Climate Change

In my post from March 29 on the “State of the Planet ‘08” conference, sponsored by The Earth Institute and “The Economist,” I talked about a close encounter I had with the gentle Chairlady of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.  We talked about nuclear power and I said, among other things, that societies needed to choose and any emphasis on nuclear power would necessarily take a tremendous amount of wind out of the sails, or turbines, as ‘twere, of the renewables industry.

Here’s an excellent ten-minute video from Greenpeace UK that makes my point rather well.

The outspoken “NY Times” columnist, Tom Friedman, takes some serious shots here, Dumb as We Wanna Be, at two of the three Presidential candidates for their recommendation on suspending the 18.4¢ a gallon federal excise tax on gasoline during the heavy summer driving season coming up.  “The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: ‘Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.’” Ouch.   

Mr. Friedman has hit it fairly close to right on the button, but he also takes a shot at Congress for not renewing tax credits for renewable energy.  It should be noted that the question of the tax credits for renewables has, for all intents and purposes, been settled now by both houses of Congress  I wrote about this here on April 15 - a good day to be writing about these things.  

Also, to say, as Mr. Friedman does, “We have no energy strategy,” is incorrect. The present Congress has significantly altered course from the recent past by passing the somewhat extraordinary “Energy Security and Independence Act” in December of this past year. It’s not everything - a renewable portfolio standard is missing, for instance - but it’s a dang sight better than we’ve had.  See It’s A Wrap… from December. 

I believe that the next Congress, presumably more heavily loaded with Democrats than the present one, will continue moving on the track toward a low and zero-carbon energy policy.  (I am not being partisan in this, merely noting facts.  The present Congress has been fiercely divided by party on energy, particularly in the Senate.)

It is good, as far as I’m concerned, to note further that any of the three remaining Presidential candidates will, as President, be on board for much of this agenda of increasing efficiency, decreasing reliance on fossil fuels, increasing growth in renewables, and generally fostering progress toward a world vastly better suited to sustainable development and saving our climate system.

I touched on an important subject here earlier in the month when I mentioned a new study purporting that the spread of black carbon – or soot – from industrial and transportation sources, and from developing world cooking practices, is having a significantly more potent impact on climate change than previously thought. This release from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography discusses the work done by their highly regarded atmospheric scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael. They report that black carbon “… has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates.” What is also evident is that “Between 25 and 35 percent of black carbon in the global atmosphere comes from China and India, emitted from the burning of wood and cow dung in household cooking and through the use of coal to heat homes. Countries in Europe and elsewhere that rely heavily on diesel fuel for transportation also contribute large amounts.” This article, Dust plays huge role in climate change, from the “Christian Science Monitor,” explains it well. There’s an accompanying podcast here from the reporter as well.

See also The even darker side of brown clouds from “Nature Reports Climate Change” and the scientists’ report itself, Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon, in “Nature Geoscience.” They say here that “The interception of solar radiation by atmospheric brown clouds leads to dimming at the Earth’s surface with important implications for the hydrological cycle, and the deposition of black carbon darkens snow and ice surfaces, which can contribute to melting, in particular of Arctic sea ice.” This is true for the Himalayan region as well.  Ramanathan and Carmichael further say that since “… BC has a significant contribution to global radiative forcing, and a much shorter lifetime compared with carbon dioxide (which has a lifetime of 100 years or more), a major focus on decreasing BC emissions offers an opportunity to mitigate the effects of global warming trends in the short term. Reductions in BC are also warranted from considerations of regional climate change and human health.”

We have known for some time about the health effects of soot in urban environments and in rural villages where cooking accounts for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, mostly of women and young children, according to any number of studies. See this study from the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS), and an accompanying group of studies, for instance, on the disastrous health effects of biomass burning for cooking in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, “More than three billion people worldwide continue to depend on solid fuels, including biomass fuels (wood, dung, agricultural residues) and coal, for their energy needs.”

See this graphic from the Ramanathan and Carmichael report to illustrate the extent and the impact of the biomass burning.

[The polluting effects of cooking using biomass like wood or cow dung in South Asia are illustrated through a measurement of aerosol optical depth, a way of measuring the quantity of pollutants in the air by the relative ability of light to penetrate through them. The upper image is a representation showing reconstructed levels of pollution from 2004 and 2005. The bottom image is a representation with the effects of biofuel cooking removed.]

How do we address the soot from household use, thus radically reducing the human health impacts and the radiative forcing from the atmospheric brown clouds and the BC deposition? One way is to eliminate biomass from cooking. The use of solar cookers is one stunningly effective and, hopefully, burgeoning approach in the developing world. Solar Cookers International is the truly superb NGO that has been spreading the word and the technology both among international aid agencies and on the ground in the developing world for a number of years now. See this powerpoint show for an introduction and use their website to learn more. They are, as just one example of many, working with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to equip refugees from the fighting in Darfur with the equipment and the know-how to go nearly entirely solar for cooking. One of the strongest indications of the success of their approach is the near total acceptance of solar cookers by the women of these camps.

SCI is doing amazing, critically important work, and it is incumbent on those of us concerned about sustainable development to learn more and support exactly these sorts of efficient, cost-effective and easily deployable technologies. It’s not always all about the high tech, capital intensive projects.

KPMG is a global network of auditors and business consultants operating in 145 countries.  According to the new Climate Changes Your Business report from them, six industries in particular have to watch out because they are not sufficiently aware of and ready to manage the risks of global warming.  The winners (or potential losers) are:  aviation, healthcare, oil and gas, tourism, transport, and the financial services sectors.  See this article from “BusinessGreen.” 

Timothy Flynn, Chairman of KPMG International says that companies need to assess the direct implications of climate change to their businesses (extreme weather, etc.) and take corrective action, consider how indirect effects such as regulatory changes will effect them, and seek to benefit from opportunities such as the growing demand for energy-efficient technologies.  (I really do love that word:  opportunity.)  Their CSR chief, Lord Michael Hastings, says “I am convinced that companies that take the initiative to improve their carbon footprint will innovate for the better – for their own prosperity and the world as whole.”  Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, says “Smart companies take action.” 

On opportunity, I recently cited an “FT” article, Energy efficiency: Use less power to cut emissions, in which we learned the arresting news that “Dow Chemical claims to have reduced its energy intensity by 38 per cent between 1990 to 2005. The group invested $1bn to meet this target but says the initiatives have resulted in $5bn of savings.” Get it?!

I have also mentioned two reports from Lehman Brothers on the Business of Climate Change which prefigure much in the KPMG report, namely the risks and the opportunities. 

I just finished watching a truly terrific Nova special, Car of the Future, with the thoroughly irrepressible Tom and Ray Magliozzi, known to their adoring public as Click and Clack from Car Talk, the NPR supershow.   Along with the laughs, you get a look at lightweight materials to revolutionize car manufacturing – the same materials being used in the new Boeing Dreamliner, hybrids, plug-in electric cars, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles with the hydrogen produced by geothermal and hydropower, and discussion of the policies we need to get us to a post-gasoline society.  See a preview here.  The website for Car of the Future may be better than the show itself.  It’s got the footage, in-depth interviews, and open content so you can take clips for your own movie or other production. 

Then, run out and get ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, by two veteran writers for “The Economist,” Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.  I heard Vaitheeswaran speak recently at the “State of the Planet ‘08” conference and he was quite enthusiastic about the possibilities for clean car technology for the future. 

Happy Earth Day!

We’ve seen a couple of great documentaries in my climate change class recently:  Fighting Goliath and Burning the Future: Coal in America.  I’m particularly excited that we’re having Burning the Future’s director in next week.  We’re also reading the outstanding Big Coal.  So, we’re into coal, in a big way.  More about the documentaries and the book before long here.

In the meantime, I just want to report that I’m a little depressed by this recent article on the Presidential contenders, Obama, Clinton woo coal vote in upcoming primaries, by the AP’s hard-working environmental reporter, H. Josef Hebert.  I know that these two, and the Republican nominee-in-waiting, John McCain, are heads and shoulders above what we’ve been experiencing in the White House on the subject of climate change.  (See Plus ça change, … from April 17 below.)  Still, I would love for the candidates to say, as John Edwards did, that we have to have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants until there’s a real CCS technology available.

On mountaintop removal coal mining, a truly evil practice, both Clinton and Obama are trying to have it both ways.  I don’t bandy the word “evil” about too much, folks, but this is an environmentally destructive practice without peer in this country at this time, and it’s got devastating human health impacts.  See the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition website and get your hands on a DVD of Burning the Future if you don’t believe me.

The AP’s article says this about Obama’s and Clinton’s take on mountaintop removal mining:

“Clinton drew the ire of some environmentalists when in a public radio interview there she said she was ‘concerned’ about mountaintop mining but also viewed it as an ‘economic and environmental trade-off’ that must be ‘looked at … from a practical perspective.’

Facing a group of environmentalists opposed to mountaintop mining at a meeting in the coal town of Beckley, W.Va., Obama also talked about the balance between economics and environmental protection. ‘There are environmental consequences to coal extraction,’ said Obama, ‘just as there are with any energy source.’ That’s just what some of the mine workers in the audience wanted to hear.” 

Presumably, the next President’s Environmental Protection Agency will do its job.  If it does, mountaintop removal will be a thing of the past. 

MEM in Paris – The two-day Major Economies Meetings (MEM), talks among major carbon emitting nations, took place last week.  The economies of these 16 countries account for around four-fifths of global output of greenhouse gases.  The meetings aim to put these countries into some sort of unified trajectory as the world heads toward coming to an agreement, over the next year and a half, on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.  See this from the AFP (courtesy of Yahoo News).  One theme in this and other international meetings recently has been the need for assistance to the developing world on meeting the challenge of adaptation to climate change.  The article says “A South African assessment found that between 30 and 60 billion dollars was needed annually as of now to help poor countries cope with the impact of climate change.”

Governors on Climate Change – There was another meeting last week, of 20 US governors, Democratic and Republican, who met at Yale to advance the cause of meeting the climate change crisis.  See Governors Call for Federal-State Climate Change Partnership from the Environment News Service.  They signed a declaration that is founded on three principles:  (1) a federal-state partnership is critical, (2) state-based climate action plans and programs have worked and should continue, and (3) rewarding and encouraging meaningful and mandatory federal and state climate action is key.  Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell said “… today my fellow governors and I memorialized our commitment to stop global warming while calling on our federal partners to join us in establishing a national policy on climate change.”  The governors were joined at the conference by two Canadian provincial premiers and by IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri.  For more on the conference see this from the host, Yale University, and the declaration itself.

Stern Warning – The lead author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change said in a speech in London last week “We badly underestimated the degree of damages and the risks of climate change.  All of the links in the chain are on average worse than we thought a couple of years ago.”  See this from “The Independent” and this from “The Guardian,” including this audio interview with the author of “The Guardian” article.

Vietnam – Finally, one of the burgeoning Asian economies, Vietnam, has announced its commitment to dealing with climate change.  In this story, we learn that Denmark and the UNDP are joining with Vietnam to create “pilot projects coping with climate change.”  UNDP has been doing a lot of work in the area of adaptation.

Have Some Fun – These five cartoons from NPR are informative and fun.  That’s a can’t miss combination where I come from.  

Earth Day is this coming Tuesday, April 22. There’s an awful lot going on all over the world. Dating myself, I can tell you that my buddy, Donald, and I went to the first Earth Day in 1970 when we were teenagers. He claims it was primarily to meet girls. My rejoinder is “That’s natural.” Back in 1990, I was working in public affairs for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation and we had a great honkin’ Earth Day in New York City for the twentieth anniversary, with hundreds of thousands of folks out, including for a big concert in Central Park. Earth Day didn’t have much cachet during many of the off years since its founding and today, but it’s beginning to pick up steam again. Check out the Earth Day website and see what’s happening in your community. You can also go to Earth Day TV to see some great videos.

The “NY Times Magazine” has its Green Issue this week. “Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move, Build” are the sections of the magazine. This is a terrific compendium of articles on what we can do to make a difference, including a compelling piece from the excellent and thoughtful writer, Michael Pollan, who asks: Why Bother?

I’ve been thinking more about meat and climate change, I have to tell you, these days, with the news about the pressures on grain and the soaring rise in food prices worldwide. The section on how we eat gets into this quite a bit. We learn, among other things, that in January “… Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and a vegetarian), uttered four little words: ‘Please eat less meat.’ He continued: ‘This is something that the IPCC was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.’” I’ve written about this before, in an essay on how we treat animals – and ourselves. I’ll be writing more soon about animal agriculture and its implications for climate change.

You should also check out this terrific video on the Green Issue.

Echoing the “NYT” special section on the “Business of Green” that I wrote about on April 11 below, the “FT” (aka The Financial Times) had a special on Business and the Environment yesterday. This is pretty much about business in the UK, and it’s got some fascinating stuff, including an article on companies saving energy, Energy efficiency: Use less power to cut emissions, in which we learn the arresting news that “Dow Chemical claims to have reduced its energy intensity by 38 per cent between 1990 to 2005. The group invested $1bn to meet this target but says the initiatives have resulted in $5bn of savings.” Get it?!

In another article on green building in France, Energy Plus: Paris building to set new standard, we are told that “…in France, buildings account for 45 per cent of French energy consumption and 16 per cent of water use, and generate 40 per cent of the country’s waste. Their carbon dioxide emissions amount to 25 per cent of the national total, second only to transport at 28 per cent.” I’ve written about Green Building a number of times here. It’s a fascinating and important subject. See this terrific slideshow too from the FT on green building.

… plus c’est la même chose. 

Well, much to probably nobody’s surprise, the present President of the United States has once again distinguished himself by being just about the only top political leader in the industrialized democracies who doesn’t subscribe to the belief that climate change is upon us, will overwhelm us if we don’t act more vigorously than we have, and that the only way to get at this is to have significant mandatory curbs, in the very near term, on greenhouse gas emissions.  One writer at the hippie environmentalist magazine, “Business Week,” said, in this piece, “President Bush has a habit of promising action on climate change—and then not delivering.”  Dan Froomkin, a columnist for the radical left-wing “Washington Post,” said in Bush’s Third Climate-Change Fake-Out, “Taking a brief break from all the papal pomp, President Bush today rolls out yet another wave of climate-change flim-flam.”  Reuters reports that Bush climate plan said too little, too late, quoting German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, “The president gave a disappointing speech.”  The title of the minister’s press release was “Gabriel criticises Bush’s Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership.”  Ouch.

What’s the plan?  According to Himself:  “Today, I’m announcing a new national goal: to stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.” 

According to most of the nearly fifteen hundred news articles at Yahoo, and your humble blogger, that ain’t going to feed the bulldog.

Energy Boost is the title of the article from yesterday in the “Washington Post.”  The Senate has agreed to “… extend solar and wind energy tax breaks as part of a housing bill that is likely to win approval in the House.”  This article keys in on some businesses that are happy about the tax benefits being extended here.  Senator Maria Cantwell, one of the authors of the extension, had this to say in her press release:  “The Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008 … provides the continuation of clean energy production incentives and incentives to improve energy efficiency that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, save people and businesses money, and over time reduce energy costs over time.”  NRDC said:  “Extending these tax incentives is essential to moving our country in the direction of a clean energy economy that will help reduce energy bills and reduce global warming pollution.” 

I’ve written about this numerous times, most recently at If At First You Don’t Succeed ……  The Senate has not passed the same bill that the House did that would have rescinded $18 billion in tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.  As I like to say, though, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  (Voltaire said it first.)