Lebanon's electricity crisis, Pielke on the podcast, Herons vs Egrets
Lebanon's deadly electricity crisis, Pielke talks "catastrophe bias" on the podcast, EVs, and Herons not Egrets
After about three weeks on the road, it’s good to be back home. Lorin started work again on Tuesday and I’ve been catching up on my writing and my exercise. Four items today:
Lebanon's hospitals teetering on the edge of disaster
New Power Hungry Podcast with Roger Pielke Jr.
I'm quoted on EVs in the Boston Globe
Green Herons and Reddish Egrets
The image above is John James Audubon's depiction of Green Herons.
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On Sunday, I published a piece in Forbes about the disaster in Lebanon. As you may recall, Lebanon features prominently in both Juice and A Question of Power. In 2017, Tyson Culver and I took a film crew to Beirut to report on the “generator mafia” and the country’s never-ending electricity shortages. But the country’s economic crisis, which began in 2019 has become a full-blown energy and humanitarian crisis. I began:
Failed states have failed electric grids. Nowhere is that truer right now than in Lebanon, where the entire county is teetering on the edge of collapse and hospitals are so short of electricity that dozens of patients who are receiving care in Beirut’s intensive-care wards could be dead by the time you finish reading this article. On Saturday, the American University of Beirut Medical Center warned that if it did not receive a shipment of diesel fuel by Monday to keep its generators running, “forty adult patients and fifteen children living on respirators will die immediately,” and another 180 others who are receiving dialysis treatment will die within a matter of days. In addition, the medical center, which is one of the oldest and most-prestigious in Lebanon, said that hundreds of cancer patients are also in danger of dying due to the lack of electricity. The looming humanitarian crisis in Lebanon’s hospitals demonstrates, once again, the essentiality of electricity to modern society. Modern health care requires dependable juice, and lots of it. All of our key networks — GPS, telecom, traffic lights, water systems — depend on low-cost, abundant, and reliable electricity. Electric grids provide near-perfect reflections of the societies they power. Countries with robust electric grids usually have strong civil institutions and robust economies. But as can be seen in Lebanon, Iraq, Nigeria, and other places where corruption runs unchecked, electric grids simply don’t work.
I concluded:
The lack of motor fuel is further compounding the humanitarian and health care crisis. According to an August 11 article by Sunniva Rose in the Arab newspaper, The National, at one hospital, some 60 percent of the staff can’t come to work because they don’t have fuel for their vehicles. The same article quoted Faris Abiad, the director of Rafik Hariri hospital, the country’s largest medical facility, as saying “A hospital without electricity simply does not exist. It’s like a car without petrol,” he said. Even if Lebanon’s hospitals get enough fuel to run their generators, the machinery may fail due to overuse. According to Rose’s article, the generators at one hospital in the southern city of Saida, “shut down after working 36 hours continuously...a full half-hour passed before electricity returned.” The Lebanese economy has long been on the brink of disaster. As the country’s crisis worsens, it appears the human suffering and dying – much of it due to electricity shortages — may be just beginning.
That's a powerful line: “A hospital without electricity simply does not exist. It’s like a car without petrol." Again, here’s a link.
Roger Pielke on climate mitigation, adaptation, the Olympics, and more
On this week’s episode of the Power Hungry Podcast, (number 68) Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado, makes a return appearance on the podcast. The last time I interviewed him was in July 2020. On that episode of the podcast, we talked about his eighth book, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change, as well as governance failures in sports and government.
I have known Roger for a long time. I interviewed him back in 2009 when I was working at Energy Tribune. You can read that interview here. (I also interviewed his father, climatologist Roger Pielke Sr., in 2007. That interview is here.)
On Monday, before I recorded the latest episode with the younger Pielke, I re-read his remarks from 2009 and was struck by how consistent Roger has been about the politics of climate change and climate science. During that interview, he said, “mitigation policies should be completely decoupled from adaptation policies and they should proceed on separate tracks. They are not trade-offs but complements. Adaptation serves broader goals of sustainable development.”
In this week’s podcast, Roger and I talked at length about the latest IPCC report and how “catastrophe bias” has been baked into the report, and how major media outlets covered the release of the report. We discussed his recent essay, co-written with Justin Richie, “How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality,” that was published in Issues in Science and Technology. We also talked about the need for more “robust science advice” in policymaking, why America’s reaction to Covid-19 was the “biggest policy failure” in modern U.S. history, the Olympics, marijuana, the suspension of sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson, and the “intersection of expertise and democracy.”
It was fun. Here’s a link. Please share it.
On August 12, Hiawatha Bray, a reporter at the Boston Globe, published a good piece on EVs that included some much-needed skepticism. He wrote:
Yet for all the hype, electric vehicles remain a hard sell for consumers, and thus an unlikely quick fix for global warming. They are more expensive than many popular gas or hybrid models, and they take too long to charge — with too few charging stations, to boot — to convince a nation of road trippers they are reliable for the long haul. Utilities will have to spend a few thousand dollars upgrading their systems for each electric car they serve, and power plants would have to double their output in a few short decades to accommodate the projected demand.
Bray quoted me:
The auto industry will likely have to tackle the high sticker prices of some electric vehicles if they’re to become more popular with a wider consumer base. “Prices for electric vehicles have come down, but they’re still not a car for low- or middle-income individuals,” said electric car critic Robert Bryce, author of the book “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.”
Bray did a good job of walking through the myriad challenges involved in making a switch to EVs, noting that “installing new chargers in neighborhoods, especially the high-powered Level 3 units, could require costly overhauls of local electrical systems,” including spending about $2.9 billion to support 500,000 EVs. “That could translate into higher electric bills for ratepayers, even for those who don’t own electric cars.”
Bray ended the piece with this cautionary note: “So making a dent in the climate problem means overhauling nearly every human activity — in the United States and worldwide.”
Confusing my Herons with my Egrets
I sometimes get my Green Herons and my Reddish Egrets confused. That’s what I did last week in this “news” letter, when I claimed to have seen a Reddish Egret in Central Park, in Roseville, Minnesota. That was wrong. As my old friend, Bill Bunch, quickly pointed out shortly after I hit “send” on Mailchimp last Friday, I didn’t see a Reddish Egret ((Egretta rufescens) I saw a Green Heron (Butorides virescens.) I am happy to admit the error. I’m no Roger Tory Peterson. I was in a rush to get the email blast out the door and wasn’t paying attention.
While the two birds have similar coloring on their necks, the Reddish Egret is a much bigger bird than the Green Heron. The Egret can stand 30 inches tall. The Green Heron is usually only about half that height (15 to 17 inches.) I can’t remember the last time I saw a Reddish Egret. By contrast, Lorin and I see Green Herons frequently along Barton Creek or at Barton Springs.
Wikipedia has this description of the Reddish Egret:
The reddish egret is considered one of the most active herons, and is often seen on the move. It stalks its prey visually in shallow water far more actively than other herons and egrets, frequently running energetically and using the shadow of its wings to reduce glare on the water once it is in position to spear a fish; the result is a fascinating dance. Due to its bold, rapacious yet graceful feeding behavior, author Pete Dunne nicknamed the reddish egret "the Tyrannosaurus rex of the Flats." It eats fish, frogs, crustaceans, and insects. The bird's usual cry is a low, guttural croak.
The Green Heron is described thusly:
The habitat of the green heron is small wetlands in low-lying areas. The species is most conspicuous during dusk and dawn, and if anything these birds are nocturnal rather than diurnal, preferring to retreat to sheltered areas in daytime. They feed actively during the day, however, if hungry or provisioning young. Shore-living individuals adapt to the rhythm of the tides. They mainly eat small fish, frogs and aquatic arthropods, but may take any invertebrate or vertebrate prey they can catch, including such animals like leeches and mice. Green herons are intolerant of other birds – including conspecifics – when feeding and are not seen to forage in groups. They typically stand still on shore or in shallow water or perch upon branches and await prey.
Have a good weekend.
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