Hawaii’s historic youth-led pollution lawsuit, Atlanta’s rapid adoption of an e-bike rebate program, and California's innovative mosquito control strategy. We also discuss Canada’s new anti-greenwashing law and China’s accelerated decarbonization efforts. Plus, listener mail from Tasmania.
- Personal Updates: Brian shares his latest news and James recounts his experience storm chasing with his adult son.
Main Stories
- Cummins Fined: Cummins faces a $2 billion fine for pollution violations.
- Canada's Anti-Greenwashing Law: Canada passes a law to combat greenwashing, leading to the shutdown of Alberta’s oil propaganda war room.
- Hawaii's Settlement with Youth: The state of Hawaii settles a lawsuit with 13 young plaintiffs, agreeing to decarbonize its transportation system by 2045.
- China’s Clean Energy Surge: Recent data shows significant declines in thermal power generation and increases in solar and hydroelectric output in China.
- California’s Mosquito Experiment: The state is releasing irradiated, sterile male mosquitos to combat population growth. What could go wrong?
Listener Mail
- Tasmanian Listener: We hear from a listener in Tasmania, the Australian province known for its clean air and eco-tourism. Brian responds with insights into Tasmania's environmental significance.
Lightning Round
- The UK's rapid transition away from coal power.
- Wildfire risks for utilities operating without insurance.
- The global solar industry’s record-breaking growth.
- Innovative pilot projects integrating PV into noise barriers.
And Finally This Week
- Atlanta’s E-Bike Rebate Program: A partnership between the Atlanta Regional Commission and Propel ATL aims to make e-bikes more accessible to moderate and low-income residents, with impressive early adoption rates.
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Hello, and welcome to Episode 218 of The Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Woodingham, this week. The Australian province of Tasmania has the cleanest air in the world. Beautiful scenery and a thriving economy. So why does one of its residents listen to our show? Stay tuned, we'll find out. 13 children and two teens sued the state of Hawaii over pollution and have won an historic settlement. Somehow, this is a great victory for the youth of today. But be warned, this will only make them drunk with power. I say beware the youth, as they seek to replace us all. 1% of Atlanteans jump on a juicy e-bike program in the first 12 hours. 99% of Atlanteans wonder what an e-bike is. California is waging a war on mosquitoes by releasing more mosquitoes. The pilot project will release tens of thousands of irradiated lab-raised mosquitoes. These mosquitoes are all male, sterile, and this should disrupt population growth. If it goes badly, the horror film potential for giant radioactive mosquitoes will be enormous, so it's a win-win for Hollywood. All that and more are this edition of The Clean Energy Show. And also this week, Brian Canada passes a law that says you can't greenwash, and as a result, Alberta's evil oil propaganda war room had to shut down. It won't be missed. China may beat their 2030 decarbonizing goals this year. Yeah, that's amazing. All right, we haven't done this for a while. James, it's time to play Jeopardy Masters. So this isn't just regular Jeopardy. This is Jeopardy Masters, which has only the smartest of the smart contestants. These are basically the smartest people on the planet, and they're here, and they're ready to play Jeopardy. Technology Six. The R1S from this car company is an all-electric SUV with a nearly 400-mile battery range. That R is for a Rivian, Matt. Oh, if all the questions were that, Brian, I could go on Jeopardy Masters and win money and get my yeast from fast. I got to tell you. This Jeopardy Masters, and that's a few weeks old. I'm kind of late catching up on it, but these people are so smart, it's insane. Quite often, they'll be an answer on Jeopardy, and I'll think, "Oh, yeah, I remember that. I recognized that. I didn't get it, but this one, the answers constantly are things I have never, ever heard of in my entire life, but yeah, I could beat them on electric car trivia." They showed a picture of the Rivian as well, which should have sealed the deal. Whoa, I guess that's a lesson for Rivian to know that their brand is not penetrating yet. Yeah. And also that smart people aren't that smart, maybe. I mean, they don't listen to the show evidently, which disappoints me. I assume they all did. Well, they're all up on current events because a lot of the questions are current events in pop culture and new things that are happening. It isn't all just old history, but we're now. I don't know. I've done this four or five times now. I'd never know these sort of clean energy or EV kind of question. Why do you think there's so many of EV questions? I've noticed you brought a lot of them to the show. It seems like somebody there is Jones and for EVs are trying to spread the word, and I think that's kind of cool of them. Yeah. From my perspective. They're giving it a try, but I don't know if they've noticed like we have that no one ever gets those, but of course, Jim pretty supposed to be hard, so maybe they'll keep doing it and maybe the contestants will eventually learn. Right. Anyway, so I have an update on Cummins. We talked about them last week because I visited Columbus, Indiana, which is the home of Cummins diesel. They make diesel engines and for things like Dodge Ram pickup trucks. So in reading more about it, this story is from back in January. I didn't catch this last week, but Cummins was fined and has to pay out two billion dollars in fines to the feds and to California for doing the same thing that Volkswagen did, which is diesel cheat devices. Oh, you know, I wonder if we even had this story on the podcast and forgot it, because I think this sounds very familiar to me. I don't think so, but yeah, it's possible. I didn't really know what Cummins was until we visited Indiana recently, but it isn't just Volkswagen. I know BMW was also fined for the same kind of diesel cheating thing. It's kind of like back in the days of the Tour de France, when everybody was doping in the Tour de France, and you had to be doping to keep up and win. Well, all of these diesel makers, they all had the same problem, and they all just started doping instead of figuring out the inner technology, or maybe they, I mean, I'm assuming they all knew each other was cheating, but maybe they didn't. Maybe they thought, Oh my God, Volkswagen is ahead of us on technology. They've figured out how to make these diesel engines cleaner. We can't do it. So, you know, we got a cheat to catch up. I don't know what the real story is. So basically, there's a test that vehicles do in the United States for the EPA. It goes slow, goes fast, there goes in different temperatures, I think, or maybe it's all the same sort of 70 degree-ish temperature. And then you base it on that. Well, they, what do they do? They sort of programmed the computer to be really efficient at those speeds, but overall, it's not efficient at all. It's putting a lot of particulate matter in the air, diesel is a terrible pollution just for air, let alone climate. Yeah, they all wrote software to basically detect when the engines were being tested, and then the engines behave differently. That would be me. Jesus. That is so evil. It's so evil, but you know, it isn't just BMW, BMW, Cummins, and others as well. So Volkswagen, in their settlement, they're putting up a charging network, billions of dollars in a charging network, but it doesn't work in the United States and Canada. Electrified America, Electrified Canada, it's got 350 kilowatts, very powerful chargers compared to everything else, mostly, yet they are the least reliable and it's almost a joke on how unreliable they are. Yeah, and we've reported how the Biden administration, I believe here in Canada as well, they've now come up with laws stating that these chargers have to have a certain uptime, especially if they're getting government subsidies. So this is hopefully in the works to fix all that and hopefully the Electrified America chargers will be working better in the future. I hope so. Gosh, I hope so. Because it's giving electric cars a bad name and some of the people who are trying electric cars are bought their first one and they're encountering these terrible networks. It sucks. It sucks because it turns people off and you don't need that. You don't need that at all. However, I don't have much this week. I did go storm chasing with the sun the other night. We chase tornadoes. I don't know why. We gravitate towards danger. How close did you get? We got into the storm that was tornado ward and then we... That's how you were going to say into the eye of the tornado. No, no, no, no. Now actually what I'll flu by you. What I fear most is hail because the tornado is very small. We live at a giant, vast open wasteland of prairie. The tornado is only going to hit a small area. We never get F-5s or anything. This was a tornado outbreak. One thing that I did note was that before we even left town, we got into tornado warning on our cell phone like the emergency alert system and there wasn't a tornado worn storm within I would say 50 miles or 80 kilometers of the city at least and yet as my son pointed out this is not good because no one's going to believe it when there actually is a tornado and they're not going to take shelter so I don't know why these things aren't more. I can't imagine that we're picking up cell towers 80 kilometers away because that usually doesn't happen and it goes to specific cell towers within that area so I'm kind of sick of it whenever there is a tornado outbreak. We tried to get these warnings like I got two of them and none of them were when I was actually in the tornado storm so I went down towards the US border about 75 clicks north of the US border kilometers and the storm was crossing the highway so most storms have tornadoes I think on the back southern edge of it or the it wasn't the edge where we were so we weren't going to see anything. We were just going to see a bunch of black and hail but then another storm that became tornado warned was just behind it. We thought oh that's a little dicky little storm. It's also we were fighting sunset because the sun was going down. I've got a picture of the sunset and the storm going on at the same time. You don't want to be in the dark out looking at storms and taking pictures and just experiencing them a little bit. Well yeah it was we were fighting the sunset so it was going down and we didn't we moved back off but that next storm we just missed it because it was tornado warned too only because it had rotation not because there was visual of a tornado. And it is possible like way back I think it's 1912 that our city had a tornado hit right in the middle of downtown it's one of the most you know famous tornado hits in Canadian history because yeah you know it's it's a tiny tiny chance that these things are ever going to hit a populated area but it did happen here back in 1912. Especially here if you think about the tornado alley in the United States there's a lot of towns in those places ours is very sparse we put up towns wherever the steam engines needed to stop and put water in and some of those are ghost towns now and some of them are still alive but not terribly big. So generally when a tornado touches down it's you know a grain bin on a farm that's turned over and everybody's fine so we actually haven't had knock on wood major injuries or anything like that from tornadoes here even though we get quite a few of them it's just the odds are yeah famous last words next week I'll be dead chasing tornado but it is a very cool thing to do because nature is awesome and you kind of want to see what that's like and I think my son when he was little like me I feared storms because when I was a kid I think that's at my best friend's birthday party a block away which was along the railway tracks and we were worked far from the edge of the city so we could see twin tornadoes down on the horizon in by a local community and back then this was 1974 probably '75 I don't know in that area there was no radar apps there was nothing like that there wasn't even radar like they didn't have the radar the weather radar back then so they were you know broadcasting hearsay over the radio waves and and you didn't know anything and they were they seemed headed our way and then you know like everyone was scared so I got scared I didn't know what they were and then I suddenly became scared of lightning because we had this intense storm at the same time so yeah my kid was afraid of tornadoes when he was a kid so now he chases them because you know that's kind of the way it was with me I think I kind of have a fascination a lot of people do but yeah you got to be careful and we we kind of know it or we kind of know not to go on certain sides of the storm we kind of know which way they're going he's a geography genius like he knows exactly where we are at all times so that's helpful I wouldn't do it myself I'd probably be dead by now if I did it myself yeah and there are tools as you say with the radar and stuff that you can access they're frustratingly behind those sometimes they're 20 minutes behind me you're looking at a image for 20 minutes that's not good when you chase it to a tornado good it's life and death no good at all alright so more legal news here on the clean energy show we love this we love when the kids sue their governments and we have an update from Hawaii and they have settled so 13 children and two teens sued Hawaii over the threat posed by climate change and instead of going to court they have reached a settlement and so it's an ambitious plan to decarbonize the state's transportation system over the next 21 years so they saw perhaps the writing on the wall these suits aren't always successful it was successful in Montana and then I think another one in Oregon was dismissed and that's now being appealed but in Hawaii it looks like they figured that they might lose this one and rather than go into a protracted legal battle over something everyone knows we have to do anyway decarbonize so the lawsuit said that one plaintiff a 14 year old native Hawaiian was from a family that farmed Taro for more than 10 generations however extreme droughts and heavy rains caused by climate change have reduced crop yields and threatened her ability to continue the cultural practice the complaint said rising sea levels also threatened to put their lands underwater another plaintiff lost her home twice due to climate change induced events according to our children's trust a public interest law firm that's representing the plaintiffs the flooding from a 2018 hurricane and last year's deadly wildfire on the island of Maui displaced this one family twice so the lawsuit has argued that Hawaii was violating the state constitution by operating a transportation system that harms the climate and infringes upon the right to a clean and healthy environment which is a similar thing that they have in Montana and that's how they were able to win it accused the Department of Transportation of consistently prioritizing building highways over other types of transportation and I have a friend who lived in Hawaii for a few years and yeah it's known apparently for its traffic like the traffic in Hawaii is really bad which is something you wouldn't think of when you think of this beautiful island paradise but they just have developed a car dependent culture and so yeah this is gonna apparently you have to change and you know more options like public transportation they're gonna spend at least 40 million dedicated to expanding public vehicle electric vehicle charging and you know other things to do with pedestrian and bicycle and public transit things are now gonna have to be prioritized due to the settlement and there's a judge that is going to enforce this agreement if disputes arise so you know the kids can keep an eye on it and check and see if Hawaii is actually you know doing what they said they're gonna do the organization is fantastic and this is you know they're racking up the victories I hope that people donate to them and I hope they get better at it and you know this is this is progress when victories happen in court and where they can't happen politically yeah yeah no this is an amazing mechanism to force governments to do what they need to do if there is a court system in the United States used to be under pressure oh zine but that's that's another podcast which I don't have sir sorry about that China has reduced power generation from fossil fuels as output from sunlight and water surges its feeding hopes that the world's biggest polluter may have peaked emissions years before its own deadline this is from Bloomberg thermal power which is another word for coal usually which accounts for the bulk of China's carbon footprint fell 4.3% in May from the previous year the biggest drops since 2022 that's from the statistics bureau reported a week ago on Monday but I guess recently hydroelectric has jumped 39% after heavy rains fed a recovery in the world's most powerful dams output from large solar farms rose by almost 30% falling a record increase in new panels last year one year Brian 30% that is not slowing down because the prices are so low I don't know what I think yeah it's actually the solar output world I think we'll talk about this in the lightning round is really optimistic for this year it's incredible actually thermos decline since has accelerated according to the Chinese coal transportation and distribution association dropping 13% year on year in the first half of June so China in one year on year June down 13% is really encouraging because China's big problem is its coal generation the data reinforces estimates that China's emissions will fall this year as clean energy starts to meet all of the nation's consumption growth so instead of adding coal they're gonna that's coming to an end we hear that politically all the time China has coal they're building more coal well they're not using it not very much it's it's remaining the pain them did not burn anything it's there for a backup as we would use natural gas and North America's a backup China's vowed to peak carbon before 2030 a key milestone on its road to zeroing out emissions by 2060 it may be doing that this year Brian is 2024 just to double check that with you yeah that's a long way ahead of schedule if that happens it may not yeah it has to do with the economy the economy takes off that's a different story but it's looking very good atomic generation of nuclear reactor will likely begin rising later this decade but they only put one reactor connected to the grid last year even though they're building a few of them compared to the expected average of five a year through 2027 well even in China and the nuclear you know world out is going very slowly yeah that's no that's amazing is 2024 we started this podcast in 2020 hope to wrap it up by 2030 when all these emissions are gonna be way way down okay let's dip into the mailbag actually this week we have a one of our beloved voicemail clips this is excellent from someone in Tasmania the province in Australia I apologize Brian that was the wrong clip that sounds like the wrong clip I have the right one here hi guys Damon Cough here from Tasmania in listening to the show for a couple of years and love the way you do your stuff I'm from Tasmania which is a small group of islands off the south coast of Australia not to be confused with Tanzania we're 99% renewable power here importing occasionally from the mainland in the crisis it's primarily hydro with some wind and I've invested in solar on my home roof I have an is in leaf which I want to have vehicle to home implemented to use it as a battery what I find frustrating about vehicle to home in Australia is that we are in a two-year pilot to prove that this will work and how to implement it this works already been done in the UK and other nations and we should be piggybacking off that and getting this stuff done also the current party and opposition on mainland Australia are also looking at nuclear for backup base load yes we have an abundance of uranium but we also have large reserves of lithium which we could refine here and then build the storage batteries here creating home-based manufacturing improving our economy and providing new jobs anyway needed to get that off my chest I love your work and I'll continue to be listening it's a great show guys thank you well that's great to hear and like I said Tasmania is a group of a thousand islands as he pointed out a thousand but mostly it's one big one we have a place here in Ontario called a thousand islands where my parents lived for a while it's not a thousand islands it's it's euphemistically a thousand but that is there's literally a thousand islands as part of Tasmania and the cleanest air in the world I envy you and bloody beautiful place too absolutely amazing yeah I share the frustration about the slowness sometimes of like everybody wants to do a pilot project on something instead of just getting down to the business of doing it so yeah vehicle to home has been explored already in pilot programs in other places so you know let's just get on with it it's a climate emergency you know these things these things have to move quicker that's Damon in Tasmania I would love to visit Tasmania Brian but it's a one day and two-hour plane trip to get there that's a long trip yeah basically the other side of the plane they're very expensive I have some some facts about Tasmania because whenever we get a letter from a less than usual place I'd like to uh kind of learn about where our listener is the state of encompasses the main island of Tasmania the 26th largest island in the world and surrounding one thousand islands it is Australia's least populous state with 569 000 plus residents Tasmania is a significant agricultural exporter as well as a significant destination for ecotourism about 42 percent of its land area including national parks and world heritage sites is protected in some form of reserve so 42 percent of it is basically protected land because it's that precious the first environmental political party in the world was founded in Tasmania so I can see and now I'm starting to wonder why all 500 000 of them are not listening to our show it seems perfect for them tell your friends Damon tell your friends it's just um yeah like I said though long ways away yeah and if you want to contact us you can get us at clean energy show at gmail.com and then the voicemail option is speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow all right so we got a story here from California this isn't quite new this story came out in May but I just came across it and thought it was interesting because I don't know it's about 10 years ago that I visited Los Angeles and I you know I was struck by the fact that there were no mosquitoes there and you know I commented I and you know when my family went there we kept okay we're some mosquitoes so we backed off we spent like three weeks in California in various places and I had to look it up and I remember you know there was these other bugs that come out at like eight o'clock or something some places so I was it was very specific and it's all the more reason Brian for us to move to California all man I want to go to California I wonder how the fortunately the Tasmania mosquito problem is is probably pretty high but yeah I imagine yeah cleaner air though but in any case um I don't know I guess there are now mosquitoes in Los Angeles if you have any listeners in Los Angeles kind of let us know but they have moved in to California more so than before and it's in part because of climate change changing climate and then you know occasionally wetter seasons you know the dryness is one of the things that people say it when I said you know how come there's no mosquitoes here and they say oh it's too dry well you know they do have droughts still but the rainy season is in the fall and winter I believe right the late fall early winter what we would consider late fall early winter and sometimes it doesn't come and the wildfire has burned in November but yeah that's why maybe they have mosquitoes for a little while then it dries up again but something like that my perspective from a man who has not opened his pool yet and it's almost July it's a problem Brian it's a problem but I have I have to keep it running even though I'm not using it so there's not mosquitoes in the water and so it doesn't turn green so I have to waste money circulating the water even though it was too cold out and it's got to stay that way into into July we really got to move to California so yeah so there's a pilot project and this has been done in other places so you know the research has been done but they're going to release tens of thousands of irradiated lab-raised mosquitoes they're male they've been sterilized by the radiation and so they're going to find wild females to mate with and impregnate them and then it's a dead end and hopefully this stops everything from expanding but apparently they actually glow under black light because they've been irradiated they're actually like fluorescent neon mosquitoes if you look at them in a black light and there's probably people with black lights in their house getting high and watching the mosquitoes glow by yeah well it's it's actually it sounds like it's a die they die them so they know which ones are the mosquitoes oh they irradiate them and they die them and then they can see it on black light do it's dying mosquitoes so yeah there's a nice quote here the stories from NBC News everybody always said well our weather isn't suitable for mosquitoes but you know the mosquitoes adapt and our weather has changed we get more moisture in the summer and people create these ideal little moist mini climates in their backyards with lush plants and everything and so mosquitoes are moving into California oh no one bastion have to move to uh right into the desert i guess away from these lush backyards you were in Palm Springs recently which is a desert place yeah i don't remember there being mosquitoes there uh-huh uh-huh well there you go mosquitoes are a terrible thing here it's rained every day of the spring and the thunderstorms and different ways of getting rain we we're not used to having rainy days but of course this is the one year that my yeast trough was broken and and i thought well it doesn't matter it's gonna be dry all summer i'll i'll get around to it so figure something down you know it there were lots of mosquitoes in Wisconsin when we were touring the frankloid right properties everybody was smacking themselves all the time oh yeah and the sconces known for its mosquitoes we used to drive through there every summer to go to uh the uh lake here in area of Ontario where my grandmother lived sort of lived well brian the alberta war room has shut down we've mentioned this on the show before now alberta is a province in Canada for those of you in Tasmania uh it is the place where oil comes from in Canada mostly a little bit from where brian and i live next door but most of it comes from alberta that's where the oil sands are they have a very right wing government florida style um not really living in reality i would say the politics of alberta right now is kind of uh cuckoo and the aborda government has closed its oil and gas so-called war room which is what the previous premier of that province called it and it was uh started in 2019 to fight against so-called false information about Canada's fossil fuel industry they saw a threat from environmentalists in the states pouring money into information campaigns and apparently that was all wrong oil is clean and beautiful and you know you can drink this stuff and it'll make your bowels work better so-called false information or as we like to call it information the it was no they put millions of dollars into this by the way and no one even read it i mean it was had a youtube channel with like less views than us and we don't have multi-million dollar budgets and yeah it was kind of a joke and you know it wasn't working because no one read it not the only people who read it were al burdens and they're already on board i can tell you with uh oil and gas living forever and giving them no sales tax and you know really good roads when you cross the border and typical oil and gas has been very good to alberta they have great infrastructure and no tax sales tax because of it the war room made many mistakes and had very few supporters so it was bound to fail but the Canadian energy center that's what it was called was set up in in 19 as a private corporation to avoid access to information laws that governments have to face when they're a government organization they didn't want the access to information because the information they're peddling are lies there i said it people want me to speak the truth to the world dammit this is a ridiculous organization that had 30 million dollar annual budget 30 million you imagine what our youtube channel would be doing with 30 million dollars that'd be amazing yeah there'd be uh dancers and orchestras uh we could hire Taylor Swift to write a theme song sure and she would perform it live every week that's what we could do and we could do it from Tasmania if we wanted to the war room failed to meet the expectations and was dissolved in september 2023 it was promised 22 million for pro fossil fuel campaign uh it faced criticism for several issues including soul source contracts and attacking and netflix kids film which we talked about you know yeah there's netflix two years ago kids film which talked about oil being bad it went right after and said you're green you're you're you know communist educating our children against uh oil is wonderful how could you bad talk oil in a kids film that was one of their big fights didn't go very well was a joke uh the closure is partly due to the federal bill in Canada c59 a federal anti-gree washing law which by the way applies to everyone not just oil and gas you have to back up your your facts if you're going to make claims and why shouldn't you gosh darn it yeah the u has similar kind of laws and both parties in our province are against it because they thought it would hurt the oil and gas industry if they had to tell the truth my god man markam hislop uh energy journalist from around here said it was a motley collection of journalism hacks and libertarian fanatics that should have been hurled into the sun years ago couldn't agree more markam um the Canadian government passed a bill requiring corporations including oil gas companies to back up their environmental claims and the alberta government says uh it will in rapidly harm canadians ability to hear the truth about the energy industry if we have to tell the truth it'll impair them from hearing the truth l o l i say and other uh Canadian oil province news the place where brian and i lives is sketch one canada has done this the province has announced that a class called oil and gas 20 that's a grade 10 class or 10th grade class will be offered in high schools and i wasn't going to talk about this because i thought why should i give these idiots more it's airtime depressing but people like twitter have begged me on right they've begged me on they want my trademark passion and outrage you know you and i know teachers i mean there's a way to teach an oil and gas class that would teach the truth about it sure the courses this is they've hooked up with actual oil companies to come up with a curriculum uh see our government thinks that well first of all their funders are all oil related or pipeline related or oil industry related or people who sympathize with the oil industry which is i can't wait i hope i live long enough i have to get the my doctors working on keeping me alive to see the demise of oil and gas or at least the beginning of it the courses will include 50 hours of online theory and 50 hours of work placement so if you want your kid to go work near a pump jack uh good luck my friend jack was telling me the other day i can't believe people actually work there because he used to do that when he was a kid because his dad owned oil consulting companies is they're extremely dangerous um the oil drilling and pump jacks the you know things are flailing around chains or whipping he says he can't believe uh more people aren't killed and some people are of course no i i know someone who was killed several years ago the province is letting an oil company develop this course as i said and i uh the premier said this i think it's just really good exposure for both our students and exposing the industry to these children our brain limited premier said and so i wondered if it will stop there brian so i made a government ad to see what else they might bring to students in high school to educate them about jobs the government of saskatuan is offering new high school courses designed with your children's future in mind we're going to prepare the next generation for exciting futures in tomorrow's energy oil and gas the future is oil and gas but few people know that so we're partnering with oil companies to educate your children properly and we're not stopping there we're also offering classes on steam engine repair steam engine design an advanced steam engine appreciation because our children need to be ready for the future we're also offering courses for intermediate switchboard operator leech collector advanced elevator operator video store management and that profession where people go out in lightweight whale oil lamps on the streets at dusk the government of saskatuan preparing for the future warning as the rest of the world thrives on rapidly expanding green economy saskatuan is destined to become an economic wasteland consider moving to manatobah you idiots wow that was uh that was amazing uh okay some news from new york city from the ridiculous to the sublime uh from the wasteland to the big city uh this is a story from canary media i love talking about um the high rise projects in new york city this is something that's come up a few times now and it's happening because new york state has introduced tough legislation that's basically going to force large buildings um of more than 25,000 square feet to meet specific emission limits which will become more stringent in 2030 or they're going to have to start facing fines so this particular one um this is uh it's a 1931 building this is an art deco office building from 1931 that's being retrofitted we talked previously about new buildings going up but everybody knows these tough rules are coming in 2030 and you're just going to have to pay fines if you don't clean up your buildings and it reminded me of course you know the auto industry had very similar kinds of warnings about you know switching over to electric vehicles and they mostly ignored those warnings it just paid the fines so it begs the question are other buildings in new york just going to pay the fines i don't know that seems like a terrible idea but uh yeah so they're expecting that this building once they're complete so they're going to take out all the fossil fuel boilers and basically uh outfit them with heat pumps and there's going to be one on each floor and it's basically going to be a first of all self-contained system that just you know hot and cold water will run through pipes in the building and basically go where it's needed or not needed because you might have like say a server room in the basement that's going to be too hot and it needs to be cooled whereas other parts of the building you know need the opposite and you know in past systems it tends to be one or the other right you either turn on the heat or you turn on the air conditioning but this is a way more efficient system that gets heat and cooling to each floor to each place that it's needed and they say it's going to use 25% less energy than the conventional design and reduce the greenhouse pollution by 70% above the 2019 levels and then as the grid cleans up because as we know all of our electricity grids or grids are getting cleaner over the years they expect that to go up to uh 90% cleaner by 2035 so um they're also partnering with other buildings so they're actually going to connect it to 555 Greenwich Street which is next door this one is 345 Hudson um the building next door has geothermal which goes way way deep underground and they're going to connect the two systems which will just give them basically more options in terms of you know heat pumps heat exchangers just move heat around they don't necessarily create it they can amplify it but you just take the heat where it's not needed and put it where it's needed and this could end up with many more kind of district heating kind of solutions something more common in Europe but you know eventually multiple high rises could be sharing these uh same kind of systems it's amazing yeah they the heat and they cool so if you know you have to replace those things anyway yeah you have probably more efficient air conditioning as well because it's modern and they're getting more a little bit more efficient so the heating part is way more efficient than what you were using yeah heat pump air conditioners are you know way more efficient than normal ones uh for reasons they don't quite understand but um yeah this is uh this is amazing all right well that's good news and it obviously in places like uh New York City um a lot of people are living in high rises the high density of the population so you need to address those people you can't just dress suburbanites like you and i which is easier yeah in most places transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions but in new york it's buildings because it's so densely populated and people tend to use public transit all right well i just wanted to mention that Canada the government is set it's going to do 30 days of examination on whether they should add tariffs to uh chinese made evs and you know the united states uh the white administration just put a hundred percent tariff that's starting in july and that's because they're protecting their auto industry and i'm hearing a lot of chatter about this now from uh analysts and they're saying that like tobi seba who we follow for disruption of uh the clean technologies he went to the chinese auto one of the chinese i think the beijing auto show was in beijing this year and where was it Shanghai i can't remember but it was one of the major cities they had hosted the auto show and he said the chinese cars are amazing and i hear this a lot you said they're not they're not what you think they are in many respects higher technology than what we are used to in north america so they i mean he said that they're 90 percent of a tesla at half the price which struck me that yeah i mean they blame some of that on um the government uh subsidizing the auto industry giving them tax breaks but it's it's not that it's it's that's only a small part of the equation it's the supply chain and they're prowess at manufacturing yeah and but of course yeah the subsidies are always the reason for imposing the tariffs the idea being that the EU or north america can claim that oh these are way too subsidized they just have excess supply and they're dumping you know you're not allowed to dump your excess goods below cost in other countries so that's the justification but it means here in north america Canada will probably align with the u.s in terms of tariffs and we're just not going to get these cheap evs and unfortunately evs will remain expensive here because of that and here's the thing though they're protecting an auto industry that was not ready to go to evs and they've dropped the ball recently they've all you know they haven't been doing it economically they haven't been doing it competitively in price they don't know how to to come up with um evs they haven't really put their heart into it and that's they would be i've said it before they would be wiped out in a matter of years you know maybe maybe 10 years maybe less if the all Chinese auto industry was allowed to come into north america and of course that would help the environment now if you work in i know we've had at least one person in the auto factory listen to the show that's not good news for you and you want to have your job and your futures and your family and your pension protected but it goes to show that we are under pressure and eventually they will come here they may set up shop here i don't know how economically they can build when they build in north america it's not all labor it's just maybe the quality of labor it's not going to be what they're looking for um you know i went looking for for information on uh there was a um a fire at a um i was a korea or somewhere there was a korean company in um somewhere in asia where that had a fire recently of 21 people died of a battery lithium battery fire so i went looking for information on it to mention it on the show and i decided to search twitter and all i got on twitter was negative nellies saying see they think this is going to protect the planet ha what a joke and that's what people are exposed to and people who don't know better people gonna listen to our show are gonna hear and that's going to be the mindset but it is a terrible situation and they're going to look into uh why that happened and why there wasn't um you know safeguards in place and cold plants and gas plants uh blow up all the time and also brian they kill people by the hundreds of thousands in the world every year it's time to move on time for the lightning round the lightning round is a fast paced look at the nate's headlines in climate clean energy and transportation cop 29 president doesn't connect mukstar baba yev says the uk's transition away from coal from 40 percent of power in 2012 to zero on a few months from now is one of the fastest energy transitions in the world as is it is an inspiring example of ambition and that is a good thing that uh what the uk is doing and they're going to probably have a change in government on july 4th as wildfires season starts some utilities in north america are now operating without insurance and are on the hook for millions of dollars and damages if their power lines are linked to a blaze a wildfire blaze that is started by a downed power line time for a c s fast fact 9 000 coal plants make up one third of global emissions those have got to go and the uk is an example of how to do it starting to happen absolutely oh let's do another one every nine days each resident of bokota columbia has to spend 24 hours without running water due to water surges caused by guess what climate change this is from pv magazine heat pump plus pv that's heat pumps plus solar on a roof is cheaper than gas heating after 11 to 14 years so if you combine the two which are both expensive basically you start to save money 11 to 14 years in in a new weekly update for pv magazine soul cast uh dnv company reports that a low pressure system over the mediterranean led to a significant dust transport event there's something you don't hear every day a dust transport event affecting solar generation across europe throughout the week uh week low pressure in the mediterranean set up a southerly winds from seherin africa across the mediterranean into europe drawing dust into italy and southern france high pressure reaching from the atlantic introduced westerly winds pushing the dust around the north of the Alps into southern germany what a weird thing to happen from africa you're getting dust and it's taking away your solar generation by a few percent i thought a significant dust transport event was a a grateful dead tour okay global solar solar industry in 2024 is on track to smash its huge record deployment of 444 gigawatts in 2023 it's matched its huge record of deployment 20 uh 240 the year before that's you know practically doubling from 2023 to 2024 and you might think well okay it was a good year but they can't continue and it looks like it will 2024 global solar installations of 600 to 660 gigawatts will be uh 40 to 50 percent higher than the previous record in last year that we're getting towards a terawatt brine of solar deployment per year in the world which is i mean people said that wouldn't happen by 2060 and it could happen next year the year after we could be at a you know i don't think it's going to go too far beyond that because we're kind of getting saturated with solar and you can't do it at the same pace forever but it's reached that very low price and you know the learning curve of being able to install it properly and cheaply people are able to do that and analyze things and get the permits going this is also from pv magazine uh there had a couple stories about uh noise walls you know those walls they put up by freeways and trains the sort of block of the noise i wish we had one here we've been promised one for decades and never had one in my neighborhood but we need to win uh lithy we're eating a based solar module manufacturer's solar tech um the provider of noise reduction foam and noise attenuation walls are participating in two pilot projects integrating panels into those noise barriers which seems like another one of those seems like it's the year of putting solar panels and defenses and walls love it and yeah it's a great way to uh kill two birds with one stone then this is going into a railway near villainous and the other along a national uh e5 highway so yeah looking at the picture they're not all solar but the top part of them are solar and yeah i'd love to see that Porsche has increased the charging power from 270 to 320 watts in their cars you know that's kilowatts pardon me they've had these uh electric cars for five years now and they saw the degradation in those cells is lower than what they expected so now they with a software update you're able to charge your car significantly faster than you were before which is nice to see because they would charge me fast to me they were very fast anyway or at they that's great i can hit 257 kilowatts in my car on occasion so you know hitting 320 would be even better uh Mexico just had a searing uh 52 degrees Celsius 125.6 Fahrenheit tying the highest temperature ever recorded in Mexico let's do another yes fast fact it took solar just eight years to grow from a hundred terawatt hours not terawatts but terawatt hours per year in the world that is producing uh that much electricity for you know hours of time to a thousand terawatt hours of generation so it went up 10x in the hours of generation that it provides electricity in eight years that is a fast expansion coal took by the way coal took 32 years to do that compared to eight years gas took 28 years and hydro took 39 years to reach this milestone so and solar did it in sucking oil that's amazing that's what i have to say about that and finally this week the Atlanta Regional Commission has partnered with the city of atlanta and propel atlanta to offer an equity focused e-bike rebate program designed to provide affordable transportation options options for city of atlanta residents particularly moderate and low-income individuals this is the one where i said uh one percent of the population has signed up this is a um one million dollar investment from the city of atlanta this initiative aims to break down barriers to e-bike ownership reduce transportation costs and replace solo car trips to work the grocery store and local parks and recreation centers you know i was thinking why he has such perfect weather we were talking about the transportation of car culture well it seems like a good e-bike place because it's i've been there weather's perfect all the time are pretty close to it approximately one percent of those people in atlanta have applied for an e-bike in the first 12 hours of the program after one life so they might have to put some more money into that brian but it's a good example of people wanting to do this that is absolutely amazing and a great way to end the show for this week please take the time to contact us we're clean energy show at gmail.com around social media clean energy pod and there are videos of the show on tiktok and youtube including sometimes special content that's not featured on the show yes and uh tiktok now has a one-hour limit for us to upload because we were fairly popular channel we've got um access to the one-hour uploads my other tiktok channel does is restricted to like 30 seconds it's not not as big but yeah we could do 60 bit of videos now last week's show the video version was like three seconds over so i couldn't upload it i tried and i failed i gave up but i might there nobody watches an hour long video trust me but i'm going to throw it up anyway for the heck of it yeah see what happens see what happens they're trying to become youtube so we'll see by the way video versions of our podcast are released on youtube the following weekend um the weekend following the audio version so if you're looking to for that we're on our youtube channel we have a clean energy store linked in your show notes with hats t-shirts and mugs we ask as always to rate and review us on apple podcast or spotify or wherever you are listening to this if you're new to the show um welcome and i hope you stay with us consider subscribing for free so that the episodes come to you every week we'll see you next week see you next week
