From CLIMATE DEPOT

By Marc Morano

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/10/arkeabio-cow-emissions-bill-gates

May 10, 2024 –
By Dan Primack & Ben Geman

ArkeaBio, a Boston developer of a vaccine to reduce livestock methane emissions, raised a $26.5 million in venture capital funding led by an investment fund founded by Bill Gates.

Why it matters: Caring about cow farts (or burps) has become a political punchline, but they’re estimated to create more than 5% of global greenhouse gasses.

Vaccines could be a relatively low-cost, scalable solution, particularly as food demand increases.

The science: Methane is much more potent than is carbon dioxide, in terms of its trapping atmospheric heat, although it also dissipates down faster.

The deal: Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the Series A round, and was joined by Grantham Foundation, AgriZeroNZ, Rabo Ventures, Overview Capital and The51 Food & AgTech Fund.

BEV previously funded ArkeaBio’s $12 million seed round.

The bottom line: The whole thing feels a little dystopian — giving animals injections so they cook the planet a little less before we cook some of them — but agribusiness sailed over the dystopian hurdle long ago.

By Jo Nova

The glut in solar power in Australia is so big that next year solar panel owners in Sydney will have to pay 1.2c a kilowatt hour to offload their unwanted energy between 10am and 3pm. Nearly a million homes in Sydney have solar panels, but only 7% of them have batteries, which means basically, thousands of homes installed hi-tech generators that aren’t very useful. Worse, other homes were forced to pay part of the costs for them. The only winner was China.

Finally, a tiny part of the strangled free market is re-asserting itself, which might slow down future installations, or trick a few people into installing a $9,000 battery. Naturally this unpredictable rule change will hurt the poorest solar owners, but benefit those wealthy enough to afford a battery.

by Caitlin Fitzsimmons, Sydney Morning Herald

The biggest electricity distributor on the east coast plans to charge households with solar panels to export their electricity to the grid during the middle of the day.

Ausgrid will impose a penalty of 1.2¢ a kilowatt-hour for any electricity exported to the grid between 10am and 3pm above a free threshold that varies by month. During peak demand times, between 4pm and 9pm, Ausgrid would pay 2.3¢ an hour as a reward to customers exporting solar to the grid.

The tariff will be charged by Ausgrid and the retailer will decide how to package it. It is opt-in from July this year, and mandatory from July next year.

The Sydney Morning Herald naturally thinks this is backwards and unfair, and in a sense it is, homeowners were led up the garden path. No one was given realistic information before they purchased another useless panel. But where was The Sydney Morning Herald? — it was selling the garden path. If they interviewed a few skeptics they could have told the hapless homeowners that the forced transition was artificial, unmanageable, and the conditions were doomed to be “adjusted” sooner or later.

Solar power at noon is electrical sewage

The wholesale market was trying to send the message. Negative spot prices show that solar is essentially a waste product at lunchtime which needs to be disposed off, a bit like electrical sewage.

Negative spot revenues didn’t really occur until we installed the last two million solar panels that we didn’t need. It is obviously a growing problem now, which suspiciously peaks in spring and summer and falls in winter months –matching the solar output profile by month.

https://ift.tt/C9auom4

You might wonder why any generator would keep generating during a glut so bad they had to pay for every watt they generated. But it’s logical in a screwed market — the negative prices are close to the value of the “Renewable Energy Certificates” the government forces us all to pay to solar and wind operators.  So solar owners can produce a product the market essentially doesn’t want, but the government forces us to pay to make it profitable. See how this works?

The point of a free market is that stupid ideas are supposed to be free to lose their own money. That’s a signal to stop doing it.

And if there was some use for solar power at midday, negative prices would have found it. If there was an AI supercomputer that needed to sleep 18 hours a day and only work at lunchtime, the owners would have been beating down the door to get paid to use that solar juice. It didn’t happen.

Here’s the solar power contribution to the NSW grid this month.

https://ift.tt/fVWyMX8

During the spikes hundreds of tons of exquisitely tuned infrastructure that could have kept running, just sits around and waits in case a cloud rolls over. And efficiency gained by solar is lost by the rest of the system.

h/t David of Cooyal in Oz

Ah, The Guardian, ever the beacon of balanced journalism, has outdone itself yet again. With a flourish of melodramatic despair, they’ve painted a portrait of Donald Trump as an eco-villain, brandishing policies like a black cape in a horror show of environmental doom. Let’s dive into their latest apocalyptic prophecy.

Donald Trump has vowed to immediately halt offshore wind energy projects “on day one” of a new term as US president, in his most explicit threat yet to the industry and the latest in a series of promises to undo key aspects of the transition to cleaner energy.

The drama unfolds with Trump, the presumed puppet master of planetary destruction, vowing to dismantle the beloved wind projects. Never mind that the industry might warrant a critical inspection of its impacts; The Guardian is more interested in framing this as an opening scene of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Trump repeated false accusations about wind projects as being lethal to whales during a rally on Saturday in Wildwood, a resort city on New Jersey’s coast, promising to stamp out an industry that has been enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden.

Here, Trump is almost comically vilified, conjuring images of dead whales washing up by the dozens, courtesy of those nefarious wind farms. The Guardian, in its infinite wisdom, assures us these claims are “false,” brushing aside any pesky nuances about the environmental cost of these structures.

“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said of the wind turbines. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”

One can almost hear the ominous music swell as Trump lists the crimes of these whirling dervishes of doom. Of course, The Guardian couldn’t possibly entertain the thought that he might be exaggerating but not entirely fabricating. Instead, they prefer their villains cartoonish and their plots black and white.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get more theatrical:

McLeod said that there has been a concerted misinformation campaign, funded by oil and gas interests, to mislead voters. “Big oil is benefiting from all of this fear mongering,” she said.

The plot thickens with the introduction of Big Oil, the shadowy antagonist lurking behind the curtain. According to The Guardian’s script, anyone who questions the sanctity of wind power must be a marionette dancing on petroleum-coated strings.

Finally, Trump’s distaste for the Paris Agreement is presented not as a policy position but as a nefarious scheme to single-handedly warm the globe:

“In one of the most vivid illustrations of his stance towards the climate crisis, Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement during his first White House term.”

…

“The Paris climate accord does nothing to actually improve the environment here in the United States or globally,” Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former EPA chief of staff, told the Guardian in February.

In the world according to The Guardian, this statement is less a legitimate argument and more a declaration of war against Mother Earth, conveniently ignoring any substantive issues with the agreement.

In this latest piece The Guardian crafts a narrative so richly woven with bias that one could mistake it for a tapestry of fiction. Trump’s environmental policy positions, whether one agrees with them or not, deserve a platform for discussion rather than dismissal as the raving of a would-be planet plunderer.

So here’s to The Guardian, our tireless sentinel against the apocalypse, ever vigilant, ever fearful, ever entertaining. If journalism ever tires them, there’s always a spot open in Hollywood scriptwriting. Cheers to that!