy prices is matched dollar-for-dollar with corporate income tax cuts, and decades of special-interest favoring regulations are thrown out the window in the zeal for efficiency—this is all a moot point. If market-friendly economists succeed in getting their readers to hold their noses and support a carbon tax, they will all learn quite quickly that the deal has been altered.

 

[i] The use of the term “useful idiots” has been attributed to Lenin, but apparently that link is disputed.

The post Economists Have Been “Useful Idiots” for the Green Socialists appeared first on IER.

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Thursday, May 16, 2019

#23 Episode 23: Kenny Stein on renewable technologies, congressional testimony and recap

Kenny Stein, IER’s Policy Director, provided testimony before the Energy Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology regarding solar and wind technologies on 5/15/19. Along with his testimony is an extended conversation on the role the federal government plays in supporting the wind and solar industries.

Links:

Read his written testimony here.

More on wind and solar tax credits from IER.

Watch video of his testimony here.

The post #23 Episode 23: Kenny Stein on renewable technologies, congressional testimony and recap appeared first on IER.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Fossil Fuels vs. Climate Politics: Two Graphs

An important statistic in the historiography of climate policy compares the global market share of fossil fuels from 1988 (the beginning year of the climate debate) to today.

How has global-warming politics changed global energy usage in the last 30 years? Restated, how much fossil-fuel demand has been redirected by climate policies?

The first chart below shows the steadiness of carbon-based energy since the 1980s with the balance divided between carbon-free energies.

Carbon Based Energy

Overall, fossil fuels fell from an 88 percent share in 1988 to 85 percent today, suggesting a floor of 80 percent going into the next years if not decades. According to the BP Energy Outlook, world coal has remained steady at 28 percent of total primary energy usage, while natural gas rose to 23 percent (from 20 percent), a 15 percent gain. Oil’s market share dropped from 40 percent to 34 percent, mostly attributable to lost demand in the industrial/power plant market.

The second chart shows the composition of non-carbon-based energies (renewables and nuclear power), accounting for 11 percent in 1988. With the growth of non-hydroelectric renewables (primarily wind and solar power), this share grew to 15 percent in the most recent year.

Non-carbon based energy

Globally, hydroelectric generation increased its share of total primary energy consumption to result in a net gain for carbon-free energy despite a marked fall in nuclear generation. Non-hydroelectric renewables had a market share of 3.6 percent in 2017, despite contributing almost nothing to global consumption in 1988.

Another way to assess thirty years of activist public policy versus consumer demand is to look at total fossil-fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Between 1988 and 2017, according to BP’s Statistical Review of the World, carbon-based energy usage increased 66 percent, while CO2 emissions rose by slightly less­—61 percent.

Conclusion

After three decades of debate and politics, carbon-based energies continue to predominate over highly subsidized and mandated alternatives. Growing world demand and improving technology from extraction to combustion have overcome political interference, as it were. This story is unlikely to change much in the next decades.

It’s a fossil-fuel world. Self-interested consumers are choosing the most abundant, portable, storable, reliable energies. For climate activists, meanwhile, the postulated CO2 emissions mitigation path to climate “stabilization” grows ever more politically impossible, leaving free-market adaptation as the real-world alternative—and societal verdict.

The post Fossil Fuels vs. Climate Politics: Two Graphs appeared first on IER.

IER’s Kenny Stein Testifying Today on Solar and Wind Technologies

WASHINGTON — Today, IER Policy Director Kenny Stein will testify before the Energy Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on the topic of solar and wind energy technologies. The hearing titled “Advancing the Next Generation of Solar and Wind Energy Technologies”  will discuss the federal government’s involvement in solar and wind energy research. The hearing will begin at 10am EST.

Below is an executive summary from Stein’s testimony:———————————————————————————————————————

“Both the wind and solar industries are mature industries, with plenty of private sector interest and investment in innovation and deployment. We are not talking about a nascent or speculative industry. The need for federal funding at all is debatable to put it mildly. If federal money is still required at this point the question must be asked whether there is ever a point where enough will be enough.

Given the already high rate of wind and solar investment, it is hard to see how more federal intervention could possibly be beneficial. In fact, a heavier federal hand could end up limiting growth and innovation. The federal government, slow and process-constrained as it is, cannot adjust rapidly to technological developments. As new operating processes or products enter the market, it can be left funding old or obsolete initiatives. Indeed federal interference of the sort envisioned by these discussion drafts can lead an industry to spend its time trying to meet federal benchmarks for grants rather than asking the question whether alternatives might make more sense, ironically limiting innovation.

Mature industries like the wind and solar generation sectors with extensive and dynamic economic activity are not in need of federal interference, however well-intentioned. While basic research is a reasonable federal role, responsibility for later phases of the business cycle such as commercialization or deployment is best left in the hands of the industry itself.”

———————————————————————————————————————

Read Stein’s written testimony.

Watch the testimony live at 10am. 

 

###

For media inquiries, please contact:

Erin Amsberry
eamsberry@ierdc.org
202.621.2955

The post IER’s Kenny Stein Testifying Today on Solar and Wind Technologies appeared first on IER.

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Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Alumni Highlight: Engr. Muhammad Amjad Khan of Lomas Energy shares about the Sialkot Housing Compound

We love to highlight SEI alumni using the training they’ve learned in our classes out in the field. Engr. Muhammad Amjad Khan, Director of Operations at Lomas Energy Pvt. Ltd, shared an article with us about one of their most recent projects. Check out his article submission below:

Sialkot Housing Compound

April 2019 

Over the last 20 to 30 years, the need for people to be more environmentally conscious has continued to grow, with many businesses making it easier for people to be environmentally friendly.

Here at Lomas, we are committed to providing Renewable energy, for the benefit of our planet by reducing carbon emissions. We take great satisfaction in that we deploy solar power systems as full EPC projects, as well as joint ventures and partnerships with other solar companies both inside and outside of Pakistan.

Businesses like Lomas that design and install solar panels for renewable energy understand how vital it is that we all do our part whether big or small in protecting our environment and preserving it for future generations. We believe that sustainability is key in this day and age.

Lomas has recently completed a solar project just outside of Sialkot which is proving to be beneficial for its clients as well as aiding in protecting the planet that we all live on.

Sialkot is Pakistan’s 13th largest city and forms part of the so-called golden triangle of industrial cities. Due to the nature of being an industrial city, one can imagine the extent of pollution to be found within the city. The Air is polluted and congested and frequently covered in smog. It is no surprise therefore that people are now more and more inclined to moving towards the outskirts of this polluted city.

Sialkot’s Center

One such family, a father and his son decided they needed to adopt a more organic way of living as their current urban lifestyle was becoming detrimental.

“I decided that if I wanted to see my family have a better future, I needed to step up and actually do something about it,” said Mr. Razzak. Mr Razzak and his family including his grandkids are set to move into a housing complex consisting of four Villas along with a central kitchen, which is an entire building on its own!

The Villas stand on pillars allowing the ground underneath to be utilized for growing vegetables and flowers. The entire housing complex is self-sufficient in that it can provide the family their own grown food including fish poultry and grains. It will store and filter rainwater for its use, and Recycle waste water for irrigation. And of course it will generate its own electricity from solar energy. “I would never have imagined how happy I could feel knowing my organic lifestyle is actually part of a bigger picture in that I am doing my bit in the looking after our planet, all while saving money on my bills too!”, said Mr. Razzak proudly.

Solar energy is the way forward who wouldn’t want to save 50 to 60% off their energy bills?

Using renewable solar energy for your homes/businesses may be one small step towards a healthier living but if we were to all follow it, then collectively it would be a giant step towards meeting our national carbon emission reduction target.

The post Alumni Highlight: Engr. Muhammad Amjad Khan of Lomas Energy shares about the Sialkot Housing Compound appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

The New Moz Local Is on Its Way!

Posted by MiriamEllis

Exciting secrets can be so hard to keep. Finally, all of us at Moz have the green light to share with all of you a first glimpse of something we’ve been working on for months behind the scenes. Big inhale, big exhale...

Announcing: the new and improved Moz Local, to be rolled out beginning June 12!

Why is Moz updating the Moz Local platform?

Local search has evolved from caterpillar to butterfly in the seven years since we launched Moz Local. I think we’ve spent the time well, intensively studying both Google’s trajectory and the feedback of enterprise, marketing agency, and SMB customers.

Your generosity in telling us what you need as marketers has inspired us to action. Over the coming months, you’ll be seeing what Moz has learned reflected in a series of rollouts. Stage by stage, you’ll see that we’re planning to give our software the wings it needs to help you fully navigate the dynamic local search landscape and, in turn, grow your business.

We hope you’ll keep gathering together with us to watch Moz Local take full flight — changes will only become more robust as we move forward.

What can I expect from this upgrade?

Beginning June 12th, Moz Local customers will experience a fresh look and feel in the Moz Local interface, plus these added capabilities:

  • New distribution partners to ensure your data is shared on the platforms that matter most in the evolving local search ecosystem
  • Listing status and real-time updates to know the precise status of your location data
  • Automated detection and permanent duplicate closure, taking the manual work out of the process and saving you significant time
  • Integrations with Google and Facebook to gain deeper insights, reporting, and management for your location’s profiles
  • An even better data clean-up process to ensure valid data is formatted properly for distribution
  • A new activity feed to alert you to any changes to your location’s listings
  • A suggestion engine to provide recommendations to increase accuracy, completeness, and consistency of your location data

Additional features available include:

  • Managing reviews of your locations to keep your finger on the pulse of what customers are saying
  • Social posting to engage with consumers and alert them to news, offers, and other updates
  • Store locator and landing pages to share location data easily with both customers and search engines (available for Moz Local customers with 100 or more locations)

Remember, this is just the beginning. There's more to come in 2019, and you can expect ongoing communications from us as further new feature sets emerge!

When is it happening?

We'll be rolling out all the new changes beginning on June 12th. As with some large changes, this update will take a few days to complete, so some people will see the changes immediately while for others it may take up to a week. By June 21st, everyone should be able to explore the new Moz Local experience!

Don't worry — we'll have several more communications between now and then to help you prepare. Keep an eye out for our webinar and training materials to help ensure a smooth transition to the new Moz Local.

Are any metrics/scores changing?

Some of our reporting metrics will look different in the new Moz Local. We'll be sharing more information on these metrics and how to use them soon, but for now, here’s a quick overview of changes you can expect:

  • Profile Completeness: Listing Score will be replaced by the improved Profile Completeness metric. This new feature will give you a better measurement of how complete your data is, what’s missing from it, and clear prompts to fill in any lacking information.
  • Improved listing status reporting: Partner Accuracy Score will be replaced by improved reporting on listing status with all of our partners, including continuous information about the data they’ve received from us. You’ll be able to access an overview of your distribution network, so that you can see which sites your business is listed on. Plus, you’ll be able to go straight to the live listing with a single click.
  • Visibility Index: Though they have similar names, Visibility Score is being replaced by something slightly different with the new and improved Visibility Index, which notates how the data you’ve provided us about a location matches or mismatches your information on your live listings.
  • New ways to measure and act on listing reach: Reach Score will be leaving us in favor of even more relevant measurement via the Visibility Index and Profile Completeness metrics. The new Moz Local will include more actionable information to ensure your listings are accurate and complete.

Other FAQs

You'll likely have questions if you’re a current Moz Local customer or are considering becoming one. Please check out our resource center for further details, and feel free to leave us a question down in the comments — we'll be on point to respond to any wonderings or concerns you might have!

Head to the FAQs

Where is Moz heading with this?

As a veteran local SEO, I’m finding the developments taking place with our software particularly exciting because, like you, I see how local search and local search marketing have matured over the past decade.

I’ve closely watched the best minds in our industry moving toward a holistic vision of how authenticity, customer engagement, data, analysis, and other factors underpin local business success. And we’ve all witnessed Google’s increasingly sophisticated presentation of local business information evolve and grow. It’s been quite a ride!

At every level of local commerce, owners and marketers deserve tools that bring order out of what can seem like chaos. We believe you deserve software that yields strategy. As our CEO, Sarah Bird, recently said of Moz,

“We are big believers in the power of local SEO.”

So the secret is finally out, and you can see where Moz is heading with the local side of our product lineup. It’s our serious plan to devote everything we’ve got into putting the power of local SEO into your hands.


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How Often Does Google Update Its Algorithm?

Monday, May 13, 2019

Climate Lawsuits have Cities Seeing Green

In my last article I discussed atmospheric trust litigation (ATL), the latest crusade among radical environmentalists to impose through the courts what they could not pass through the ballot box. This coordinated campaign includes using child plaintiffs to sue the federal government to adopt their desired climate change regulations and a press strategy including what would become the youth climate strikes. Increasingly prominent components of the ATL campaign are investigations by state attorneys general into ExxonMobil (ongoing in New York, Massachusetts, and being picked up in Washington, DC) and public nuisance lawsuits by cities, counties, and states against Exxon and a few other chosen oil companies (starting or ongoing in Rhode Island and more than a dozen cities and counties across North America). These investigations and climate lawsuits are desperate and misguided attempts to smear providers of conventional fuels and extract rents free of political consequence.

Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs

For the municipalities investigating and suing oil companies, the main motivation is clear: money. Enough pressure on oil companies could yield settlements of hundreds of millions of dollars, or maybe even a general fund modeled after the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The best part? They are able to outsource the actual legal work for free, courtesy of Michael Bloomberg and a few foreign-funded organizations. In addition to utilizing this “law enforcement for rent,” former New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman also kept in communication about “company specific climate information” with billionaire Tom Steyer and the Rockefeller Family Fund, the latter of which also paid journalists to write stories and op-eds and funded a cherry-picked and error-laden study against ExxonMobil. Though it also already hired a Bloomberg-funded special assistant attorney general, the DC Office of the Attorney General (OAG) announced that to help it investigate Exxon it was hiring extra help on an unusual contingency-fee basis which allows its payout to go instead to a financing institution—say, an interested foundation.

Starting a lawsuit against much-maligned oil companies is also a way to make a costless political statement, providing the perfect cover for rent seeking. For a solidly Democratic municipality, this is a rare political win-win. With attorneys, curated data, media outreach and management provided by wealthy donors and potentially millions of dollars to be gained if they can reach a settlement, how could municipalities (at least those that do not let pesky ethics get in the way like Virginia) not want to join in? As Mike Layton, the Toronto City Councilor who proposed that his city join the burgeoning North American oil lawsuit movement, explained:

I think what you’ll find is as it gains popularity, more and more municipalities are saying, “Wait a second, we have hundreds of millions in infrastructure costs that we see coming. What are we going to do to fund those?” Rather than just assume that we’re going to have to cover it out of the rate base or the tax base or that the federal government will come to the rescue, that we should move ahead and join forces on a similar lawsuit.

As with Juliana, the actual legal claims of the oil investigations and lawsuits seem to be an afterthought for their funders. At a meeting for prominent climate change activists and political operatives organized by the Rockefeller Family Fund, the agenda stated that the goals of the Exxon campaign include “delegitimize them as a political actor” and “drive Exxon & climate into center of 2016 election.” By accepting these resources to engage in sham investigations and lawsuits, OAGs lend the offices’ implicit credibility to the unbridled accusations of environmental activists. I doubt they will be getting that credibility back.

Flawed Reasoning

Most of the arguments brought out against ExxonMobil and other oil companies were built at the workshops of the 2012 La Jolla meeting and are formalized in their summary paper, Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control. The basic strategy is to establish harm caused by climate change, rest the blame squarely on carbon emissions, accuse corporate defendants of having secret knowledge of the harms of climate change and then seek public nuisance damages from those corporations for their contributions to climate change under “joint and several” liability. These lawsuits were designed to accomplish many of the activists’ goals at once. They promise monetary rewards to “combat” climate change—a broad concept that could include funding for renewable energy, climate adaptation, conservation and climate research (perhaps the same research done by the conference-goers). They condemn and punish oil companies, discouraging future energy development. Most importantly, they may secure court approval for the narrative that climate change is an imminent threat, oil producers are to blame for it and opposition to the activists’ plans are part of the oil companies’ misinformation conspiracy.

The basis for this in law is precarious at best. Far-reaching public nuisance claims have an extensive record of being thrown out in courts. For a lawsuit to be justiciable—resolvable by a court—it must revolve around legal and not political questions. In order ensure that courts adhere to the judicial function of resolving discrete and tractable disputes rather than wider social ills, all tort law must establish proximate cause; there must be a close connection between the defendant and the harm done to the plaintiff. But climate change is global in scope and caused by billions of actors, including the plaintiffs themselves. The irony of a city calling the burning of conventional fuels a public nuisance when that city uses (and owes much of its current existence to) those fuels was not lost on U.S. District Judge John Keenan, who dismissed the New York City lawsuit:

As an initial matter, it is not clear that Defendants’ fossil fuel production and the emissions created therefrom have been an “unlawful invasion” in New York City, as the City benefits from and participates in the use of fossil fuels as a source of power, and has done so for many decades.

When the plaintiffs are relying on a theory of joint and several liability, whereby a few oil companies can be held liable for a global phenomenon of which they are minor actors, it is hard to ignore the plaintiffs’ own contributions to emissions. It certainly makes the climate lawsuits look less like discrete and tractable legal disputes and more like either political stunts or attempts to use the courts to reach political outcomes that the plaintiffs cannot reach through their legislatures. Outside of the courtroom, supporters of the plaintiffs justify the lawsuit on political grounds, arguing that the judiciary is justified in doing the jobs of the legislative and executive branches because those branches have not offered the right solutions.

Even if one were to successfully convince a judge that this is a legal question, other fatal issues persist. In American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut (2011) the court held that the Clean Air Act and EPA actions displaced the federal common law of nuisance. Since these companies comply with federal regulations, they are immune to additional nuisance challenges. The grand ambitions of these state and local governments also brush up against the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. To the extent that such a suit would attempt to impose fines for actions done outside of the plaintiff’s state, they violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional restrictions on out-of-state commerce. Indiana and 14 other states argued in their Amici Curiae on behalf of the oil industry defendants against New York City’s lawsuit that using public nuisance to regulate global climate change “attempts to extend New York law across not only the United States, but the entire world.”

False Premises

The judges who have dismissed these lawsuits aimed at their legal defects, but the lawsuits’ unsound structures are due equally to the groundless claims at their foundations. The first claim is that the municipalities have suffered and will suffer demonstrable harms from anthropogenic global warming. It is not sufficient to show damages from sea level rise or extreme weather events; it must be shown to what extent a global climatic shift contributed to these phenomena. The enormity of this challenge cannot be overstated. Why should we accept a plaintiff’s prediction of extra damages from local weather due to global climate change in the far future when professional meteorologists can hardly predict damages from weather or even the weather itself in the near future? The effect of global warming would also presumably be dependent on the exact amount of future emissions and warming, yet another uncertainty.

The cost of climate change for a given municipality depends heavily on the effect of future extreme weather events on its region. These are nearly impossible to predict and the relationship of a warming earth and local extreme events is poorly understood. For example, the most recent report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) stated that the future influence of climate change on tropical cyclones is likely to vary by region, and identified low confidence for region-specific projections of frequency and intensity. Municipalities that predict great costs from climate change are necessarily making shaky assumptions. As the judge who threw out San Francisco and Oakland’s lawsuit against oil companies incredulously stated, “You’re asking for billions of dollars for something that hasn’t happened yet and may never happen to the extent you’re predicting it will happen.”

Even if a municipality does suffer losses from weather, the impact of anthropogenic global warming is hard to determine. Local factors and chance are the predominant variables, and in countless cases the municipalities themselves have been contributing to the cost: destruction of protective wetlands, poor forest maintenance, increased building in risk-prone areas and various actions including urbanization itself that affect land water storage and thus land subsistence/relative sea level rise. Until the plaintiffs stop making their own costs worse, it is hard to see why they should be given more money. The funds that the plaintiffs are demanding would ostensibly be used for things like sea walls and other climate resiliency projects, but the track record of such arrangements are dismal. States secured billions of dollars in perpetuity from the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, but just 2.4 percent of the annual revenues have made their way into the intended use of tobacco prevention and cessation programs. If the plaintiffs suing the oil companies truly believed that these climate adaptations are vital investments, they would have already started building them.

The centerpiece of the investigations and the public nuisance lawsuits is the allegation that for decades ExxonMobil had unique, definite knowledge that burning oil would warm the planet (#Exxonknew), yet publicly sowed doubts in order to maximize its profit. There is a significant problem here for the environmental activists; this narrative is false. The research that Exxon did is publicly available, as it has been for decades in peer-reviewed publications, and it was not just Exxon doing global warming research. You can see scientific reports on the subject well before Exxon’s research, in Time Magazine in 1956, a Bell Labs production from 1958 (with Frank Capra!) and even a report to Congress sent by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Activists discovering all of the studies and warnings available decades ago have expanded the conspiracy to include other oil companies and even electric utilities rather than admit that global warming was not so secret after all.

So maybe everybody in government and anyone else that cared to know could have found out about global warming since at least the 1960s—but what about the misinformation that Exxon was spewing, sowing doubt about the certainty of the science? Inside Climate News published a series on Exxon that claimed to show just that. But what is misleadingly omitted from their out-of-context quotes of Exxon’s research is that the scientists frequently discussed the uncertainty of causal mechanisms and future warming predictions. President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was certainly up-to-date on the climate science, but their concerns about carbon dioxide emissions were couched with “at present it is impossible to predict these effects quantitatively,” a problem they hoped to be resolved in a few years by better computers. It must have taken longer than that, because in the mid 1970s, when the concept of global warming had been around for decades, journalists as well as the majority of scientific papers flipped over to alarms about global cooling. Of course, in both cases the clear solution one could find in the media was to curb our use of oil and gas, a case that was also frequently made by alarmists for the enduring 20th century “peak oil” theories.

The activists’ key evidence that Exxon muddied the scientific waters comes from a study produced by researchers involved with the investigations, one of whom was featured in the New York Times as one of the original architects from the 2012 La Jolla meeting. The study, funded in part by the Rockefeller Family Fund, concludes that while ExxonMobil’s internal documents and research found anthropogenic warming, their New York Times advertorials from 1989-2004 sowed doubt.

One critical problem with this representation is that Exxon and Mobil were separate companies until 1999, and the climate research came from Exxon while the advertorials came from Mobil. More importantly, the study was cherry-picked and error-laden, relying on the Greenpeace-run website PolluterWatch to find just 36 global warming-related advertorials from a weekly advertorial series that lasted 15 years. Energy In Depth found 69 global warming-related advertorials, of which “the overwhelming trend in ExxonMobil’s advertorials was to acknowledge that climate change is happening, that humans are contributing to it and that the company was and is taking steps to mitigate it.”

Perhaps recognizing the flaws in the #Exxonknew narrative, the NY OAG ended up suing ExxonMobil on claims entirely contrary to their initial accusations—although you would not know it from the misleading New York Times headline, “New York Sues Exxon Mobil, Saying It Deceived Shareholders on Climate Change.” One would be forgiven for reading that and believing that the NY OAG is accusing the oil corporation of downplaying the risks of climate change to its shareholders, but in fact, it is arguing exactly the opposite: that the oil corporation has been telling shareholders that the risk from climate is greater than their internal estimates. If this strange argument does not give you the impression that the NY OAG is truly concerned about ExxonMobil shareholders, well, you might be right—any money that the State of New York manages to pressure Exxon into coughing up in a settlement will go straight into the government’s coffers.

Ironically, the only parties that any courts have found to be giving conflicting positions on climate change are the California counties and cities that sued Exxon; though in their lawsuits they were certain that climate change will cause damaging sea level rise and floods in the near future, in their recent bond offerings they stated that they are unable to predict whether sea level rise or other climate change impacts will occur or whether they will have material adverse effects to city finances or the local economy. The Texas District Court in which Exxon asked for finding of fact concluded that these contradictions “raise the question of whether the California municipalities brought these lawsuits for an improper purpose,” boding well for Exxon in a potential countersuit. The Californian municipalities will be forced to either admit that the claims of damages from climate change that they alleged in their litigation are false or face fraud charges for underreporting climate risks to their bondholders.

Conclusion

We as a society have depended on the reliable electricity and transportation made possible by oil, gas and coal. There has been no deception necessary for this relationship to occur; these fuels make up the vast majority of U.S. energy consumption as they have for more than a century, a fact that decades of generous subsidies for nuclear, biofuel, wind and solar energy has done little to change. Our current public nuisance is not the conventional fuels that keep the lights on at schools and hospitals but rather the sham lawsuits created by municipalities looking for their next meal ticket.

The post Climate Lawsuits have Cities Seeing Green appeared first on IER.

SEO & Progressive Web Apps: Looking to the Future

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

MozCon 2019: Acceptance. Education. Donuts

Posted by PJ_Howland

We’re digital marketers; we make our living in a constantly changing (and consistently misunderstood) industry. It’s easy to feel like even those who are closest to us don’t really get what we do. Take me, for example, I once mentioned algorithms to my grandmother, and ever since then, she’s been absolutely (and adamantly) sure that I work with clocks. Did she think I said analog?

But despite the dynamic nature of marketing, Moz has always been a solid rock at the center of the storm. It’s been here since the beginning, a place where all the marketing nerds and SEO geeks could hang our hats and feel understood.

And MozCon feels like the culmination of that culture of acceptance.

MozCon: Helping you build your best self

As I’ve chatted with the good folks at Moz about this year’s MozCon, it’s clear to me that they pay attention to data. Why do I say that? Because they’re doubling down on making this year their most actionable year ever. As a past attendee, I can say that hearing that MozCon’s biggest focus is a dedication to actionable tactics gets me excited.

The creative media surrounding MozCon have an under-the-sea theme going on. These nautical nods are setting us all up for the deep dive into digital marketing we’re sure to see this year. Since there’s a good chance that most of us marketers never made it to prom (just me? Okay then...), it’s kind of fun to get a second chance to experience oceanic decor in a congregate environment (What, you’ve never dreamed about being Marty McFly at his parent’s Enchantment Under the Sea dance? Was I the only one?)

The point is that the upcoming MozCon is poised to do what it does so well: Offer a delightful mix of predictability and variety, presented in a way that’s designed to improve us without reforming us. New players will share the stage with established thought leaders and strategists. Innovation will go hand in hand with cherished tradition.

After looking at the initial agenda, here are a few of the front runner speakers and sessions I’m excited for in particular.

Casie Gillette — Thanks for the Memories: Creating Content People Remember

Digital marketers like data, right?

[Cue nodding heads and incoherent mumblings]

While I certainly love data, I also struggle with data. Sometimes I rely on the data so much that I become hesitant to take risks. And if there’s one thing our industry as a whole can improve on, it’s taking more risk.

Casie is taking to the stage with a mission to teach us how to make content memorable. With the promise that MozCon 2019 will be more tactical and strategic than ever before, I am earnestly giddy (feel free to picture that emotion however the mood takes you) to hear about what I can do to take a step back from the data, and instead put it on the line for something my audience will never forget.

Shannon McGuirk: How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Link-building, anyone? Yeah, it’s still a thing. After all, if you link-build it, they will come. Shannon promises to teach us how to set up a “digital PR room.” AKA, a link-earning machine! It sounds like she’s pulling back the entire curtain and will be showing us some concrete link-building tactics. I know how many hours go into earning a single link, so I am eagerly awaiting a process that scales.

Ross Simmonds — Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Like many SEOs, I’m a firm believer in the power of valuable content. So when I hear about a session titled, “Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing,” it’s eye-catching. Maybe more than eye-catching, it’s paradigm challenging. I love keywords, LOVE’em! Content marketing without keywords makes me a little uneasy. Let’s just say keywords are at the center of most of my strategy for content marketing decisions. I’m glad I have time to prepare my mind for what mad brilliance Ross will be sharing this year at MozCon.

Heather Physioc — Mastering Branded Search

Before I even jump into Heather’s digital game, let’s start with her taste in music. Her walk-on music was strong last year — real strong.

This year Heather is going to be chatting us up on branded search. At one glance I’m like, “Okay, color me intrigued…” Branded search seems so surface-level, but knowing Heather, it will be an engaging presentation replete with answers to (what I thought were) unanswerable questions about branded search. Heather has a background in working with enterprise brands, so for me, the opportunity to learn how to leverage big brand names for unique perspectives on what many may think is a pretty straightforward subject, is one I don’t dare pass up. Very excited for what’s sure to be a wild ride.

Britney Muller — Topic TBD, but looking forward to it nonetheless 

I’ve never left a conference with more notes from a single session that I have from Britney’s MozCon address in 2017. I recall her sharing her trepidation about being the lead SEO for Moz. A quick project Britney took on was gutting some old and thin pages on Moz.com — about 70,000 community pages if my notes from the event are correct. But shortly, Moz.com saw a modest organic traffic bump. Britney is fearless as an SEO, and there’s something beyond the sheer value of case studies here. As SEOs, we too should be fearless in our work. I’m looking forward to Britney sharing data, insights, and her gutsy spirit with all of us.

Moz with Benefits...

Speakers and sessions are cool and all, but can I just say that all the little extras MozCon has to offer are amazing.

Networking is something that every conference touts. And sure we all like networking, cause that’s what we have to say right? What’s the phrase? “If you’re not networking, you’re not working”? At MozCon, networking is not a chore; it’s easy and enjoyable. Even productive. From an agency perspective, it’s a cool place outside the office to connect with clients too.

And how have I gotten this far and not mentioned the food at MozCon? The meals are excellent, but can I say a word about the snacks? Moz does not skimp when it comes to eats. Sure, I talked about some cool speakers and topics above, but you know what’s actually stolen my heart at MozCon? Top Pot donuts. I may be that guy that leaves a session 5 minutes early just to get a head start on these donuts. Does that mean I might miss out on valuable insights or strategies? Absolutely it does, and I don’t care. My goal has always been to get a couple of donuts down the hatch before I run into someone I know. That way, when they see me with a donut in each hand, they think that’s all I’ve had.

“Just two donuts this time, PJ?”

“Yeah, haha, just two…” Suckers.

Donuts aside, Moz cares immensely about their community and has done everything possible to make this the best year yet. So come as you are, and leave as you were… only better. The Moz culture of acceptance and education stands to deliver a MozCon experience that will keep you going throughout the year.

I can’t wait to take a deep dive into the sea of SEO with all of my fellow marketing geeks. And if you want to chat, I’ll be the guy hovering around the donut table.

Well, what did I miss?

For all the long-time MozCon attendees out there, what are you excited for?

Which speakers and sessions are you looking forward to most?

Do you have any favorite moments from years past?

Where are you grabbing dinner in the city?


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Environmental Activism by Court Order: The Dangerous and Faulty Approach of Atmospheric Trust Litigation

Monday, May 6, 2019

Creating Quality Content in 2019 (For Search Engines and People)

The Afterlife of Electric Vehicles: Battery Recycling and Repurposing

By 2040, more than half of new-car sales and a third of the global fleet—equal to 559 million vehicles—is projected to be electric. This poses serious challenges. Electric vehicle batteries typically must be replaced every seven to 10 years for smaller vehicles and three to four for larger ones, such as buses and vans. Declining performance for an electric vehicle battery is evidenced by fewer miles of driving per charge and more frequent plug-ins by owners.The global stockpile of these batteries is expected to exceed 3.4 million by 2025, compared with about 55,000 last year. This is almost a 62-fold increase in 7 years. Automobiles have overtaken consumer electronics as the biggest users of lithium-ion batteries.  Because batteries contain toxic chemicals that should not be placed into a landfills, they need to be either recycled, which involves an intensive manufacturing process, or repurposed for other uses.

China has the largest electric vehicle market in the world and the largest number of electric vehicle manufacturers. Electric cars make sense in China because of its dense and crowded cities that often mean shorter driving distances. China, where about half the world’s electric vehicles are sold, has made carmakers responsible for expired batteries and the European Union also has regulations on battery disposal.

Recycling

Batteries can be recycled, but recycling them is not easy due to the sophisticated chemical procedures involved. If not handled properly, the heavy metal contained in the battery can lead to contamination of the soil and water.

Batteries can be recycled through smelting, direct recovery, and other, newer processes. A smelting process is used to recover many minerals (e.g. lithium, cobalt, nickel) contained in the battery. After a battery is smelted, the lithium ends up as a mixed byproduct and extracting it is costly. While the cost of fully recycling a lithium-ion battery is about €1 per kilogram, the value of the raw minerals reclaimed from the process is only about a third of that.Another way to look at the cost of extraction of lithium from old batteries is that it is 5 times more expensive than mined lithium.

One of the premier EV battery recycling companies is Li-Cycle, a Canada-based company that uses advanced recycling technologies that can recover up to 100 percent of lithium from lithium-ion batteries. In the United States, California-based Redwood Materials and Retriev Technologies also recycle materials from old batteries. OnTo Technology, based in Oregon, is also pioneering advanced battery recycling processes.

Repurposing

As these advanced technology processes continue to develop, reusing batteries offers another route to their disposal and productivity. Many electric vehicle batteries which are ‘spent’ still have up to 70 percent of their capacity left– more than enough for other uses. After used electric vehicle batteries have been broken down, tested, and re-packaged, they can be used for things like home energy storage.

Manufacturers like Nissan and Renault are using old batteries to provide new services. In Japan, Nissan repurposed batteries to power streetlights. Renault has batteries backing up elevators in Paris. And GM is backing up its data center in Michigan with used Chevy Volt batteries. Old batteries can also be useful for storing solar energy and backing up traditional electrical grids. In addition, private companies like the UK-based Powervault and Australia-based Aceleron have created technologies that can turn batteries into home electricity storage units, electric bike batteries, and other tools. General Motors Co., BMW AG, Toyota Motor Corp., BYD Co. and several renewable-energy storage suppliers are among those trying to create an aftermarket, thereby obtaining extra profits.

Source: Bloomberg

By 2025, it is estimated that about three-quarters of spent electric batteries will be reused and then recycled to harvest raw materials. That means automakers and battery producers can profit from the same battery pack several times.

Conclusion

Batteries have a limited life for electric vehicles. However, because they still have 70 percent of their capacity after electric vehicle use, there is a secondary market for them for home storage, street lights, elevators, data centers and other uses. Once these uses have expired, the battery can be recycled to obtain reusable materials, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. But, advanced processes are still needed to make recycling more economic. Several companies are working on the technology. However, if the electric vehicle market grows as these projections indicate, the resulting significant increase in the demand for battery and battery materials may be a major challenge for suppliers.

A previous IER article on battery disposal can be found here:

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/uncategorized/chinas-new-environmental-problem-battery-disposal/

 

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