Ring-Wing Comedians Are Right-Wing Media
By Seth Simons | March 22, 2021  

Image is a screencap from Steven Crowder's You

This article was originally published on Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy. Subscribe here to get posts like this in your inbox.

Last week Media Matters reported on a series of racist jokes Steven Crowder and his co-hosts made about Black farmers during a critique of the American Rescue Plan on his show Louder with Crowder. “I thought the last thing they would want to do is be farmers,” said Dave Landau, who recently joined the show from Compound Media, where he was Anthony Cumia’s sidekick. “Wasn’t that a big problem for hundreds of years?” YouTube removed the episode, telling The Verge it violated the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policy. This incident came barely a week after Crowder earned a similar wave of condemnation for racist jokes about Meghan Markle.

Crowder, a stand-up comic turned Fox News contributor turned streamer, is part of an ecosystem of entertainers who make a living telling racist jokes on YouTube. He is a rare example of someone in this cohort widely recognized for what he is: a conservative pundit. These people are more commonly described as comedians, a classification that confers many privileges, namely the ability to make those racist jokes free of mainstream scrutiny. What I would like to propose today is that we start recognizing these comedians as part and parcel of the right-wing media apparatus poisoning American life.


This apparatus is vast and multifaceted. It encompasses traditional media like Fox News and the New York Post, digital publications like The Federalist and The Daily Caller, and multimedia platforms like The Daily Wire and Blaze Media, the latter of which is home to Crowder, Glenn Beck, and Dave Rubin. Elsewhere in the landscape you’ll find Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, Candace Owens, Jesse Kelly, and Charlie Kirk. They traffic in bigotry and fear under the guise of truth and reason, painting themselves as victims of persecution even as they commandeer rabid fan bases against their enemies. Their particular ideologies, audiences, and reach may vary (slightly) by person, but they all serve the same function: to uphold and enforce white supremacy.

A great many comedians use all these same tactics toward the same ends. They evade criticism because they are comedians, which is taken to mean they are not serious: not that they don’t believe their own words, but that their speech exists in a mystical realm of non-meaning where words have no power other than to evoke laughter. They’re not politicians, the logic goes. They’re not cable news pundits. Their audiences aren’t going out in the streets and committing crimes on their behalf. It doesn’t matter what they say; it doesn’t matter that people listen and agree. To critique them is to embark on the fool’s errand of taking unserious people seriously.


This attitude is difficult to reconcile with the fact that no conservative commentator is a serious person. Tucker Carlson’s ravings are no more grounded in reality than Steven Crowder’s or Tim Dillon’s. There is very little about the conservative movement writ large that can be described as serious, nor about the politicians leading it, who increasingly seem to view themselves as performersfirst and lawmakers second. The conservative media machine is so dangerous precisely because it’s pure fantasy. Its effect has been to detach millions of people from the real world and render them immune to reason. The few who launder their role in this project through artistic practice are just as dangerous as those who do it openly.

The unseriousness of their practice never seems to stop them from engaging in serious discourse anyhow. Last month Andrew Schulz, who in his debut Netflix special blamed the pandemic on China, argued in a lengthy podcast segment that China is seeking to overtake the U.S. as a world power, at which point it will suppress American culture. He said China has taken advantage of American greed to become a major manufacturing center for American companies, and that the Chinese government is buying up controlling interests in American companies so it can censor criticism of China. The U.S. was able to become such a world power, he continued, because it exported its popular culture to other countries, culture that celebrates the core American value of freedom. Chinese citizens don’t get to consume American media—barring the occasional censored export, like 10 or so movies each year edited by the Chinese government “to fit into the communist standards”—and as a result “they don’t know what freedom is, so they don’t know what they’re missing.” Whereas Trump took a tough stance on China, Biden and the Democrats are bending over to appease it because they know its era of dominance is fast approaching; they wish to enter that era on good terms. “I don’t have enough data to back up that claim,” Schulz concluded, “but it seems like that.” His Patreon currently brings in $94,800 per month.


This is a small sample of the bigotry Schulz peddles as a matter of course. In an episode earlier this month he again suggested China is to blame for the pandemic and mocked Jeremy Lin for “snitching” on teammates who called him “coronavirus.” In a January segment he argued that Biden nominated Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services so his administration could deflect all criticism of its health policy as transphobic. (Schulz didn’t seem to know Levine hasn’t been confirmed or that he had the position wrong, referring to her as “Health secretary.” He also appears to call her a transphobic slur early in the segment, although most of the word is censored so I can’t be certain.) These are political opinions. The man is commenting on politics. They all are: Nick DiPaolo, Tim Dillon, Legion of Skanks, Sam Tripoli, Yannis Pappas, Kurt Metzger, nearly everyone on Compound Media, the list goes on. Some are more prone than others to refract their political analyses through culture war bugbears, but their analyses are political all the same. The only thing differentiating them from your average Fox News contributor is that they’ll get very upset if you attach them in any way to the ideologies they openly hold. (In his Netflix special’s credits, Schulz thanked Federalist publisher Ben Domenech and libertarian pundit Matt Welch.)


Comedy is the art of calling things what they are. It may seem pedantic to classify a relatively small cohort of comedians as extensions of right-wing media, but we must see them clearly if we are to treat them properly. They are not truth-tellers nor rebels nor crusaders for free speech; they are liars, pawns, and crusaders for the ideologies contained in their speech, which they have always made freely. Their bigotry is not a matter of aesthetic taste, as their defenders are wont to insist, nor are their ideas worthy of debate. (Fascists are always challenging you to defeat them in battles of ideas, as if they have not already been defeated in numerous actual battles.) They are simply mouthpieces for the most powerful forces in our lives, a job so banal it almost circles back around to being funny that they think success makes them special.

It doesn’t. They’re not. They’re really terribly boring. It’s a huge drag to have to pay them any mind. But we cannot fight back the forces they represent without meeting them at every turn with contempt and scorn; without treating thosewhoplatform them and those who share their platforms as participants in an avowedly white supremacistproject; and without doing everything else in our power as comedy consumers or workers to toss the whole lot of them from the public square.


It’s unpleasant business, deplatforming bigots. The alternative is much worse.

Seth Simons is the writer of Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in the comedy industry. He’s on Twitter @sasimons.

 

Oil and natural gas production emit more methane than previously thought

Research finds EPA underestimates methane emissions from oil and gas production

HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES

Research News

 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is underestimating methane emissions from oil and gas production in its annual Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, according to new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The research team found 90 percent higher emissions from oil production and 50 percent higher emissions for natural gas production than EPA estimated in its latest inventory.

The paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The research team, led by Joannes Maasakkers, a former graduate student at SEAS, developed a method to trace and map total emissions from satellite data to their source on the ground.

"This is the first country-wide evaluation of the emissions that the EPA reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC)," said Maasakkers, who is currently a scientist at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

Currently, the EPA only reports total national emissions to the UNFCC. In previous research, Maasakkers and his collaborators, including Daniel Jacob, the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at SEAS, worked with the EPA to map regional emissions of methane from different sources in the US. That level of detail was used to simulate how methane moves through the atmosphere.

In this paper, the researchers compared those simulations to satellite observations from 2010-2015. Using a transport model, they were able to trace the path of emissions from the atmosphere back to the ground and identify areas across the US where the observations and simulations didn't match up.

"When we look at emissions from space, we can only see how total emissions from an area should be scaled up or down, but we don't know the source responsible for those emissions," said Maasakkers. "Because we spent so much time with the EPA figuring out where these different emissions occur, we could use our transport model to go back and figure out what sources are responsible for those under- or over-estimations in the national total."

The biggest discrepancy was in emissions from oil and natural gas production.

The EPA calculates emission based on processes and equipment. For example, the EPA estimates that a gas pump emits a certain amount of methane, multiplies that by how many pumps are operating across the country, and estimates total emissions from gas pumps.

"That method makes it really hard to get estimates for individual facilities because it is hard to take into account every possible source of emission," said Maasakkers. "We know that a relatively small number of facilities make up most of the emissions and so there are clearly facilities that are producing more emissions than we would expect from these overall estimates."

The researchers hope that future work will provide more clarity on exactly where these emissions are coming from and how they are changing.

"We plan to continue to monitor U.S. emissions of methane using new high-resolution satellite observations, and to work with the EPA to improve emission inventories," said Jacob.

"It's important to understand these emissions better but we shouldn't wait until we fully understand these emissions to start trying to reduce them," said Maasakkers. "There are already a lot of things that we know we can do to reduce emissions."

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This paper was co-authored by Daniel Jacob, Melissa Sulprizio, Tia R. Scarpelli, Hannah Nesser, Jianxiong Sheng, Yuzhong Zhang, Xiao Lu, A. Anthony Bloom, Kevin Bowman, John Worden, and Robert Parker.

The research was funded by the NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) program.

Researchers harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices

PENN STATE

Research News

 

IMAGE: AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF RESEARCHERS, LED BY HUANYU "LARRY " CHENG, DOROTHY QUIGGLE CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROFESSOR IN THE PENN STATE DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE AND MECHANICS, HAS DEVELOPED A STRETCHABLE ANTENNA... view more 

CREDIT: LARRY CHENG, PENN STATE

From microwave ovens to Wi-Fi connections, the radio waves that permeate the environment are not just signals of energy consumed but are also sources of energy themselves. An international team of researchers, led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has developed a way to harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices.

The researchers recently published their method inMaterials Today Physics.

According to Cheng, current energy sources for wearable health-monitoring devices have their place in powering sensor devices, but each has its setbacks. Solar power, for example, can only harvest energy when exposed to the sun. A self-powered triboelectric device can only harvest energy when the body is in motion.

"We don't want to replace any of these current power sources," Cheng said. "We are trying to provide additional, consistent energy."

The researchers developed a stretchable wideband dipole antenna system capable of wirelessly transmitting data that is collected from health-monitoring sensors. The system consists of two stretchable metal antennas integrated onto conductive graphene material with a metal coating. The wideband design of the system allows it to retain its frequency functions even when stretched, bent and twisted. This system is then connected to a stretchable rectifying circuit, creating a rectified antenna, or "rectenna," capable of converting energy from electromagnetic waves into electricity. This electricity that can be used to power wireless devices or to charge energy storage devices, such as batteries and supercapacitors.

This rectenna can convert radio, or electromagnetic, waves from the ambient environment into energy to power the sensing modules on the device, which track temperature, hydration and pulse oxygen level. Compared to other sources, less energy is produced, but the system can generate power continuously -- a significant advantage, according to Cheng.

"We are utilizing the energy that already surrounds us -- radio waves are everywhere, all the time," Cheng said. "If we don't use this energy found in the ambient environment, it is simply wasted. We can harvest this energy and rectify it into power."

Cheng said that this technology is a building block for him and his team. Combining it with their novel wireless transmissible data device will provide a critical component that will work with the team's existing sensor modules.

"Our next steps will be exploring miniaturized versions of these circuits and working on developing the stretchability of the rectifier," Cheng said. "This is a platform where we can easily combine and apply this technology with other modules that we have created in the past. It is easily extended or adapted for other applications, and we plan to explore those opportunities."

###

This paper is co-authored by Jia Zhu, who earned a doctoral degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2020; Zhihui Hu, former visiting professor in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State and current associate professor at Wuhan University of Technology in China; Chaoyun Song, assistant professor in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland; Ning Yi, who earned a doctoral degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2020; Zhaozheng Yu, who earned a master's degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2019; Zhendong Liu, former visiting graduate student in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State; Shangbin Liu, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State; Mengjun Wang, associate professor in the School of Electronics and Information?Engineering at Hebei University of Technology in China; Michael Gregory Dexheimer, who earned a master's degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2020; and Jian Yang, professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State.

Support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health; and Penn State.

 

Turning wood into plastic

A research team, led by YSE professor Yuan Yao and Liangbing Hu from the University of Maryland, has created a high-quality bioplastic from wood byproducts that they hope can solve one of the world's most pressing environmental issues

YALE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Research News

 

Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky -- the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics.

A study published in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), outlines the process of deconstructing the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry. The researchers say the resulting material shows a high mechanical strength, stability when holding liquids, and UV-light resistance. It can also be recycled or safely biodegraded in the natural environment, and has a lower life-cycle environmental impact when compared with petroleum-based plastics and other biodegradable plastics.

"There are many people who have tried to develop these kinds of polymers in plastic, but the mechanical strands are not good enough to replace the plastics we currently use, which are made mostly from fossil fuels," says Yao. "We've developed a straightforward and simple manufacturing process that generates biomass-based plastics from wood, but also plastic that delivers good mechanical properties as well."

To create the slurry mixture, the researchers used a wood powder -- a processing residue usually discarded as waste in lumber mills -- and deconstructed the loose, porous structure of the powder with a biodegradable and recyclable deep eutectic solvent (DES). The resulting mixture, which features nanoscale entanglement and hydrogen bonding between the regenerated lignin and cellulose micro/nanofibrils, has a high solid content and high viscosity, which can be casted and rolled without breaking.

Yao then led a comprehensive life cycle assessment to test the environmental impacts of the bioplastic against commons plastics. Sheets of the bioplastic were buried in soil, fracturing after two weeks and completely degrading after three months; additionally, researchers say the bioplastic can be broken back down into the slurry by mechanical stirring, which also allows for the DES to be recovered and reused.

"That, to me, is what really makes this plastic good: It can all be recycled or biodegraded," says Yao. "We've minimized all of the materials and the waste going into nature."

The bioplastic has numerous applications, says Liangbing Hu, a professor at the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper. It can be molded into a film that can be used in plastic bags and packaging -- one of the major uses of plastic and causes of waste production. Hu also says that because the bioplastic can be molded into different shapes, it has potential for use in automobile manufacturing, as well.

One area the research team continues to investigate is the potential impact on forests if the manufacturing of this bioplastic is scaled up. While the process currently uses wood byproducts in manufacturing, the researchers say they are keenly aware that large-scale production could require usage of massive amounts of wood, which could have far-reaching implications on forests, land management, ecosystems and climate change, to name a few.

Yao says the research team has already begun working with a forest ecologist to create forest simulation models, linking the growth cycle of forests with the manufacturing process. She also sees an opportunity to collaborate with people who work in forest-related fields at YSE -- an uncommon convenience.

"It's not often an engineer can walk down the hall and talk to a forester," says Yao.

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These birds flock in mesmerizing swarms of thousands—but why is still a mystery.

Melanie Haiken 

3/27/2021

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop As a falcon streaks across the evening sky the flocks sometimes form tightly packed “ribbons”.

It’s a mesmerizing sight: Thousands of birds move in unison through the evening sky, whirling and swooping as if performing a highly synchronized ballet.

When they finally descend to their treetop roost, the beating of their iridescent wings creates such a rush of sound that the noise earned the phenomenon its unusual name: a murmuration of starlings.

The term is unique to European, or common starlings, one of the world’s most abundant—and adaptable—birds. Native to the United Kingdom as well as Europe, starlings have become invasive species throughout the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, South Africa, and many other countries where, over centuries, they were introduced either by accident or on purpose. In the late 1890s, a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts released about a hundred European starlings into New York City’s Central Park, hoping to populate the area with every bird mentioned in the playwright’s works.

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop This is a starling’s point of view from inside the flock as a falcon attacks from above.

Though starlings can be a nuisance and a threat to native birds, their murmurations are breathtaking spectacles that often draw crowds to watch.

In the Northern Hemisphere, murmurations begin in fall and winter as the birds take rest stops of up to six weeks on their southern migrations. During this time, starlings may venture up to 60 miles a day from their roosting trees to feast on seeds, bugs, and larvae, then come back together to create murmurations that can last as long as 45 minutes. (Learn more about the epic journeys of migrating birds.)© Photograph by Nick Dunlop When starlings are feeding on the ground and a falcon approaches at high speed the flocks rise quickly into the air and compress into ever changing shapes, which can intimidate a closer attack. The luckiest starlings are typically the ones in the middle.

Of course, birds moving in flocks is not a new behavior, and ornithologists have long studied it. But no other bird species flies together with the same coordination or complex patterns as European starlings, whose murmurations have been counted in numbers of up to 750,000 individuals.

What’s more, though starlings are such a ubiquitous bird, very little is known about why they murmurate.

“The bottom line is, I’ve been studying this thing for 50 years, and I still don’t know,” says ornithologist Frank Heppner, professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island, who did some of the earliest studies of starling behavior in the 1960s.

Birds of a feather

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop This immature falcon has captured a starling and is trying to dispatch it quickly with a bite to the neck. This image also shows the starling’s fight for survival as it fights off the falcons bite with its own beak.

University of Rome physicist Andrea Cavagna has spent the past 16 years studying how starlings synchronize their movements with such precision and grace. To do so, he has created sophisticated 3-D models of the starling flocks that swirl over Piazza dei Cinquecento in Rome, where the starling population has doubled over the past decade to about a million birds.

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop As a falcon approaches at high speed, the starlings turn in tight formation to avoid capture.

Together with his research partner Irene Giardina, Cavagna operates three synchronized, high-speed cameras on the roof of the Palazzo Massimo during the starlings’ winter migration.

“Every winter we have been up there in the cold and rain night after night,” says Cavagna. “It’s just us and the statues.”

Using the video footage they capture, Cavagna and his colleagues reconstruct the positioning and velocity of a flock’s individual birds into computer models.

Their recreations reveal that starlings maintain their fluid formations via a mechanism known as scale-free behavioral correlation, in which each bird positions itself next to approximately seven other birds, coordinating its movements to create an overlapping synchronicity. (Read more about animals that swarm.)

Cavagna suggests thinking of the phenomenon as like driving on a freeway: “You interact with a fixed number of cars, maybe the one in front, the one behind, and one or two on each side, but you’re not interacting with the cars 50 meters away so you’re not distracted by them.” (It helps, he notes, that European starlings have the advantage of lateral eyesight, giving them a field of vision that extends almost all the way around their bodies.

)

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop Taken near a nightly roost site, starling flocks will often stay high in the sky when they feel threatened by an aerial predator, whether it be a falcon or a hawk. These widely changing shapes can be quite beautiful, especially when combined with dramatic evening light. Once they feel out of danger, they drop quickly to trees below.

Although each bird is interacting with its nearby neighbors, every bird’s movements affects and is affected by the entire group, allowing information to travel across the flock at a constant speed. The result is collective decision making so agile that a signal to turn, usually initiated by a bird on the outskirts, can flash through a flock of 400 birds in half a second—a speed of 90 miles per hour.
Sky dancers

The various shapes and patterns the birds create during murmurations have picturesque names: vacuole, cordon, flash expansion.

Perhaps most fascinating in appearance are the dark bands that radiate through a cloud of starlings like a moving stream, says Charlotte Hemelrijk, professor of evolutionary life sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

These “agitation waves” look from the ground as if the starlings are drawing together more densely. But actually they are visible when the birds bank upward, tilting to show a larger area of their wing to observers below. In other words, in addition to clocking the surrounding seven birds, they’re playing follow the leader. “Our latest models show that they are copying the behavior of the nearest bird, causing the motion to roll through the flock,” Hemelrijk says. (Read why birds matter, and are worth protecting.)

Hemelrijk has also found evidence that these patterns serve to confuse predators, such as hawks and other birds of prey, and make it more difficult for them to pick off stragglers. Using sophisticated computer modeling, Hemelrijk has documented patterns of collective escape specifically tied to the movements of a predatory hawk or falcon.
Mysterious murmurations

Why European starlings circle the sky in such gigantic flocks for so long is a much more perplexing question.

The most common explanation—sometimes known as the “safer together” hypothesis—is that the swarms are a protective response against predators. But Heppner and Cavagna say that defies logic; they point out that the birds could simply return directly to their roosts, rather than amassing into huge formations and spiraling across the sky.

“You would think they would want to minimize flying time, but instead they go through this spectacular display for half an hour to 45 minutes, burning up energy at a ferocious rate,” Heppner says.

“And meanwhile they’re actually attracting predators. it’s like they’re saying, We’re here, we’re here. You have to ask yourself, how did a mechanism like this evolve?”

Another possible explanation, sometimes called the “warmer together” theory, suggests that murmurations function to advertise a roosting site, attracting greater numbers of birds to the flock to conserve body heat.

In an attempt to solve the mystery, researchers from the University of Gloucester and the Royal Society of Biology compiled data from more than 3,000 murmurations, data that volunteers in 23 countries collected in 2014 and 2015. The results, published in 2017, showed no correlation between temperature and murmuration size, leaving little support for the warmth hypothesis.

The study also reported the presence of a hawk, falcon, or other bird of prey in just under a third of the murmurations, offering some support for the predation theory—yet leaving unexplained why the birds join together in such lengthy performances.
An act of pure beauty?

On one characteristic of the starlings, though, researchers are in agreement: the birds are remarkably intelligent. When Heppner kept starlings in captivity for his research, he says, “they were so good at picking the locks on their cages, we had to put padlocks on them.”

With the birds’ brain power in mind, is it possible that murmurations are simply their conscious expression of a sheer joy of movement? (Read more about animals that “dance.”)

“In the absence of a predator, I do think it’s possible to see these displays as a sort of dancing,” says the University of Groningen’s Hemelrijk.

“We don’t want to attribute too much intention, but they’re certainly very excited. They do this for a very long time sometimes,” she says, “when they could just go to sleep.”

EU experts  SHILLS to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

By Kate Abnett

3/27/2021

© Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann FILE PHOTO: 

Night view shows Electricite de France nuclear power plant near Fessenheim

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Experts tasked with assessing whether the European Union should label nuclear power as a green investment will say that the fuel qualifies as sustainable, according to a document reviewed by Reuters.

The European Commission is attempting to finish its sustainable finance taxonomy, which will decide which economic activities can be labelled as a sustainable investment in the EU, based on whether they meet strict environmental criteria.

Brussels' expert advisors last year split over whether nuclear power deserved a green label, recognising that while it produces very low planet-warming CO2 emissions, more analysis was needed on the environmental impact of radioactive waste disposal.

The Commission asked the Joint Research Centre (JRC), its scientific expert arm, to report on the issue.

A draft of the JRC report, seen by Reuters and due to be published next week, said nuclear deserves a green label.

"The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies," it said.

Storage of nuclear waste in deep geologic formations is deemed "appropriate and safe", it said, citing countries including France and Finland in the advanced stages of developing such sites.

Two expert committees will scrutinise the JRC's findings for three months, before the Commission takes a final decision.

The Commission declined to comment on the draft document.

EU countries are split over nuclear. France, Hungary and five other countries this month urged the Commission to support nuclear in policies including the taxonomy.

Other states including Austria, and some environmental groups, oppose the fuel, pointing to its hazardous waste and the delays and spiralling costs of recent projects.

"The nuclear industry is desperate for funds as nuclear power is too expensive and new projects are evaporating," said Greenpeace EU policy adviser Silvia Pastorelli.

EU countries are also split over how the taxonomy should treat investments in natural gas.

After a plan to exclude gas faced pushback from pro-gas countries, the Commission this month drafted plans to label some gas as sustainable - splintering countries between those who support the fuel as an alternative to more-polluting coal, and those who say new gas plants risk locking in emissions for decades, thwarting climate goals.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett, editing by Louise Heavens)

Offshore galore! Wind farms go on the block as valuations spike

© Reuters/Jean-Paul Pelissier FILE PHOTO: 

Power-generating windmill turbines are seen near Port Saint Louis du Rhone

By Arno Schuetze and Christoph Steitz

3/26/2021

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European utilities are offering a slew of offshore wind farms, eager to cash in on high valuations as investors hungry for stable returns increasingly flock to the sector, people close to the matter said.

Demand for such assets has surged as environmentally-conscious investors and industries such as oil and gas seek green power in order to meet goals to achieve net zero emissions in line with the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Denmark's Orsted, Switzerland's Axpo, Germany's EnBW and Sweden's Vattenfall are all marketing offshore wind assets that are either at project stage or completed, four people familiar with the matter said.

Specialised infrastructure investors including FSI, Equitix, PGGM, APG, MIRA, Omers, Glennmont, IFM, CDPQ, Omers, Ardian, as well as oil majors are being targeted in the various auctions, the people said.

"There is a massive influx of capital and it is driven by pension funds and insurance companies," said Mortimer Menzel, partner at Augusta & Co, which specialises in renewables deal advisory.

"It drives utilities to recycle their assets because, quite frankly, they're getting a higher price today than they did last year and the window won't be open forever," he said, adding there was a huge scarcity of assets at the moment.

For utilities, selling stakes in farms or projects is part of their strategy to get these assets, which usually require spending of at last 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) apiece, off the ground.

Orsted, the world's No.1 developer of offshore wind farms, is in talks to sell part of its 900 megawatt (MW) Borkum Riffgrund 3 project to an investor in a deal worth up to 2 billion euros, the people said.

Glennmont Partners has been seen in pole position as a buyer but talks have not yet been finalised, they added.

Meantime, Axpo has already kicked off the sale of its 24.1% stake in the 400 MW Global Tech I farm, located about 100 kms (62 miles) off Germany's North Sea coast, the people said.

Axpo has already approached potential buyers including owners of adjacent wind parks like APG and Macquarie as well as EnBW, which may be able to reap synergies from a potential combination, one of the people added.

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Other investors in Global Tech I, which entered operation in 2015 and produces enough electricity to supply about 450,000 households, have also signalled their willingness to exit, and a buyer could get a majority in the business, the people said.

Orsted, Glennmont and Axpo declined to comment.

GRAPHIC: European offshore wind investments -

 https://graphics.reuters.com/ENERGY-EUROPE/dgkpleqbqvb/chart.png

Valuations for renewables assets have soared, with the global FTSE cleantech index more than doubling over the past year on demand from investors, including oil majors who are under increasing pressure to find new sources of profit.

"The historical gap between returns from oil & gas upstream and renewables has significantly narrowed," said Maria Garijo, co-head of EMEA power investment banking at Bank of America.

"However, big oil is likely to prefer to tread carefully when investing in renewables in the near term as they continue to adapt their financial frameworks and fulfil their dividend commitments."

Despite the pandemic, 2020 has been a record year for offshore wind financing in Europe, climbing to 26.3 billion euros last year, according to industry body WindEurope.

EnBW is expected to mandate advisors for the sale of a stake in its 900 MW He Dreiht project, to be located about 110 kms west of Heligoland in the North Sea, in autumn, potentially launching an auction later this year or in 2022, the people said.

The company said that while for now its operating focus regarding He Dreiht remained developing the project until an investment decision has been taken, funding partnerships are part of its renewables business model.

In May, Vattenfall is expected to send out information packages in the planned sale of a stake in its Dutch 1.5 GW Hollandse Kust Zuid wind park, which is slated to go online in 2023, the people said.

Vattenfall, which communicated the sales plans last year, declined to comment on the timeline of the deal, adding that RBC Capital Markets is helping it to find an investor. "We call this asset ownership flexibility," it said.

In a sign of how big interest in renewables assets currently is, Spain's Iberdrola is getting unsolicited bids for some of its wind farms, including Germany's 476 MW Baltic Eagle project, the people said.

But while the company, which in 2019 sold a stake in its East Anglia One wind park, is looking for partners to finance the construction of Baltic Eagle, it is aiming to retain full ownership, they added.

Iberdrola declined to comment.

($1 = 0.8472 euros)

(Additional reporting by Isla Binnie and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

Oil nations tipped for political instability if the world moves away from fossil fuels

Elliot Smith 
3/26/2021

In its 2021 Political Risk Outlook on Thursday, Verisk Maplecroft said countries that had failed to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels faced a "slow-motion wave of political instability."
The most vulnerable countries are higher-cost producers that are heavily dependent on oil for revenues, have lower capacity to diversify and are less politically stable, the report said.

© Provided by CNBC The Egina floating production storage and

 offloading vessel, the largest of its kind in Nigeria, is berthed in

 Lagos harbor on February 23, 2017.

LONDON — Algeria, Chad, Iraq and Nigeria will be among the first countries to experience political instability as oil producers feel the effects of a transition to low carbon energy production, according to a new report from risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft.

In its 2021 Political Risk Outlook, published Thursday, the firm cautioned that countries that had failed to diversify their economies away from fossil fuel exports faced a "slow-motion wave of political instability."

With the move away from fossil fuels set to accelerate over the next three to 20 years, and the Covid-19 pandemic eating into short-term gains gains in oil export revenues made in recent years, Maplecroft warned that oil-dependent countries failing to adapt risk sharp changes in credit risk, policy and regulation.

Though some countries are increasing fossil fuel investment in the short term, consensus estimates indicate that "peak oil" will be reached in 2030, after which the transition toward a low carbon economy will gather steam and force oil-producing countries to adapt their revenue streams.

Analysts suggested the worst-hit countries could enter "doom loops of shrinking hydrocarbon revenues, political turmoil, and failed attempts to revive flatlining non-oil sectors."

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Since the oil price crash of 2014, most exporters have either stagnated or reversed efforts to diversify their economies, Maplecroft data highlighted, with many doubling down on production in the ensuing years in a bid to plug revenue holes.

"Despite this, the majority took a hit on their foreign exchange reserves anyway, including Saudi Arabia, which has burnt through almost half of its 2014 dollar stockpile," the report added.

Break-even costs, the capacity to diversify and political resilience were identified as the three key factors determining the severity of the impact on stability when the expected energy transition begins to bite.

"Currently, if countries' external break-evens – the oil prices they need to pay for their imports – remain above what markets can offer, they have limited choices: draw down foreign exchange reserves like Saudi Arabia since 2014, or devalue their currency like Nigeria or Iraq in 2020, effectively rebalancing their imports and exports at the expense of living standards," the report explained.

Nigeria, Africa's largest economy, relies on crude sales for around 90% of its foreign exchange earnings and has devalued its naira currency twice since March last year. The IMF last month urged the country's central bank to devalue once again, but met with resistance.

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Verisk Maplecroft researchers suggested that recent currency devaluations were a "harbinger of the bleak options" ahead for oil-producing countries, who will have to either diversify or face forced economic adjustments.

"Many, if not a majority, of net oil producers are going to struggle with diversification largely because they lack the economic and legal institutions, infrastructure and human capital needed," said Head of Market Risk James Lockhart Smith.

"Even when such institutions are in place, the political environment, corruption or governance challenges and entrenched interests mean some may not reform their way out of trouble, even where it is the rational course."

The most vulnerable countries are higher-cost producers that are heavily dependent on oil for revenues, have lower capacity to diversify and are less politically stable, the report said, identifying Nigeria, Algeria, Chad and Iraq as the first to be hit "if the storm breaks" due to their fixed or crawling exchange rates.

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Lower-cost Gulf producers with stronger economic institutions and resources that enable easier diversification, such as the UAE and Qatar, were seen as least susceptible to political upheaval. However, Lockhart Smith suggested that even they will not emerge unscathed.

"Authoritarian political stability is anything but stable over the long term and, as lower-for-longer oil prices cut into social spending, additional pressure will pile on these deceptively fragile political systems," he said.

"Even diversification could come with its own political risks by challenging traditional petro-state social contracts: legitimacy to rule in return for hydrocarbon largesse."

Scientists show direct evidence of humans' role in climate change

Michael J. Coren 1 day ago

© Provided by Quartz

Every year, the sun sends radiation toward Earth equivalent to more than 7,000 times humans’ annual energy consumption. Much of it is reflected out into space (about 30%), ricocheting off the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed or reflected back out after reaching Earth’s surface. Global warming happens when the greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere act like a warm, insulating blanket, capturing this energy rather than letting it escape.

For decades, scientists have relied on models to predict exactly how fast the world is warming due to human activities. And they’ve gotten very good at them. But scientists publishing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on March 25 reported the first direct global observations of how much aerosols and greenhouse gases released by humans are driving climate change. “It’s direct evidence that human activities are causing changes to Earth’s energy budget,” said Ryan Kramer, co-author of the paper and a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Since 1977, NASA has been continuously studying Earth’s energy budget by flying instruments aboard satellites with the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project. These have delivered detailed measurements of the planet’s radiation budget: how much enters, how much escapes, and how much soaks into the oceans. The new study is the first to account for human activities—as well as natural factors such as water vapor, clouds, and surface reflectivity—to precisely pin down the Earth’s energy imbalance, the “distinct fingerprints of anthropogenic activity in Earth’s changing energy budget.”

The study concluded human activities increased this imbalance, also known as “radiative forcing,” by about 0.5 watts per square meter between 2003 to 2018, mostly due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. For context, that’s about the equivalent of keeping nearly 5 trillion 60-watt light bulbs lit across the Earth’s surface all the time.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the environmental research group Breakthrough Institute, said the study “largely validates what we already know but in a more straightforward observation-based way,” pointing to a 2015 study in Nature that measured CO2 radiative forcing on the Earth’s surface as another example.

That data lines up well with scientists’ climate models, but it also offers a faster way to monitor how mitigation efforts are working and to test computationally-intensive models. It might also influence those who continue to doubt the overwhelming climate consensus among 97% of publishing climate scientists. “In my experience,” said Hausfather, “skeptics tend to be more swayed by observations than models, so it’s certainly helpful. It creates a pretty high bar to explain away.”

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