First of all, I have to apologize for not being so much in evidence here over the past couple of weeks.  It’s been busy:  Last weekend had three - count ‘em - three birthday parties, including a big (successful) surprise for my wife with many old friends, followed the next day by a museum extravaganza for my kid and some of her buddies and back to our place - in a hurricane - for the inevitable pizza and cupcakes, and then a family do for my wife.  I had a cold, too, all last weekend.  I’ve had school work, and although I’ve been on break this week, I’ve got papers to read - and plus I’ve had to do some serious work on an important project.  It’s all good, but the blogging has been a bit of a victim.  I’ll be cranking back up a bit more soon.

For today, let me note a fascinating item in the indispensable “Talk of the Town” section of “The New Yorker.”  The usually superb commentator, Hendrik Hertzberg, fell rather short of the mark on this one:  Some Nukes.  You know I’m not going to lie to you:  I’ve pretty much hated nuclear power for about 40 years.  There’s been very little that’s changed, in my view, to make it more attractive in all that time.  The one argument that might’ve worked for me - that we’re in a climate crisis and nuclear is zero carbon - has been shot through with holes.  But what’s worse is that as we have made unprecedented, nearly miraculous progress on renewables and other clean tech, money spent on nuclear becomes even more wasteful than before because it’s money that’s not being spent on clean tech.

Hertzberg and my favorite journalist, Betsy Kolbert, had some live chat on Hertzberg’s piece.  There’s some great give and take there, as well as some interesting post-chat comment.  What follows is my perspective on the piece, submitted to “The New Yorker” as a letter.

Hendrik Hertzberg is one of the sharpest policy wonks around.  And he’s been around for a long time, so he’s got great breadth as well as depth.  But he needs to go back to school on nuclear power.  (See Comment - Some Nukes, March 22, 2010.)

His choice of individuals who he seems to think represent the environmentalist movement’s embrace of nuclear power is questionable.  Beyond his recent attempts at environmental iconoclasm, Stewart Brand is not particularly involved as an activist.  Patrick Moore is a paid flack for the nuclear power industry.  Climate scientist Jim Hansen, universally revered - as he should be - as an outspoken prophet of the climate crisis, is not an energy policy analyst.  One major mainstream environmental organization, NRDC, recently called the Obama administration’s support of a massive loan guarantee program for nukes a “mistake.”

The carbon footprint of nuclear power is far from zero as Hertzberg would have us believe.  In fact, given the entire life cycle from mining uranium to processing to building the plants to disposing the waste and all the many parts in the continuum, nukes fall below natural gas but way, way above geothermal, solar and wind.  Not incidentally, the waste disposal issue has not ever been properly addressed.  Anywhere.  Even nuclear power proponents will tell you that.

Cost?  You bet.  So much so that these plants would never have generated a kilowatt-hour of power in the US had they not enjoyed hundreds of billions in federal subsidies of various kinds over the years.  Even so, no plants have been built here in 30 years.  Why?  It’s essentially financial suicide to try to build one.  Yes, there was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl - and Davis-Besse in 2002 barely missed a reactor meltdown and containment failure.  But have you heard of the aptly named WPPPS?  The Washington Public Power Supply System defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds in 1983 because of massive cost overruns at its nuclear plants.

There are many other reasons to avoid this increasingly dead end:  the threat of proliferation, the threat of terrorism, the finite nature of the fuel, among others, not to mention that every dime spent on nuclear will not be spent on renewables, energy efficiency, green building, the smart grid, distributed generation, and the scores of clean tech alternatives - both high and low - that are on the verge, very possibly, of delivering us from the maw of the climate crisis.  Nuclear power is not, as Hertzberg characterizes it, the “merely good.”  It’s the catastrophically irrational, wasteful and dangerous.

Here’s a story that I wanted to flag to you quickly.  It hearkens back to what I wrote recently about some sublime and ridiculous aspects of offshore wind development.  Regarding the sublime, I reported that the United Kingdom’s Crown Estate had leased offshore areas for a series of massive wind power projects.  What the Crown Estate announced today was opening up more of their offshore territory for tidal and wave power.  Their press release talks about building out 1.2 GW, half from each of these technologies.  This is exciting stuff.

RenewableEnergyWorld quotes Roger Bright, the Crown Estate CEO here, saying this “…shows the world that marine energy can produce meaningful amounts of electricity and offers a real alternative to conventional power production.”  Sweet.

One of the technologies to be used by two of the successful bidders is this Pelamis wave machine.

Photo: David Moir

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

I wrote about The Brouhaha Over the Science a month ago, saying, among other things, that the premise, as posited in a particular “NY Times” article, that there are “two sides in the climate-change debate” is way off the mark.  There is deep, broad and unequivocal science that has long since ended any reasoned contention that dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI) with the climate system is not a stark reality.

I want to cite a really fine letter in the “NYT” this week in response to another article, Scientists Becoming Active in Defending Climate Data.  The writer, William Scott, says “In the apparent interest of balanced reporting, equal voice is too often given to those whose opinions have no demonstrable basis in fact.”  Way too often, William.  Read the whole letter, folks.  It’s a winner.

Tom Friedman’s latest column, Dreaming the Possible Dream, touches on some companies and their promising technologies that we’ve seen here, namely Calera (cement) and Bloomenergy (fuel cells.)  Everybody has seen the hype for Bloomenergy.  I sincerely hope they live long and prosper.

I quoted Bill McKibben here a while ago in his review of a Tom Friedman book:  “Thomas Friedman is the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they’re in-the-know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease.”  Friedman seems, though, to give me deep mental unease.  I think it’s because he is always showing off to his millions of readers.  The problem, for me anyway, is that he’s not usually saying anything particularly revelatory and he often is saying things that are downright off the wall.

The FT’s “EnergySource” blog noted the Friedman column and expanded somewhat on Calera’s promise:  to sequester carbon dioxide from power plants and industry with seawater to make solid mineral carbonates for building materials like cement.  EnergySource notes some skepticism out there on these processes.  (I have to say that if Calera’s potential is reflected in the quality of their video, I wouldn’t be rushing out to sell shares to buy theirs.)  In any event, I also wish them well.  If Vinod Khosla thinks they can sequester billions of tons of carbon, then that’d be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But I’ve written about one low-tech, high-potential approach that doesn’t require billions of venture capital bucks:  biochar.  Why isn’t this being embraced by the cognoscenti?  In correspondence with an established author I know who writes about new tech, I said:  “So, I’d say this deserves much more support than it has gotten.  I fear that the VC folks, the engineers, and the politicians like big-ticket, high-tech solutions that promise high return on capital, sexy machines and votes and this sort of approach may not provide those.”  Biochar may not be sexy enough?  Is that what changing our destructive industrial and agricultural practices and curbing our insatiable consumerism is about?

Whatever.  Let a thousand clean-tech companies bloom.  There’s plenty of space for low tech and high tech to co-exist.  Biochar, algae, ground source heat pumps and solar cookers are there for us.  “Teach us delight in simple things …” There are the high tech answers too:  the smart grid, CSP, and green IT among them.  The more, the merrier.

I don’t write about fossil fuels much here because I consider them, well, to be fossils.  The fossil fuel industries are rather large dinosaurs lumbering to their long, drawn-out deaths as the earth continues to get hotter.  It’s a scene from “Fantasia.”  Unfortunately, so is my vision.  Coal, oil and gas are going to be with us for a bit longer.

When I do write about them it is usually about their ills:  see Coal - Besides Carbon Dioxide, There’s …, for instance, or Health Impacts - Coal and Oil.  I defer to my colleagues at the FPA blog on Energy for in-depth coverage of these industries.  (Here’s a thought, though, from Jodi Liss of the Energy blog, on yet another of the many nightmares that fossil fuels spawn:  massive corruption.  See also “the resource curse.”  You don’t get a lot of kickbacks with wind and solar.  Why?  Because nobody owns them!)

I did want to flag some items to you because there is a growing buzz about “unconventional” fuels at the moment.  I noted here the relative promise in a move to natural gas as an alternative to coal.  Gas has half of the carbon dioxide output of coal per BTU produced.  I have also talked a bit about environmental concerns in the hydraulic fracturing of shale to get at hitherto-inaccessible gas reserves.

The “Financial Times” has some articles today zeroing in on shale gas, coal-bed methane, and tar sands - one of my all-time least-favorite industries, right up there with mountain-top removal coal mining.  The FT also has a terrific interactive graphic on these industries that you should definitely see.  It’s most informative.

Further, there was a great column the other day in the FT, The true cost of shale gas production, that is sobering indeed on the economics.  (The economics of nuclear power are exponentially worse but there seems to be even more enthusiasm for it.  Go figure.)

Here’s another item from the very good folks at “The Oil Drum” that takes you to the twilight zone of unconventional:  Test results from nuclear stimulation of oil and gas reservoirs.  (I think my hair just caught on fire!)

I have the pleasure of teaching at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU, in both the graduate and Continuing Education programs.  Every month, the MS in Global Affairs folks have a discussion (followed by a lunch) and this past Friday the topic was “New Directions in News Reporting.”  Veteran reporter and professor of journalism, Barbara Borst, moderated an ace panel consisting of John Daniszewski, international editor for the AP; Stephen Engelberg, managing editor for ProPublica; and David Case, an editor with GlobalPost.  There was a ton of journalism experience up on that dais.

One of the principal themes of the discussion seemed to be that with the tremendous economic pressures that newspapers and magazines have been experiencing in the past several years, these businesses have had to do a lot of adapting, including downsizing.  (Fact:  The advent of craigslist took most of the air out of the sails of classified advertising at newspapers.  That slaughtered their bottom lines.)  The economics are the bad news.

The good news is that there has been a burgeoning of reporting on the internet that has taken different forms, has greatly expanded the ability of both readers and journalists to access information, and has provided a new creative outlet for “citizen journalists,” bloggers and activists who have important news to disseminate.  Venerable organizations like the AP, founded in 1846, and brand new sources such as ProPublica and GlobalPost, are charging ahead with vital journalistic services.  (Michael Massing, one of my favorite writers, had a great series last year in the “NY Review of Books” on these “new horizons.”)

Steve Engelberg mentioned one new approach:  “distributed reporting.”  ProPublica has a Reporting Network that organizes readers and helps them “commit acts of journalism.”  They also call this “crowdsourcing” or “collaborative reporting.”  See what they’re doing with this and if you want to be involved.  They have 4,000 stringers now all over the world.

There was also discussion having to do with search engine optimization (SEO) and the use of social media.  (I will be the first to admit that I have been woefully blithely unaware of social media’s value.  I just write what I write and hope for the best:  that you will read what’s here, keep coming back and pass along what you think is worthwhile for others to see.)

It’s certainly abundantly clear at this point that we’re in a brave new world in which the intersection of traditional journalism, including investigative reporting, with the blogosphere and, in the case of climate change and sustainability, also with science, politics, policy and activism, is producing a fertile and useful universe of information and discourse.

As you might imagine, I subscribe to a number of feeds on climate, energy and sustainability.  Here are a few that I highly recommend to you.

Nature Reports Climate Change, from the Nature Publishing Group, is an excellent resource on climate science and related matters.  Its companion blog, Climate Feedback, has timely and compelling coverage of the issues.  In the current issue of NRCC, I thought the review of the new book, Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map, was a particularly interesting bit of reading.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has an e-newsletter, UNFCCC News, with a range of interesting insights on mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology and other news.  This month’s edition, has a guest column by Peter Dunscombe, Chairman of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, on how strong public policy should be driving private sector investment.  (Hear that US Senators?)

A third resource is the excellent SolveClimate, providing “daily climate news and analysis” and appealing to a broad range of “climate players” including environmentalists, investors, people of faith, and young people, among others.  Well written and scrupulously researched, the articles have some real heft.  There’s a great one today, for instance, on the Alberta tar sands:  Report Warns Oil Sands Investors of Toxic Wastewater’s Financial Risk.

It’s not easy, as you no doubt well know, to keep up on your reading, but it helps to have some reliable sources available to you.  Like this blog too, I hope you think.

I would be remiss in not pointing you to a blockbuster paper by Amory Lovins from September that I’ve only just now read.   I scanned his article in Grist at the time in which he thoroughly debunks Stewart Brand’s support for nuclear power.  Here are the four myths he shatters:

• variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
• those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
• all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
• nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to protect the climate.

If Amory Lovins were Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy, we’d be more than halfway home to solving the climate crisis.  Instead, we have Steven Chu’s nuclear boondoggle.  (In Chu’s defense, though, I have to say that the political “thinkers” in the White House are pushing nukes too because they think they’ll “win votes.”)

Read Lovins’s paper because it shows us how manifestly successful renewables and energy efficiency are now and how much more they can be.

John Kerry gave a speech this past week in which he said that he is “on a short track” to introducing climate and energy legislation that can be passed.  Kerry said he’d been working with key administration officials and Senators to create a package.  In a Reuters article on this, Carol Browner is quoted as saying “…the work that is going on up on the Hill is moving at a nice speed.”  Reuters also noted the obvious:  “Washington’s ability to produce a domestic law mandating carbon reductions on industry will have a significant impact on whether negotiations on the international track will succeed.”

Kerry is articulate and passionate about climate change.  “Why do you need to price carbon? Because you need to create a signal in the marketplace where businesses have a certainty about where the marketplace is going over 20, 30, 50 years so they begin to invest accordingly and you begin to move your market in wholesale fashion towards the kind of new investments, new jobs and the adjustments we can make.”  That’s why most of the Fortune 500 companies that have a stake in this - either because they’re GHG-emitters or they’re poised to increase their value by investing in clean tech, or both - have been hammering on Congress to get this done.

Will it be cap-and-trade?  Maybe not, according to the “Washington Post” yesterday:  Senators to propose abandoning cap-and-trade.  “Power plants would face an overall cap on emissions that would become more stringent over time; motor fuel may be subject to a carbon tax whose proceeds could help electrify the U.S. transportation sector; and industrial facilities would be exempted from a cap on emissions for several years before it is phased in. The legislation would also expand domestic oil and gas drilling offshore and would provide federal assistance for constructing nuclear power plants and carbon sequestration and storage projects at coal-fired utilities.”  The nuclear power component is a sop to the GOP.  (It’s also, in my opinion, hugely bad policy.  But then some smart analysts, like Dave Roberts at Grist, think nukes are an acceptable price to pay for climate legislation - as they won’t get built at the end of the day.)

Like John Kerry, Al Gore lost a presidential election to George W. Bush.  (What a distinction.)  But also like Kerry, Gore is articulate, passionate and steeped in the science, economics and politics of climate and energy.  He has an op-ed in today’s “NY Times” in which he notes Kerry’s effort and that a draft bill is forthcoming - as soon as next week perhaps.  The op-ed covers a lot of important ground, including addressing the brouhaha over the science.  (Gore’s latest book, Our Choice, does a phenomenal job of looking at and explaining the complexities of climate change and our energy future.  I’ve been using it this semester in both of my climate change classes at NYU.)

Gore says in his op-ed that the “pathway to success is still open”  and “begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution.”  A “price on carbon.”  That’s what industry and finance have been calling for, along with the President of the United States, the US House of Representatives, top economists, the European Union, the UNFCCC, the IPCC, top science academies - pretty much the entirety of the community of key policymakers on climate and energy.  Earth to the US Senate:  Let’s get on it.

I wrote last month about The Reaction to EPA’s proposed regulations on greenhouse gases.  The virus of fear is spreading.  People who should know better, in my opinion, namely eight Democratic Senators from coal, oil and industrial states, wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson warning her, for all intents and purposes, to back off.  Coal-State Democrats Oppose Global-Warming Rules was the headline from ABC News.  Led by West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, this group wants the EPA to “suspend” the regulations and wait for Congress to pass legislation.  (As I noted last month, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, has introduced legislation to block the EPA.  She’s been joined by 40 cosponsors, almost all Republicans, except for three Democrats, all very conservative.  Murkowski’s effort is being aided and abetted in the House by two powerful Democratic members, Collin Peterson and Ike Skelton, who head the Agriculture and Armed Services committees.)

Rockefeller’s press release says his state and others “…can ill-afford ad hoc regulations.”  The letter they sent to Jackson asserts that “Ill-timed or imprudent regulations of GHGs may squander critical opportunities for our nation, impeding the investment necessary to create jobs and position our nation to develop and produce its own clean energy.”  Yes, Senators, and that’s precisely why EPA is acting:  because the Senate has been deadlocked owing to steadfast blatant political obstructionism by the Republican Caucus - in all things - and fear and loathing by industrial state Democrats, and we are blowing this amazing opportunity to move toward a sustainable, clean tech economy.

Lisa Jackson’s thoughtful and full response to Rockefeller et al concludes by saying that “…a vote to vitiate the greenhouse-gas endangerment finding … would be viewed by many as a vote to move the United States to a position behind that of China on the issue of climate change, and more in line with the position of Saudi Arabia.”  Ouch!

NRDC’s Climate Policy Director, Dave Doniger, further underlined the reasonableness of EPA’s position and Jackson’s response in this statement, and in this quote in a NY Times article on the matter:  ”These answers from Lisa Jackson hopefully will reassure the authors of the letter that the E.P.A. is proceeding in a very measured way and doing what is achievable and affordable to curb global warming pollution and focusing as they should on the biggest sources like power plants and not small businesses.”

It is unlikely that legislation barring the EPA on this could actually pass.  If it did move out of the two houses of Congress, the President would veto it.  Yet, it is still beyond my conception, at this late date, that right-thinking people could actually be blind to the opportunities inherent in instituting greenhouse gas regulations and/or passing cap-and-trade.  Most of the business community gets it.  The American Public Health Association and 11 other leading health organizations get it.  Why not the Senate?

Meanwhile, court challenges to the EPA are starting to pop up.  Texas To Challenge U.S. Greenhouse Gas Rules reports Reuters.  Governor Rick Perry is quoted:  “The EPA’s misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ.”  Other lawsuits are pending.  In fact, Greenwire reports here that 16 suits have been filed and here that a number of states and New York City have asked to intervene on behalf of EPA.

The Supreme Court mandated that EPA come to a decision on endangerment in a landmark 2007 ruling on Massachusetts et al v. EPA et al.  I have little doubt that EPA’s finding that GHGs endanger public health can be successfully challenged.  The problem, of course, lies in the obstruction and delay that court cases can bring.  But then that’s exactly what the folks filing these suits have in mind.

Finally, you should be aware that the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Wall Street’s principal federal regulator, issued a “guidance” last month on Disclosure Related to Business or Legal Developments Regarding Climate Change.  The SEC scrupulously avoided “…opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace it might be changing, or due to what causes.”  They did suggest to companies that there were areas where “climate change may trigger disclosure requirements,” namely, in the impact of legislation and regulation, impact of international accords, indirect consequences of regulation or business trends, and by the physical impacts of climate change.  Those cover a lot of territory.  Clearly, the trend has been for companies to move toward disclosing the potential or the actual impacts.  Organizations such as the Carbon Disclosure Project have been driving this movement.

Another of these groups, the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), was happy about the SEC guidance.  Their release quotes Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk:  “Today’s vote is a clarion call about the vast risks and opportunities climate change poses for US companies and the urgency for integrating them into investment decision making.  The business risks of climate change cannot be ignored. With this guidance investors can make more sound decisions based on better information - and businesses will have a level-playing field with clear standards and expectations for disclosure.”

The “NY Times” editorial board was delighted too.  But their editorial also notes there “…were predictable howls…” from folks like “Representative Joe Barton, among the most reliable of the oil, gas and coal industries’ many friends in Congress…”  Barton’s colleague, Senator John Barrasso, wants to block the SEC from doing its job, Bloomberg News reports here.  Barrasso’s release calls the SEC guidance “absurd.”  My grandmother would’ve said “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”  The SEC is doing its job, Senator, just as the EPA is doing.