Climate Change

Cap-and-Trade Bonanza – “Fortune” has a Sustainability column authored by Marc Gunther and this week he’s got a story on how we’re going to divvy up the proceeds from the inevitable U.S. cap-and-trade program that will be on the books sometime in 2009.  See A $3 trillion climate change battle.  As Gunther writes, “The issue gets pretty wonky pretty quickly, but it’s worth trying to understand because the stakes are so high.”  The question is who will get the money raised by the permits issued.  That’s the much-more-than-$64,000 question.  Should it go to the taxpayers, the industries effected in the form of some rebate, to help fund renewable energy investments, and/or any of a number of other constituencies and projects?  This will be a big part of the debate as this legislation wends its way through Congress, and in the early days of the next administration.  (As we learned in the last post below, the next President of the United States, whomever he or she will be, will be on board for some sort of cap-and-trade regime.)   

New Study Pinpoints Thousands of Climate Change Impacts – “Nature,” one of the oldest, most revered, and most definitive science journals, published a paper this week, Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change, from key scientists who were involved with last year’s landmark Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  “Nature’s” superb blog, “Climate Feedback,” said here that “Nearly 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - from the timing of plant flowering to the rate of ice melting - are being influenced by human-induced global warming, according to the first study to formally link trends in biological and physical systems to rising greenhouse gas emissions.”  Here’s the story from NASA where the lead author, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science, has her day job.

Wind Power – There are two good stories at “EERE Network News,” the weekly newsletter of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.  Not incidentally, folks, if you haven’t looked at the DOE’s website, there is really a goldmine of great information here, from soup to nuts on energy.  (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?  Sorry, if I’ve offended any particularly delicate sensibilities on these sorts of things.) 

Anyway, the first compelling story here is New DOE Report Analyzes a Path to 20% Wind Power by 2030.  This means the US would move from its current generating capacity of 16.8 gigawatts to 304 GW in 2030.  It would also mean we’d achieve an annual reduction of 825 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2030.  The report further calculates “…the accelerated wind power effort would support roughly 500,000 U.S. jobs and add more than $1.5 billion in annual revenues to the coffers of local communities.”  Go to the “20% Wind Energy by 2030” program website for more.

The second story from DOE references a new report from the American Wind Energy Association showing a continuing boom in windpower installations.  The “…industry continued new installations at a breakneck pace in the first quarter of 2008, putting 1,400 megawatts or approximately $3 billion worth of new generating capacity in place,” according to the report from the AWEA.  The first quarter!  Not bad.

However, even though it appeared as of my post from last month, Tax Breaks, Finally, for Renewables, that the deal was done and the extension of tax credits for the renewables industries was at hand, it appears to be not quite yet the case.  The AWEA and her sister renewable energy industry trade groups are still pitching.  See this release.  We’re getting close though.  See this from Reuters’ today:  Renewable Energy Tax Bill Advances In US House. 

The big news came from John McCain on Monday.  McCain Pledges To Combat Climate Change is the story from Reuters’ “Planet Ark” service.  In an obvious attempt to delineate the difference between President Bush and himself, he said “I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges.”

McCain’s speech was thoughtful too about the problem of getting China and India on board.  He said:  “In my approach to global climate-control efforts, we will apply the principle of equal treatment. We will apply the same environmental standards to industries in China, India, and elsewhere that we apply to our own industries. And if industrializing countries seek an economic advantage by evading those standards, I would work with the European Union and other like-minded governments that plan to address the global warming problem to develop effective diplomacy, effect a transfer of technology, or other means to engage those countries that decline to enact a similar cap.”

The story from NPR on this, included the news that “A prepared text of McCain’s speech supplied to reporters suggested that western countries might use trade sanctions to push China and India into cutting their carbon output. But in delivering the speech, McCain substituted softer language, saying diplomacy and technical support should be enough to move the two countries.” 

He seems to be referring to the idea of a trade mechanism related to carbon consumption that I wrote about here in December.  See the last paragraph at that post where I described the idea:  “So, if you can’t get China or some other recalcitrant to restrain GHG emissions through some international protocol (to which the Bali meetings were supposed to point the way), then take it out of their exchequer by creating barriers to products created in high-GHG economies.”

For a good, well-rounded look at McCain’s position and history on climate change, and the positions of the other two candidates remaining, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, look at this item from “The Online NewsHour.”  (For more on cap-and-trade and other stories related to the carbon markets, you can see these posts.) 

All three Presidential candidates support a cap-and-trade system and, for me, that is reassuring.

With the West Virginia primary tomorrow, and Kentucky next week, coal and coal mining become more visible as issues.  I wrote about this in April at Quick Political Note – Coal and the Candidates. 

The Sundance Channel is going to premier a blockbuster movie, Burning the Future: Coal in America, tomorrow night.  That’s 9:35 PM (Eastern) on May 13.  (See the schedule here for the time in your area.)  Check out this trailer. 

This documentary is moving, eloquent, visceral.  We had the great fortune to have the director, David Novack, in my class on climate change a couple of weeks ago.  David is, not surprisingly, not unlike his film:  low-key, intelligent and passionate.

He told us about a number of ins and outs, including the linguistic detoxification of fill by the Corps of Engineers that now allows the previously banned practice of using waste to fill in waterways.  The mountaintop debris that has been blown away by thousands of pounds of ANFO to expose the coal seams for easy extraction is no longer waste – it’s just earth.  “War is Peace” as they might say in 1984.  Well, some folks in Congress have noticed this bit of jiggery pokery and have offered the “Clean Water Protection Act” as a remedy.  It defines “fill material” to mean “any pollutant that replaces portions of waters of the United States with dry land or that changes the bottom elevation of a water body for any purpose and to exclude any pollutant discharged into the water primarily to dispose of waste.”

We also talked a bit about the fact that, as Big Coal, the magisterial treatise by Jeff Goodell from 2006, points out, West Virginia, just like some other places, Nigeria and the Congo, for instance, is a place where economists have demonstrated a “clear negative relationship between natural-resource based exports” and economic growth.  This phenomenon is called the “resource curse.”

As I heard Jeff Goodell say in a video from a discussion of his book in the SF Bay Area, and as David Novack seems to think, it just may be that the coal companies and the utilities see the handwriting on the wall and they know that the era of coal is coming to a close.  That may or not be true.

In any event, let’s sincerely hope the pace on fighting MTR mining picks up with the broader release of this great movie.  I really hope you get a chance to watch it. 

Over the past several days as we’ve seen the death and damage from the storm in Burma/Myanmar metastasize, there has been a greater-than-usual sense of impotency on the part of the international community in its inability to rise to the challenge. There is the extraordinary scale of the disaster, and the fact that so much of the impacted area is difficult to access. There is the immediate relief effort that seems to have been thwarted by the military government there. There is the realization that the hundreds of thousands who’ve been affected were terribly vulnerable in the first place, because of their poverty, the lack of adequate infrastructure, and their proximity to the Bay of Bengal and its often-dangerous weather.

There is a further realization, I think: that storms of this strength have been more frequent in recent years and will continue to grow in frequency and intensity. Certainly, Katrina’s impact on the consciousness of Americans, and others, has been a key factor in the further recognition and acceptance of the reality of the climate change crisis that is looming. The AFP reports here that “Some experts argue the evidence is already hard enough to identify a probable trend: storms are becoming more powerful as global warming heats up the oceans.” The article gives a good summary of the scientific thinking.

To go deeper, you can refer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II Report “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” (from last year’s critical Fourth Assessment Report), and specifically the chapter on Coastal Systems And Low-Lying Areas. (See also this from Reuters when the WG II report was issued, and my post at the time.) The IPCC Chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said “It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit.”

In this thoughtful piece, The Science Of Cyclones, from MSNBC’s Alan Boyle, we learn about the work of Chris Mooney, the author, and blogger for Intersection. (I’ve mentioned Chris here. He’s a formidable voice.) Among the things that Mooney says in his interview with Boyle, and this very much echoes the message from the IPCC, is “There’s a huge socioeconomic disparity, in terms of levels of preparedness, and in terms of levels of damage, and especially in terms of numbers killed by cyclones in the world. And that’s something we’ve got to address.” You can hear the interview here here and read Mooney’s essay for “Science Progress” here.

In the meantime, you should find out ways to help. My first stop when disaster strikes is Unicef. Not surprisingly, they are geared up to help. Look at their website’s Cyclone Nargis information for more.

Here’s an eye-catching quote:  “I believe the age of fossil fuels is coming to end - and that the age of clean energy will follow.”  That’s what Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last week.  See this from the AP.

Massachusetts is home, as you probably know, to the Cape Wind project, what NRDC has characterized as the largest single GHG reduction project in the U.S.  This is a project that Patrick has championed, in contrast to his predecessor, Mitt Romney.  At a conference I attended last year, I heard Cape Wind’s developer, Jim Gordon, say that on a good day his offshore wind farm could not only supply all the stationary power needs of Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, but the surface transportation needs as well - if plug-in hybrids were being deployed.  (I recently wrote about a great Nova program on automotive advances starring those two quintessential Boston townies, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack.)

For a comprehensive look at what’s being proposed, including advancing renewables and green jobs, go to the state’s website here for a transcript of the speech and video as well. 

Patrick’s speech coincided with an announcement by the state’s Department of Public Utilities that they’d given approval to a program that would allow a million Boston-area electricity customers the option of buying 100 percent of their power from wind.  See this from the venerable Boston-based Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the designers of this innovative program.

Deanne Upson, a consultant on climate change in Washington, posed a great question at my post below on soot and solar cookers. In a nutshell, she asked how would you design an energy-efficient home for low and middle-income people in the developing world or in economically distressed areas. I thought a reply rated a post of its own.

Off the top of my head I would say maximizing energy efficiency and deploying renewables are two great places for people in the developing world to start. The International Green Building Movement has been focused on urban housing design and commercial development. I wrote here about the “Masdar Initiative,” in Abu Dhabi, which will be a “… 6 million square meter sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a zero carbon and zero waste community.” Sweet. See the project plan and some graphics from the architects, Foster and Partners.

In Green Tech, Low Tech, Clean Tech, New Tech from a year ago, I noted a fascinating exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, on “Design for the Other 90%.” Here’s their section on innovative designs for shelter. Also, UNEP has a vigorous Sustainable Buildings And Construction Initiative. This particular section of their report on “Buildings and Climate Change” has excellent information on low-energy and zero-energy buildings and passive houses. The Rocky Mountain Institute, whose motto is “Abundance by Design,” has done a lot of consulting on buildings. See this section of their website. Of course, the U.S. Green Building Council and the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment (COTE) have been doing superb work for years. The USGBC has an extensive list of links. See also the work of their sister organization, the World Green Building Council.

There is truly extraordinary work being done in the area of green building. Human habitat is obviously a critical area in which we can achieve great things, sustainably.