Planet Earth Needs You

  Senators Slotkin and Moreno are the sponsors of the "Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026" an act that essentially prevents the importation of Chinese cars and components by US consumers. Both Senators expressed the concern that certain Chinese cars are "connected vehicles" that can collect travel and road information which will be use by China in nefarious ways against the US. On the economic side, they point out that the Chinese government subsidizes these cars, which allows them to unfairly sell for less than American cars. They are also concerned that these Chinese cars have already capture a large portion of the European and Asian market.  Are we to believe the Chinese did not think to build this surveillance capability into the Apple iPhone, smart watches, computers and tablets that travel with us? Software for tracking the location of a cellphone has been available for years and has been used by parents to track the location of their children.  Auto insur...

  The Data Center will be the straw that breaks the back of the effort to stop climate change. They will consume massive amounts of energy, resources and degrade local environments. It will start with their construction and escalate with its operations. Data centers may well be needed in the future but building them at this critical time is not possible, when the reduction in greenhouse gases is necessary for the survival of all life as we know it today. What follows are the reasons it is not possible at this time.   Hundreds of data centers are under construction and hundreds more are being planned. Huge amounts of greenhouse gases will be produced in the making of the steel and concrete for the buildings. Significant amounts of materials and energy will be used to make the massive number of computers and thus will produce more greenhouse gases. During the construction, transportation of men and materials will burn lots of fuel and add to the carbon footprint of the project. ...

Ever since the Trump administration began its effort to stop the growth of Battery Electric Vehicles, BEV's, online articles pop-up every other day either declaring the end of BEV production in the USA or announcing the billions of dollars lost by the legacy automotive companies invested in BEV's. These articles claim the US auto industry has finally heard from the consumer and it is telling the industry they just do not want battery electric vehicles, BEV's. The articles keep reporting that the projected growth of BEV sales prior to the elimination of government tax subsidies will not be achieved. Hidden in the articles is that growth is still increasing but just not as high as before Trump's attack on the BEV business.  So why are consumers still buying BEV?  Reliability of BEV is much better than ICEV. This is made possible because the number of parts, especially moving parts, is many times less than that of an ICEV. It results in lower repair and maintenance cost. O...

Is new development really good for your community? Are there limits to what your local community can support? Have we reached the point where further development results in a decrease in the quality of life for the majority of its residents? With the planet heating up faster than predicted and the effects of the global increase in temperature occurring faster and more severely a more thorough look at further development of our local community would seem  necessary.  Severe rain events that last longer and bring many inches of rain in a very short time are occurring much more frequently and causing extensive damage to local communities. Wildfires that destroy our homes and send smoke that keeps us in our homes, with windows and doors sealed tight so we are not made sick by breathing them. Droughts that destroy crops and grazing fields result in higher priced food for us. More hurricanes with stronger winds staying long and reaching further inland are destroying our local commun...

  By Nancy Williams and Michael Coppola The tobacco industry touted the filtered cigarette as being safer than their unfiltered brands in order to keep selling cigarettes, but the filtered cigarette was not actually safer. Now we see similar misinformation from the auto industry, backed by the powerful fossil fuel industry that the Hybrid Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle [HICEV] is less polluting than the Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle [ICEV] and, therefore, it can get us to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement of staying below a 2 degree C increase or hopefully below a 1.5 degree C increase. How much time do we have left to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement? According to all sources we cannot meet the 1.5 goal by 2030 as required and are headed to exceeding 2.0 C by the mid 2030’s if we continue on our current path. However, it is still possible to halt warming to 2.0 C if we were to immediately dramatically reduce our greenhouse emissions. The latest data shows ...

By Michael Coppola When it comes to the climate emergency there are two allegories that exemplify what has gone on in the USA for the past hundred years or so. For the citizens it is that of the frog slowly being cooked in the pot of water and for the political leaders it’s Nero fiddling while Rome burns. If one looks at the headlines in the media, we see the Epstein scandal; the war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine; the death of democracy; the tariff policy of a deranged president. Rarely does one see even a footnote mention of the climate crisis even after the reporting of wildfires; hurricanes and massive flooding destroying neighborhoods. If we do not stop the politicians from fiddling and the citizens don't begin to feel the heat, business will continue as usual and we will lose the last opportunity to save ourselves. The science tells us that we have less than 5 years to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently we are increasing our emissions. The ...

  By Nancy Williams and Michael Coppola Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase in the United States.  If we want to keep the increase in global temperature from rising to the level that will make it very difficult to survive, shouldn't we be spending taxpayer money on the most cost-effective solutions; the ones that are already available and can be implemented the fastest?  We have to question the government spending $808,000,000 in grant money on a technology that will not be commercially available for almost a decade and will contribute little to the reduction in GHG emissions. The Federal government is offering that $808 million as a grant to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for the development of a nuclear reactor known as a Small Modular Reactor (SMR). There are several types of SMR's that are being investigated today. Some are designs that were rejected in the 1970's. The type that the TVA is betting our tax money on is a modified design of the reactors b...

  by Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams We are stuck in a world of two battling tribes. One believes in man-made climate change and one that denies it. Even when storms repeatedly destroy a person's home, often that person, if he is a climate denier, will come up with some reason to continue denying the existence of the crisis. They will say such things as, we have always had storms; it's God's will; man is being so arrogant to think he could effect a change in the climate. Are they reacting this way because they have to support their tribe? The other tribe believes that these events are happening because the climate is changing. Human activity has been putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at a rate that far exceeds anything the planet has seen in the lifetime of humans. They cannot understand why people would deny the evidence and conclusions of climate experts.  The tribe believing in climate change may fail to see that some of the climate deniers have a legitima...

By Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that not only must we immediately stop burning fossil fuels that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but we must also remove them to get the level back to pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. They say that once removed these gasses must be stored so they are not released back into the atmosphere. Planting trees is one of the ways that we can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Most people know, and what we often see in the media, is that trees take in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and give off oxygen, which helps in the battle against global warming. However, there are other ways that trees battle climate change. What is rarely talked about is that trees cool the environment in other ways. They take in water and move it through the whole tree; ultimately sending the water out via little holes in its leaves to the atmosphere using the ...

Time is running out to solve the climate crisis. Energy policies that encourage nuclear generation, hydrogen fuel for transportation, and direct carbon capture and storage, are not proven technologies, nor economically viable solutions. By Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams Where We Stand Solving the Climate Crisis Under the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015, virtually all the world’s nations pledged, “…to limit global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and also, if possible, pursue efforts to cap warming at 1.5C.” In the absence of large future emissions reductions, according to the latest generation of climate models used by the United Nation’s International Governmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, that goal will not be met. Time Is Running Out The world is now about 1.2C warmer than it was in the 19th Century - and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 50%. There is no way to undo the effect of that much carbon in the atmosphere anytime soon....

                                                                 Paramount Pictures Corporation Electric vehicles and green electric generation are working together to help reach the Paris agreement goal of keeping the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees  Celsius. By Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams All the reliable sources monitoring the climate crisis seem to agree that we are not doing nearly enough to hold the planet’s average atmosphere temperature to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period. This was thought to be an acceptable increase which could allow us to eventually reduce back to a pre-industrial level. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan organization of the US Federal Government, published a report in December, 2022 entitled “Emissions of Carbon Dioxide in the T...

By Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams Many people ask me questions about my new all-electric Vehicle, a Ford Mustang Mach-E. They stop me in parking lots, at the beach, or even on the road! This is a breakdown of the main points of owning and operating an EV and the impact I believe this market will have on Climate Change. One of the first concerns I hear is about charging the battery and the car’s miles of range. Charging both at home and on the road has worked out well, however an understanding of the battery technology currently being used will help keep your EV running at its best. It's really no different than knowing what keeps your ICEV running its best. All batteries are degraded by heat, both by an external heat source and self-generated heat from charging and discharging. Just like your cellphone, you must protect your car’s battery from overheating. What that means for an owner is deciding how you charge to protect the battery while achieving the results you require for ...

  Are you tired of seeing news articles of the forest fires around the world, floods from 15 inches of rain falling in 24 hours, droughts drying up major rivers, and people dying from record high temperatures lasting for weeks? As if things are not bad enough you hear from the climate scientists that the target temperature increase that was set by the Paris agreement will not be met because the actions that were promised were not taken. So now you succumb to the feeling of hopelessness and accept your demise. Well, maybe we each can take enough actions to prevent further deterioration of our climate. I know our job is to keep a roof over our family's head, food on the table and clothes on their backs, and the governments of the world are supposed to tackle the big problems like climate change. Yet I am quite certain that there are a lot more of us than there are corporate CEO and politicians. So, if most of us take steps to reduce our carbon footprint we may achieve the Par...