Coming to Hawaii, National Drive Electric Week

Transportation puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other sector in the U.S. economy. In Hawaii, the percentage of transportation-related pollution is higher than on the mainland, and represents an excess of 40% of all local greenhouse gas emissions.  Hawaii is now following a global trend in the electrification of transportation, and off fossil fuels.

If you are curious about all-electric and zero emissions vehicle alternatives to your gas guzzler car, SUV, or truck, then you should not miss the 10th annual National Drive Electric Week (September 26 – October 4), which promises to answer your questions and excite anyone interested driving electric.

Locally, this year’s National Drive Electric Week (NDEW) event is locally hosted by the newly formed Hawaii EV Association (HEVA), a grassroots, multi-island, all-volunteer organization dedicated to helping Hawaii accelerate its transition to zero-emission transportation. The statewide organization brings together expertise from EV stakeholders across the islands.

Hawaii Electric Vehicle Association, a newly incorporated statewide organization representing Hawaii’s electric vehicle owners in Kauai, Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii Island, will host two separate webinars designed to assist Hawaii’s residents interested in and owners of electric vehicles.

Whether you’re curious about electric vehicles or an experienced EV driver, this national celebration, offers a local emphasis through exciting virtual workshops, expert presentations, and everyday EV owner experiences — all shared in an interactive two-day online event held on two consecutive Saturdays:

Saturday, September 26^th  

Webinar Event begins at 9 AM, ends at 11 AM

To register online visit: https://hawaiiev.org/events

Session 1        EV 101 – Buying and Owning an EV

(with webinar Audience Q&A)

• EV Buyer Benefits and Incentives
• EV Buying Tips
• EV Charging
• EV Owner’s Panel – Experiences with electrification
• EV Owner’s Panel – Audience Q&A
• Contest Give Away

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Saturday, October 3rd  

Webinar Event begins at 9 AM, ends at 11 AM

Session 2        EV 102 – Accelerating EV Adoption within Hawaii

(with webinar Audience Q&A)

• What the Future Holds for Electric Transportation in Hawaii
• Hawaii’s EV – Clean and Renewable Energy Connection
• New EV Models Coming – beyond EV Cars and SUV’s: Trucks, Buses, and other EV vehicles form factors
• EV Speed Bumps part 1  – Panelist presentations: Blue Planet, Hawaiian Electric, Hawaii County, and Rep. Nicole Lowen, Chairperson, House Committee, Energy & Environment
• EV Speed Bumps part 2 – Panelist – Audience Q&A
• EV Resources and Recap

For more information and to register for the free community events, visit:  https://hawaiiev.org/events

— Big EV News today

• CA mandate to go all electric with cars and auto-trucks beginning 2035

– drivers throughout the U.S. may want to start a rainy day car fund in the wake of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s climate-change-focused ban on sales of new gas-powered autos-SUV’s and light trucks, beginning in 2035.

• ChargePoint, the world’s largest provider of electric-vehicle charging stations, said on Thursday it is going public with a reverse-merger agreement worth $2.4 billion.

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— EV 2020 Political News

The Biden campaign has previously underlined the important role electric vehicles (EV) will play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

To encourage EV adoption, the campaign has three key targets: deploying 500,000 new public EV charging outlets, restoring the full EV tax credit, and developing a new fuel economy target.

Wood Mackenzie’s projection for public charging infrastructure deployments in the US is 800,000 new outlets by 2030. “A promise of 500,000 new charging outlets rings hollow considering organic growth is projected to be higher,” said Ram Chandrasekaran, Wood Mackenzie Principal Analyst.

However, according to Wood Mackenzie’s analysis, fewer than 20% of the projected charging outlets are fast chargers.

“Range anxiety – running out of charge before reaching your destination – is one of the biggest consumer hurdles for EV adoption. Deployment of fast chargers is arguably the best way to combat range anxiety regardless of the size of the car’s battery pack,” added Chandrasekaran.

While fast chargers are 15 times quicker to charge the vehicle, they are 30 times more expensive to construct and operate.

Electric vehicle share across major markets, 2015 to 2020 H1

“A higher share of fast chargers will be harder to achieve without well-directed efforts from the federal government. If the policy support promised by the Biden campaign is effective in increasing the number of fast chargers, it could ease some consumer concerns and boost EV sales,” said Chandrasekaran.

The current tax credit system is capped at the first 200,000 vehicles sold by a manufacturer. As of 2020, Tesla and General Motors have reached the cap, while Nissan and Ford are rapidly approaching it and other automakers are below the halfway point.

While previous efforts to increase the cap failed last year, Wood Mackenzie believes the Biden campaign’s promise to restore the full tax credit would mean increasing the cap to 600,000 as outlined in the previously down-voted bill.

“The average price difference between a number of internal combustion engine vehicles and their battery electric vehicle counterparts is $8,000. Raising the cap would immediately help Tesla and General Motors. All other automakers would likely welcome the opportunity to achieve the economies of volume before feeling the pressure to reduce the sale price of their EVs,” added Chandrasekaran.

Increasing the cap to 600,000 would positively impact over 7.5 million new EV sales, whereas the current cap helps only 2.2 million EVs. “A cap change for the tax credit system would certainly boost the share of EVs in the US for the next four to five years,” said Chandrasekaran.

As noted in Wood Mackenzie’s research, the most impactful policy change for EV adoption would be increasing federal fuel economy targets.

On 31^st March, during the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration passed the SAFE act. The directive reduced fleet-level fuel economy targets and implemented less stringent goals for 2021-2026.

The Obama-era regulations targeted a 5% improvement in fleet fuel economy every year. The Trump administration’s new rules reduced this target to 1.5% annually.

“Going beyond the Obama-era regulations or even reversing the new targets set by the Trump administration would definitely increase EV adoption.

“This has already been evidenced in other global markets. Setting a target at an automaker fleet level forces the automaker to manufacture more efficient cars. Automakers would also be required to spend more money on effective marketing campaigns and automaker-provided subsidies,” added Chandrasekaran.

Passing stricter emissions regulations would push US EV sales over the 4 million mark by 2030, 50% higher than Wood Mackenzie’s base case projection.

As death rate from the COVID-19 virus infections rises daily in Hawaii, here’s a jarring thought experiment: If the United States had done merely an average job of fighting the coronavirus — if the U.S. accounted for the same share of virus deaths as it did global population — how many fewer Americans would have died?

The answer: about 145,000 fewer American COVID-19 deaths.  

That’s a large majority of the country’s 183,000 confirmed coronavirus-related deaths.

No other country looks as bad by this measure. The U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population, and for 22 percent of confirmed Covid-19 deaths. It is one of the many signs that the Trump administration has done a poorer job of controlling the virus than dozens of other governments around the world.

The specific numbers are based on virus statistics that are unavoidably incomplete. Most scientists believe the real U.S. death toll is higher than the official numbers indicate, and under-counting of deaths may be even greater in some other countries.

After the U.S., Brazil and Mexico have the next largest gaps between population share and official death share. They are also countries with less advanced medical systems, where some experts think the actual death toll is vastly higher than the official one. If that’s right, the true gaps in Brazil and Mexico may be as large as the U.S. gap.

But no other affluent country has nearly so big a gap. Canada and several European countries each account for a greater percentage of deaths than population, yet the differences aren’t nearly as severe as in the U.S.

And some countries, like Australia and South Korea, have a positive version of the gap. Japan is home to 1.7 percent of the global population but less than 0.2 percent of deaths. An additional 12,000 Japanese residents would not be alive if the country had merely an average death rate.

The U.S. remains the world’s richest country, with vast medical capabilities, and the virus started on a faraway continent. All of which suggests that there was nothing inevitable about the U.S. performance. It is instead a tragic reflection of the country’s failed response and absence of leadership and governance of the Trump Administration.

(source: New York Times)

Today, there is more carbon dioxide in the air now than at any time in the last 3 million years — The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, global average surface temperatures were significantly warmer than they are today, and sea levels were 50 to 80 feet higher.

The continuing rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may sound surprising in light of recent findings that the pandemic, and the associated lockdowns, had led to a steep drop in global greenhouse gas emissions; a 17 percent decline in early April, but only a temporary blimp on the climate radar.

“The buildup of CO2 is a bit like trash in a landfill. As we keep emitting, it keeps piling up,” said Ralph Keeling, who directs Scripps’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, and whose late father, Charles David Keeling, began measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958, and at that time it was 313 parts per million in atmospheric CO2 gas concentrations.

Fossil Fuel Emissions Push Greenhouse Gas Indicators to Record High in May – New measurements show that not even the pandemic can flatten the Keeling Curve.

As graphs go, the Keeling Curve is simple, but it clearly illustrates the planet’s vexing global warming challenge. In a decades-long upward zigzag it charts the unrelenting increase of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Natural factors such as El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean and changes in terrestrial carbon sinks, such as forests, can have a large influence on the rate of climb in CO2 concentration from year to year, but the historic trend is undeniable.

This year’s May CO2 peak marked an increase of about 2.4 ppm compared with a year ago. The 2010 to 2019 average rate of increase is precisely the same at 2.4 ppm per year, according to NOAA. The decline of El Niño during the past year may help explain why the increase in the last year was not as large as recent years.

Because atmospheric levels of CO2 are cumulative, they will continue to increase until net emissions are cut to zero. Molecules of CO2 can remain in the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years.

Scientists warn that we’re on course to reach 450 ppm by mid-century, where levels would need to stop increasing to have a decent chance of meeting the goals in the Paris climate agreement, which seeks to limit climate change to well below 3.6 degrees (2 Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2100.

Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech, says the new findings underscore the need to act now. “It is a reminder that climate change is not on pause in any way, shape or form,” she said.

“We estimated that fossil carbon emissions dropped 8 percent [during] January through April, from 12 billion metric tons in 2019 to 11 billion in 2020,” he said. “A billion tons is a lot, but not so much that we can find it with statistical confidence.”

Keeling says it would take a sustained drop in emissions, rather than a sudden decline related to the coronavirus pandemic, to show up more clearly in measurements of atmospheric CO2. “What really matters here is setting a new trajectory,” he said.

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The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet

According to a comprehensive international study released last week, Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that global warming is extremely unlikely to be on the low end of estimates.

Scientists say it is likely that if human activities — such as burning oil, gas and coal along with deforestation — push carbon dioxide to such levels, the Earth’s global average temperature will most likely increase between 4.1 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 and 4.5 degrees Celsius). The previous and long-standing estimated range of climate sensitivity, as first laid out in a 1979 report, was 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 4.5 Celsius).

If the warming reaches the midpoint of this new range, it would be extremely damaging, said Kate Marvel, a physicist at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and Columbia University, who called it the equivalent of a “five-alarm fire” for the planet.   The new range is narrower than previous studies but shows at least a 95 percent chance that a doubling of carbon dioxide, which the world is on course to reach within the next five decades or so, would result in warming greater than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) relative to pre-industrial temperatures.

Breaking Climate News

Trump rolls back methane climate standards for oil and gas industry

The Trump administration is revoking rules that require oil and gas drillers to detect and fix leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas that heats the planet far faster than carbon dioxide.

Methane has a much more potent short-term warming effect than CO₂ and addressing it is critical to slowing global heating as the world is already on track to become more than 3C hotter than before industrialization.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that heats the planet far faster than CO₂ and addressing it is critical to slowing global heating

The Trump administration’s changes apply to new wells and those drilled since 2016, when President Barack Obama enacted the regulation in an effort to help stall climate change during a boom in fracking – a method of extracting fossil gas by injecting water and chemicals underground. The regulations required companies to regularly check for methane leaks from valves, pipelines and tanks.

Roughly a quarter of global warming the planet has experienced in recent decades has been due to methane, said Robert Howarth, a researcher who studies methane at Cornell University. The oil and gas industry is the biggest source of the pollutant.

“Methane is the second most important gas after carbon dioxide,” Howarth said. “For the time it’s in the atmosphere, it’s about 120 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide. There’s nowhere near as much of it in the atmosphere so it ends up being not quite as important overall, but it’s very powerful.”

Methane emitted today is largely gone in 30 years and totally gone in about 60 years, but it has a big effect on the climate in the meantime. That effect is most significant in the first months methane is released, when it is about 120 times stronger than carbon. That drops to around 86 times more powerful over 20 years and 33 times more powerful if compared with carbon over 100 years, Howarth said.

US methane emissions have become more concerning as scientists have begun to better understand their prevalence and impacts, and as gas production has continued to grow rapidly, increasing 10% last year.

Average global temperatures are already more than 1C higher. And they are expected to be 1.5C to 2C higher within the next 10 to 25 years, Howarth said. Reductions in carbon have a delayed effect on temperatures. But reductions in methane have a more immediate impact.

The world essentially cannot meet the near-term goals nations agreed to in an international climate agreement without reducing methane, Howarth said.

On the Path to Extinction

Ocean Warming Dooms Most Fish

The oceans could look much emptier by 2100, according to a new study that found that most fish species would not be able to survive in their current habitat if average global temperatures rise 4.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, as The Guardian reported.

The researchers of the new paper said that 60 percent of fish species face a grave threat from global heating if temperatures approach that worst-case scenario level. The species under threat include many common fish found in grocery stores, including staples like Atlantic cod, Alaska pollock and sockeye salmon, and sport fishing favorites like swordfish, barracuda and brown trout, as CNN reported.

The new study, published in the journal Science, looked at how nearly 700 fresh and saltwater fish species respond to warming ocean temperatures. The problem for most fish is that as ocean temperatures rise, the oxygen level goes down, which makes it extremely challenging for embryos to survive.

“A 1.5C increase is already a challenge to some, and if we let global warming persist, it can get much worse,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a co-author on the paper and a climatologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, as The Guardian reported.

That 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold would result in 10 percent of marine species suffering over the next 80 years, including the aforementioned grocery staples.

However, even a 10 percent decline in fish species has a large ripple effect on ecosystems as one species being pushed out effects the food supply and the habits of many other species that have evolved to be interdependent.

“More than half of the species potentially at risk is quite astonishing, so we really emphasize that it’s important to take action and follow the political commitments to reduce climate change and protect marine habitats,” said Dr. Flemming Dahlke, a marine biologist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute and one of the authors of the study, as CNN reported.

“Some species might successfully manage this change,” said Dahlke, as the Daily Mail reported. “But if you consider the fact that fish have adapted their mating patterns to specific habitats over extremely long time frames, and have tailored their mating cycles to specific ocean currents and available food sources, it has to be assumed that being forced to abandon their normal spawning areas will mean major problems for them.”

A lot of this is a conservative estimate since the study did not take into account pollution or the increased acidity of the ocean, which could present additional challenges to sensitive species, as The Guardian noted.
“Some tropical fish are already living in zones at their uppermost tolerance, their areas are already 104F,” Pörtner said. “Humankind is pushing the planet outside of a comfortable temperature range and we are starting to lose suitable habitat. It’s worth investing in the Paris Climate Accord goals.”

Seasonal allergies getting worse, the climate connection

Pollen related allergies and their symptoms are starting earlier in the year and seemingly getting worse, doctors around the world now reporting.  Allergy season is worse than ever, with a constellation of symptoms — runny nose, itchy eyes, sneezing, and even difficulties in breathing, changes tracked back to the increasing global effects of climate change.

Increasingly, patients are telling their doctors that their allergy symptoms have become increasingly severe in recent years. One reason for this may be the rise in seasonal pollen counts, as demonstrated by ragweed, one of the most common allergens in the United States.

Studies show that higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is produced when fossil fuels are burned for energy, leads to increased plant growth and pollen production. Between 1900 and 2019, the concentration of carbon dioxide rose from 280 to 412 parts per million, which correlates with a more than twofold increase in the production of ragweed pollen, with trends projected to increase fourfold in the next 40 years with continued unchecked carbon dioxide emissions.

This escalation of seasonal pollen concentration does not only affect quality of life, it also has an economic impact, as those suffering from allergies spend more money on medicine to control and relieve their symptoms.

For those who are experiencing the familiar symptoms of sneezing, itchy eyes and stuffy nose, this is not just a “bad pollen” year. The world is warming and pollen is lasting longer and increasing in concentrations all around us.