Category: Daily News

Daily News 7 Jul 2025

The Texas Flooding Tragedy: Could It Have Been Avoided?

On Friday morning, heavy rains led to catastrophic flooding along the Guadalupe River in central Texas.

Tragically, it appears that at least fifty people lost their lives.

But what is particularly disturbing is that the National Weather Service (NWS) provided excellent warnings and forecasts before the event that clearly predicted a substantial threat.

And yet, no attempt at evacuation was made.

Furthermore, weather model forecasts indicated the potential for a major precipitation event over this historically flood-prone region during the prior days.

The Event

The flooding occurred around 4 AM on July 4.

A heavy precipitation event was forecast for the region during the previous days. For example, the NOAA/NWS HRRR forecast from 8 PM July 3 (the evening before) predicted a band of heavy rain over central Texas.

THE DAY BEFORE, the NWS Forecast Office in San Antonia put out a flood watch for central Texas Hill Country, which included the site of the tragedy.

During the subsequent hours, the National Weather Service communicated increasingly strong warnings, including flash flood warnings. A children’s camp on a floodplain should have been evacuated.

Here is the warning by the local NWS office several hours before the flood.

Also consider the warning by the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center (WPC) before the event:

As the event got closer, with National Weather Service radar showing the event unfolding, the San Antonia office made the threat explicit, noting a very dangerous flash event.

Any media or other organization suggesting that the National Weather Service was not on top of this event is not only not telling the truth, but doing a deep disservice to the highly professional and skillful folks in that organization.

Some folks are making such suggestions for patently political reasons. Extraordinarily unethical and wrong.

Areas along the Guadalupe River have flooded catastrophically many times in the past, and not evacuating low-lying areas with such warnings verges on criminal neglect. The local county (Kerr) does not even have a flood warning system in place.

The Texas flooding is another example of large numbers of deaths, even when weather forecasts are excellent, with all too many other examples, including the Maui wildfires, the LA wildfires, and flooding from Hurricane Helene.

But if you really want to experience media and advocacy group loss of moral compass, consider those claiming this event is the result of global warming.

For example, this connection was suggested by the New York Times:

There is NO EVIDENCE that the central Texas floods are the result of climate change.

For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has noted that flooding is DECLINING over time in that region (see below)

I examined this issue myself. Below is a plot of the extreme daily precipitation in July for nearby San Antonio from the 1940s to today.

There is NO upward trend, which suggests that climate change is not a factor in this event.

If climate change was significant, there WOULD be an upward trend.

In summary, society needs to learn how to effectively use the greatly improved prediction and observational capabilities that now exist.

Most weather-related deaths can be prevented if society makes use of this valuable information.

Those using disasters to support their political and social change agendas are not only hurting those they wish to help, but acting in a morally and ethically indefensible way.

Discover more from Watts Up With That?

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

via Watts Up With That?

https://ift.tt/ryuINv4

July 7, 2025 at 12:01PM

Daily News 7 Jul 2025

Energy Facts, No Hype, from Vaclav Smil

At Real Clear Energy, Ross Pomeroy writes insights from Vaclav Smil An Interview With Vaclav Smil on Small Nuclear Reactors, a Fertility ‘Crisis’, and More. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

There is perhaps no scholar more qualified to dissect the world’s energy systems on a macro scale – from food and agriculture to electricity and fuel – than Vaclav Smil. The 81-year-old Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba has been researching how humanity has developed, transformed, and used energy for over a half-century. And to our collective benefit, he doesn’t keep what he’s learned to himself. Smil has written fifty books. (His latest was just released in April.)

Smil’s up-to-date and encyclopedic knowledge on humanity’s energy use, coupled with his longevity in the field, make him uniquely positioned to render learned prognostications on the future of Earth’s ever-changing energy, material, and environmental systems. He graciously took the time to answer a few questions for RealClearScience on topics ranging from small nuclear reactors, to climate adaptation, to humanity’s much-debated fertility “crisis.”

RP: Market valuations for small modular reactor companies such as Oklo and Nuscale have ballooned over the past year to roughly $10 billion for each despite the fact that these firms have never built a commercial nuclear reactor. Do you think hype has gotten ahead of reality here? How likely do you think it is that small modular reactors will be deployed in the next decade? What are some open challenges?

VS: This is just the latest (and perhaps the craziest) chapter in an old tale. I heard first about small nuclear reactors more than 40 years ago from Alvin Weinberg (a Manhattan project participant, co-inventor of pressurized water reactor and a director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)). When Congress ended the funding of a liquid metal fast breeder reactor in 1983 (in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident and huge cost overruns for large nuclear plants), ORNL began to promote the idea of small, inherently safe reactors now known as SMRs (small modular reactors).

When asked about their future I have had a simple answer ever since the 1980s. First, I used to say, “give me a call,” then I changed that to “send me an e-mail” once you see such wonders built on schedule, on budget, and in aggregate capacities large enough to make a real difference to a country’s electricity supply (say at least 10% of the total).

US installed power capacity is now about 1.3 TW. Ten percent of that is 130 GW. Hence, even if SMRs were to average 100 MW, the US would need 1,300 of them to matter. If they averaged just 50 MW, then the country would need 2,600 of them. And that’s before we even consider rising electricity use.

Then think of dealing 1,300 or 3,000+ times with public acceptance, siting selections, NIMBY controversies and lawsuits, regulatory requirements, constructions schedules and major cost overruns (all major projects are notoriously prone to that fate). Obviously, that e-mail announcing SMRs making discernible difference, nationally or globally, is not coming during this decade . . . or the next one.

RP: Transitioning power generation to renewables garners most of the attention when it comes to addressing climate change, but you’ve pointed out that there are other major processes besides power generation that are extremely important and even more difficult to decarbonize. What are a few of these?

VS: Decarbonizing electricity generation is technically straightforward, with known conversions (now dominated by wind turbines and PV cells) and system arrangements (substantial storage and transmission). And there are other effective choices: the world still has a huge untapped hydro capacity and a new generation of fission reactors could supply base demand. In contrast, decarbonizing what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization -– ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics -– is hard as there are no readily available technical fixes combining the needed output scale with affordability. Basic calculations reveal the extent of these global challenges.

Without Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia we could not, even with assiduous recycling of organic wastes, feed more than about half of humanity. This synthesis is now responsible for less than 2% of global CO₂ emissions, mostly from the production of hydrogen by natural gas reforming. Steel and cement are the two largest, indispensable infrastructural materials. Primary steel production is responsible for 7-9% of global CO₂ emissions, above all from blast furnaces fuelled by metallurgical coke. Cement production (calcination process) generates 7-8% of global CO₂ emissions. And now ubiquitous plastics add 4-6% of global CO₂ emissions from the energy-intensive production of petrochemicals used as feedstocks and energy sources. Together, these industries contribute 20-25% of total global CO₂ emissions. And then there are non-energy uses of fossil fuels as feedstocks required for plastics production as feedstocks and for lubricants (5-6% of total global primary energy use).

Synthesis of ammonia as well as the smelting of iron can rely on green hydrogen generated by electrolysis of water energized by renewably generated electricity. If you do your own stoichiometric calculations of hydrogen mass needed to produce annually about 180 million tons of ammonia and 1.35 billion tons of primary steel (by the reduction of iron oxides) you will end up with some 32 million tons of green hydrogen for ammonia and 75 million tons of green hydrogen for steel, 107 million tons in total.

In 2025, the global production of green ammonia will not surpass 5 million tons, less than 5% of today’s replacement demand -– but by 2050 that demand for rising ammonia and steel production might surpass 150 million tons of green hydrogen a year, requiring about 30-fold increase of electrolysis capacity in 25 years. This is technically doable but enormously challenging with total costs (most notably, building entirely new iron pellet reduction plants because the existing blast furnaces cannot work by burning green hydrogen instead of metallurgical coke) that remain to be determined. Meanwhile, 75 new blast furnaces began to work (mostly in China and India) since 2020 and dozens more are under development. Once lit, new furnaces produce hot metal in uninterrupted campaigns lasting 15-20 years. Moreover, in 2024 Nature Energy found a huge gap between the promise and the reality of new green hydrogen capacities: after tracking 190 projects over three years they found only 7% of announced projects finished on schedule.

RP: Humanity, at this time, appears to be largely fixed within its current systems and resistant to the large-scale change and immense spending – estimated to be comparable to WWII yearly expenditures – that would be required to complete a global energy transition by 2050. Do you foresee anything steering humanity off of its current planet-heating course?

VS: Contrary to common impressions, there has been no absolute worldwide decarbonization. In fact, the very opposite is the case. The world has become much more reliant on fossil carbon. Global fossil fuel consumption rose by 62% between 1997 and 2025 while the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has decreased only marginally and it remains above 80 percent. Moreover, the first global energy transition, from traditional biomass fuels to fossil fuels, which started more than two centuries ago, remains incomplete, as about two billion people still rely on traditional biomass energies – mostly on fuelwood and crop residues in the countryside but also on inefficiently and destructively produced charcoal in cities. Replacing these energies will require even greater increases of renewably generated electricity.

In large-scale affairs, scale always rules. Wishful thinking may set the dates (usually years ending in zero or five) for specific national, regional or global decarbonizations (EU: no new internal combustion engines in 2035; world: net zero in 2050) but after increasing our reliance on fossil fuels by more than 60% during the past quarter century the chances of completely eliminating this dependence during the next 25 years appear extraordinarily unlikely.

RP: Is there a point that climate adaptation becomes a wiser strategy than climate mitigation?

VS: Let us stick to facts. Since the year 2000 more than 20 countries have reduced their CO2 or even their overall (CO2, CH4, N2O) emissions. But global emissions –- the only metric that matters because it is the total mass of greenhouses gases resident in the Earth’s atmosphere that determines the degree of warming — keep on rising. CO2 emissions from energy uses are the most reliably quantifiable flows. In 2024 they set yet another record, 1.3% above 2023 and they now approach 41 billion tons of CO2 equivalent a year, nearly 9% higher than a decade ago. Clearly, there has not been any mitigation (“the act of reducing a severity”) on the global level.

As for adaptation, wide-body jetliners bring record numbers of people to places already choked with other people. As you read this, cargo flights are bringing fresh blueberries from Peru to New York and just-caught tuna from the Indian Ocean around the Maldives to Tokyo. Go ahead and calculate the carbon costs and benefit ratios of such ventures (blueberries are 85% water and not even high in vitamin C). There is no “wiser strategy” –- there is no strategy (“a plan to achieve a major gain”). The greatest global success has been the rising share of renewably generated electricity (about 13% of the total in 2025) -– but the world now also generates more electricity from coal and natural gas than ever and hence the carbon emissions from this sector also keep on rising.

RP: You’ve previously touted efficiency as an unheralded yet highly effective method of reducing our impact on Earth’s systems, noting leaky water distribution, inefficient indoor heating, and nitrogen waste from fertilizers as problems ripe for innovation. Why don’t you think there’s been more of a widespread effort to boost efficiency in these arenas?

VS: Eventually, efficiencies always make the greatest difference. Here are just two prominent examples. The first gas turbine (1939) generated electricity with 17% efficiency, now Siemens will sell you one that is 64% efficient. Boeing 787 uses 69% less jet fuel per revenue passenger kilometer than did the first commercial Boeing 707 in 1958. But these gains are usually incremental, spanning decades. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been a notable exception.

Energy losses taking place in hundreds of millions of homes (heated in winter and air conditioned in summer), at billions of sites (leaking pipes), or over enormous areas (as denitrification bacteria in soils convert fertilizer nitrates into nitrogen gas) are an entirely different challenge to manage. Still, none of this can excuse the modern preference of throwing away billions on quests for dubious breakthroughs over-hyped by instant (and often instantly forgettable) start-ups rather than spending millions on good sensors to avoid excessive fertilizer applications and to seal leaking pipes or restrict excessive heating.

RP: Elon Musk and others have sounded the alarm about a looming fertility crisis resulting from humanity’s gradually declining fertility rate, which has fallen from almost five children per woman in 1965 to just over two today. What do you think about the declining fertility rate? Is it a “crisis”, something to be celebrated, or neither?

VS: Who is the arbiter of this global total? Who defines what is “desirable?” Who decides what constitutes a “crisis?” Elon Musk? In 1950, when I was a young boy, the global population was about 3 billion. Then the panic about endless growth set in and in 1960 Science (!) published a paper claiming that on Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 the Earth will have an infinite population! No wonder, by the late 1960s there were apocalyptic fears of massive famines. Yet then the death rates declined, life expectancies rose, mass famines ended, and today we have about 8.3 billion people. Who is omniscient to say that 9 or 6 or 3 billion is the right number for the human future. Elon Musk?

DAVID BLACKMON: The OBBBA Resets The Energy Policy Playing Field

From THE DAILY CALLER

David Blackmon
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Make no mistake about it, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) signed into law on Friday by President Donald Trump falls neatly in line with the Trump energy and climate agenda. Despite complaints by critics of the deal that Majority Leader John Thune struck with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to soften the bill’s effort to end wind and solar subsidies from the Orwellian 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the OBBBA continues – indeed, accelerates – the Trumpian energy revolution.

Leaders in the oil and gas industry, hamstrung at every opportunity by the Biden presidency, hailed the bill as a chance to move back into some semblance of boom times. Tim Stewart, President of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told his members in a memo that, “For the oil and gas industry, the bill…signals a transformative opportunity to enhance domestic production.”

API CEO Mike Sommers also praised the OBBBA as a positive step for his members: “This historic legislation will help usher in a new era of energy dominance by unlocking opportunities for investment, opening lease sales and expanding access to oil and natural gas development. (RELATED: Why Oil Market Held Firm In Face Of Another Middle East War)

While leaders of organizations like those must curb their enthusiasm to some extent in their public statements, they and their peers must be somewhat amazed at how much real substantive change the thin GOP majorities shepherded by Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to stuff into this bill. This industry, historically an easily demonized bogeyman for Democrats and too often ignored by previous Republican presidents, does not experience days as encouraging as July 3 was in the nation’s capital.

Even so, many Republicans, especially in the House, remained unsatisfied by amendments the Senate made to the bill related to IRA subsidy rollbacks. To help Speaker Johnson hold the party’s narrow House majority together, President Trump committed the executive branch to strict enforcement of the new limitations, and promised the White House will work with congressional allies to move a major deregulation package ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

But the OBBBA as passed is chock full of energy and environment-related provisions. FTI Consulting, a business consultancy with a major presence in Washington, DC, published a quick analysis Thursday that projects natural gas and nuclear as the biggest winners as the OBBBA’s impacts begin to take hold across the United States. Interestingly, the analysis also projects battery storage to expand more rapidly over the next five years even as wind and solar suffer from the phasing-out of their IRA subsidies.

The side deal struck by Thune and Murkowski is likely to result in significant new investment into wind and solar facilities as developers strive to get as many projects on the books as possible to meet the “commenced construction” requirement by the July 4, 2026 deadline. The bill’s previous language would have required projects to be placed into service by that time. But even that softer requirement will almost certainly cause a flow of capital investment out of wind and solar once that deadline passes, given the reality that many of their projects are not sustainable without constant flows of government subsidies.

What it all means is that the OBBBA, combined with all the administration’s prior moves to radically shift the direction of federal energy and climate policy away from intermittent energy and electric vehicles back to traditional forms of power generation and internal combustion cars, effectively reset the policy playing field back to 2019, prior to the COVID pandemic. That was a time when America had become as energy independent as it had been in well over half a century and was approaching the “Energy Dominance” position so dear to President Trump’s heart.

Trump’s signing of the OBBBA gives the oil and gas, nuclear, and even the coal industry a chance at a do over. It is an opportunity that comes with great pressure, both from government and the public, to perform. That means rapid expansion in gas power generation unseen in 20 years, rapid development of next generation nuclear, and even a probable chance to permit and build new coal capacity in the near future.

Second chances like this do not come around often. If these great industries fail to grab this brass ring and run with it, it may never come around again. Let’s go, folks.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.