Climate Change

California – The Golden State has a population of 37 million folks or so. That’s around Kenya’s or Poland’s population. According to which source you use, California, if it were an independent nation, would have the seventh, eighth, or tenth largest economy in the world. California is responsible for 13% of the United States’ gross domestic product. The state’s GDP was about $1.7 trillion in 2006. Think people pay attention to what happens there?

Well, California just issued a comprehensive draft plan for reducing its greenhouse gases. The aim is to reduce GHG to 1990 levels by 2020, or about 10 percent from today’s levels. See also this story from the AP. For everything climate change, see California’s portal.

The Governator and much of the political and civic leadership in California have been hard at work trying to create a post-carbon society. I’ve noted some of their efforts here, the Million Solar Roofs initiative for instance, the Western States cap-and-trade compact, and the landmark law for regulating GHG from automotive emissions – plus the dirty pool played by the EPA in pushing back.

While fires consume Big Sur, the California climate change juggernaut keeps plunging ahead. It’s a very good thing for all of us that Google and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and Gavin Newsome, all those venture capitalists and energy entrepreneurs, and millions of citizens are thinking and living greener and greener.

Massachusetts – I wrote about the brouhaha in the Bay State in “Cape Wind” just below. Former Governor Mitt Romney did his best to scuttle the wind farm, but Governor Deval Patrick is a staunch supporter. The Massachusetts legislature is also on board and this week is moving an aggressive renewables package forward. See this from the “Berkshire Eagle” and this from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Rhode Island – Meanwhile, just down the coast, Governor Donald L. Carcieri, has vetoed a renewables package from the legislature. This article from the “Providence Journal” recounts how the Governor and the legislature are in substantial disagreement about how best to bring renewable energy to RI. The venerable and progressive Conservation Law Foundation, in this release, is calling on the legislature to override the veto, something they are likely to do. The CLF, not incidentally, has an important profile on climate change.

Wisconsin – The news from the Badger State is that the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming has issued an ambitious plan that calls for utilities to bring greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2022 according to this article from the “Chicago Tribune.” The plan recommends that Wisconsin join a regional GHG cap-and-trade program, or the federal one when it comes into being – in 2009, most prognosticators, including me, project. The task force also says that nuclear power should be considered, even though there’s been a moratorium on nukes in Wisconsin for over 20 years.

Florida – The Sunshine State just hosted its second Climate Change Summit.  Governor Charlie Crist has been taking climate change quite seriously.  Unfortunately, his legislature hasn’t taken quite the forward-looking stance he has.  See Energy bill stops short of Crist’s goals from the “Daytona Beach News-Journal.”  The bill, it appears, doesn’t have much of what Crist intended when he started the process.  It looks like nothing more, at this point, then a formula for nuclear power.

Arizona – A conservative institute is suing the state to block a surcharge on consumers to help fund renewables. See this from the “Phoenix Business Journal.” When I was in Arizona in January, I was thunderstruck that every single roof didn’t have solar panels installed. There is nothing but sun there - and room for improvement. With plug-in hybrids, for that matter, you could supply huge amounts of both the stationary and surface transportation needs of the state from solar without a gram of carbon dioxide making the atmosphere hotter.

What a great yarn!  A smart, successful, committed energy entrepreneur comes along with a solid project to provide enough zero-emission, renewable energy to supply, on a good day, all the stationary power needs of Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and, if you had plug-in vehicles, a good bit of the surface transportation needs as well.  Wind turbines are a proven technology and in Europe, offshore wind farms have been flourishing for years.  The project would serve an area that is now subject to considerable air pollution from the ancient power plant that is in place.  A devastating oil spill from a barge headed to that power plant occurred only a few years ago.  The wind farm will eliminate three quarters of a million tons of GHG a year and provide a much-needed and reliable boost to the New England electrical grid.  What’s not to love?!

Well, if you have a multimillion dollar summer home on Nantucket Sound, you might not like that the view is going to be diminished at the horizon.  If you have a yacht, you might not like the idea of sailing in and around the farm.  So, as has been too often the case in determining energy policy in this country, and elsewhere, money talks.  The book, Cape Wind, out a little over a year ago, tells the story of, as the subtitle says, money, celebrity, class, politics, and the battle for our energy future on Nantucket Sound.  It’s not a pretty story.  It’s beautifully told, don’t get me wrong.  It reminds me of Fast Food Nation, a hugely depressing book, but compelling in every way.  However, the Cape Wind story ends better.  There appears to be wind at the end of the tunnel. 

The Cape Wind project continues to wend its way through the courts and the environmental review process.  Fighting opposition that has extremely deep pockets and connections in high places, the project has kept moving forward.  After more than six years of environmental review, the comment period for the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) ended in April.  The Army Corps of Engineers transferred the lead agency responsibility for the environmental review of the project to the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior a couple of years ago.  See the MMS webpage for Cape Wind here.  It’s got all the documentation.  In November 2004, the involved agencies released, according to the developer, a very positive DEIS reporting numerous project benefits at minimal impact.  Here is the developer’s summary of the findings.  The permit should be issued this year, and they expect turbine manufacturing and construction in 2010. 

The “NY Times” did a story on this in 2003 that is still worth reading – A Mighty Wind.  The story of the reporter’s impact on the chemistry of the debate is recounted in the book.

Cape Wind bills itself as America’s first offshore wind farm.  They were certainly the first to come out with a real proposal but it looks like they’ve got some competition to be the first into the water and onto the grid.  See Bluewater Wind’s proposal for Delaware waters.

My old buddy, Mike Vickerman, gave me the book last summer.  I’m really glad that I finally got around to reading it.  Mike runs a superb organization, RENEW Wisconsin, that has been promoting wind power for years.  Read his insightful and entertaining two-part commentary on the book here and here. 

Wind is here to stay.  For more, see these links:  American Wind Energy Association, Windpower Monthly, Nat’l Wind Technology Center, Danish Wind Turbine Mfr. Association and the U.S. DOE Wind Power Program, and some of my posts, here recently and any number of other times at the blog.

Finally, for fun, go to the Daily Show’s segment from last summer on the Cape Wind controversy.

(photo courtesy of Kaveh Sardari)

Dr. James Hansen is both an icon and a working scientist at the forefront of global warming research.  He’s a world-renowned physicist and an impassioned activist.  He’s soft spoken and hard hitting.  Hansen is the director of an important US government lab, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and has sometimes been an outspoken critic of government policies.  He has also been subject to censorship under the present Presidential administration.  He has never been a victim. 

Dr. Hansen appeared in Congress exactly 20 years ago this Monday to testify on the dangers of global warming.  (I’ve written about or referenced him here a number of times.)  His testimony then, along with other top scientists, was a landmark event in the battle to confront climate change.  He came on the anniversary to testify again. Scientist: “We’re toast” without action on global warming  is the headline from CNN.com on an AP story.  He also said “Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic.  Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.”  Shocking, certainly, and inconvenient as well to some.  You will find his full remarks, “Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near,” here.

Later, Hansen was honored by the Worldwatch Institute and the United Nations Foundation.  There is great coverage of this event here, including an op-ed for Worldwatch.  In his opinion piece, Hansen says: “The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million), and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising by about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.”  (The Tallberg Foundation has a vigorous climate change program including a drive to get back to 350 ppm.  Hansen is a signatory of their letter which recently appeared as a full-page ad in the “NY Times,” “International Herald Tribune,” and “Financial Times.”)

There’s more on Hansen, Worldwatch Institute partnered with Grist on a three-part bio to be found here as well.  He was a hero 20 years ago and he’s a hero now.  One difference, thankfully, is that there are a whole lot more people on board these days.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that we’ve got an awful lot of work to do in a relatively short amount of time. 

As I said on Friday, there is so much going on. Here are some more salient items for you.

Jim Rogers – I quoted the Duke Energy CEO here a while back. In the Sunday “NY Times Magazine,” there’s a profile of the head of the nation’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Why has he been promoting a cap-and-trade law when it will impact his company so enormously? The short answer: “‘If you’re not at the table, you’re going to be on the menu,’” he says in the article. The article is a good survey of where we are on climate change legislation and where the power industry is. (Hint: not yet quite in the same place.)

The big, unanswered question, for me anyway, is why the subject of demand-side management is not front and center. The article touches on this. By DSM, we mean all the ways in which a utility, power regulators, other authorities, and consumers get consumption down. There are ways to reduce consumption by having large users cut down in peak periods. There are the obvious approaches to energy conservation such as mandating higher efficiency and providing audits. Cogeneration and distributed generation – or decentralized energy as the Europeans call it – will both enormously add to the efficiency of power systems and therefore radically reduce consumption.

Rogers says in the article, for instance: “So we have 500,000 solar units on the roofs of our customers. We install them, we maintain them and we dispatch them, just like it was a power plant!” That’s enough to replace a large coal-fired power plant, and it’s one innovative approach.

Beyond that, why shouldn’t power providers get paid for helping to reduce consumption? It’s called decoupling and it’s worked before. We had it in New York State and it lapsed. Duke Energy, and others, are bringing it back. As Rogers says, ““I would rather spend $8 billion implementing efficiency than spend $8 billion on building a nuclear plant.” Hear, hear!

The Economist – In the current issue of the venerable “Economist,” there is a special section on the “Future of Energy.” In the leader (Britspeak for editorial), they say “…in the imaginations of a coterie of physicists, biologists and engineers, an alternative world is taking shape.” They also report that “…plans for the end of the fossil-fuel economy are now being laid.” This is the message of “Earth: The Sequel” which I wrote about in April. There’s a host of good material into which you can sink your teeth at “The Economist” report.

Algae Moves Up – Algae has a lot of possibilities. Aside from its ability to grow very quickly and in a relatively small footprint, thus providing a much-more easily accessible and cost-effective feedstock for ethanol than corn, or even cane sugar, it also consumes enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. Algae production can, in fact, be configured to act as a carbon sink. This is precisely what is being piloted by a utility in Arizona. (I wrote about this, also in “Earth: The Sequel”.)

In this article from Reuters, we learn that an American company, Algenol, is in a deal with a Mexican company, BioFields, to build a large plant in the in the Sonoran Desert. Algenol is aiming to produce one billion gallons, 10% of current US capacity, by 2012.

More Electric Cars! – Further to my recent notes on cars, here’s an item from GreenBiz: GM, GE and Ford Join DOE to Advance PHEVs. It’s only a modest $30 million, but it could signal a real acceleration by American industry in this critical field. See also McCain Proposes $300M for Next-Gen Car Battery from them. (Not incidentally, GreenBiz has a world of great information into which you can delve.)

Here are two videos I saw the other day at the estimable DeSmogBlog.  Have fun with these.

There really are a ton of stories out there.  Here’s a sampling:

Cars – I’ve written recently about electric cars and other exciting initiatives.  There are more developments on the automotive front.  Mitsubishi and Peugeot have entered into an alliance to supply key components for electric vehicles and may build their own as well.  See this from Planet Ark.  As noted here last month, Renault and Nissan already have come together to produce electric cars.

Meanwhile, in California – where else? – Pacific Gas & Electric announced a commitment of billions of dollars to build out an infrastructure to support plug-in hybrids.  See this story, also from Reuters’ Planet Ark.  PG & E made the commitment at a conference hosted by Google and the Brookings Institution, “Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington?”  The conference featured some top people in the field, including one of the two authors of ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, and John Dingell, also known as Big John, Chairman, House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Finally, Honda just made a big splash when they announced the rolling out of their fuel-cell car.  Get all they’ve got to say about it here. 

Take a video break now for fun.

That’s from a nine-year old!  You go, Jupe!  There’s a world of important, useful information on plug-ins at Plug In America.  (Plus more videos.) 

Climate Change in the House – Speaking of John Dingell, this recent story from the “Detroit News” talks about draft legislation that the exceedingly powerful Mr. Dingell is putting together.  As you know, the Senate just failed to bring a climate change bill to the floor there for a vote.  (See No Surprise from the blog and Why The Climate Bill Failed from “Time.”)

Dingell’s legislation will be a powerful vehicle.  He’s got serious juice and committee staff has a world of expertise.  See his committee’s white papers on climate change for more on where we might be headed.  As noted here, and in every other venue following climate change matters on The Hill, we’re not going to get anything this year, but in 2009 the stars will undoubtedly align for something robust.  (By the way, Hill Heat is a good blog for following this story closely.)

Africa – The UN came out with a comprehensive report recently on the impact of climate change in Africa.  This story from the “LA Times” summarizes things nicely.  It’s not, in a work, pretty.  The story reports that “Computer models project major changes in precipitation patterns on the continent, which could lead to food shortages and increased desertification.  Yet on the whole, African nations lack the resources and technology to address such changes.”  In its Fourth Assessment Report last year, the IPCC pronounced that “Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability, a situation aggravated by the interaction of ‘multiple stresses’, occurring at various levels, and low adaptive capacity.”

Australia – I’ve been writing recently about CCS and coal plants.  Well Greenpeace in Australia has just come out with a report saying that phasing out coal down under is not only necessary, it’s perfectly do-able.  They are providing a blueprint for just how to do it.  “The report shows how we can completely phase out coal-fired electricity in Australia by 2030 by harnessing the country’s renewable energy resources – which are enough to power half of Asia.”  Good on ya.

Bonn – I noted here the international climate change negotiations that took place earlier this month.  Here’s an item from the Environmental News Network summing up the talks, and a link to the UNFCCC website for more.  “The road ahead of us is daunting,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.  Okay, Yvo, tell us something we didn’t know.  But we’re on it, baby.  

I have to admit, back in December I didn’t think that Barack Obama would be the nominee of the Democratic Party.  I predicted then, in my year in review, that either Hillary Clinton or John Edwards would be the nominee, and the eventual next President.  (I also predicted that Bill Richardson, a very good man in my estimation, would be the next Veep.  He’s still in the running.)

In any event, we’re going to have a White House next January that is more given to the many concerns that have been evidenced at this blog and elsewhere about climate change.  We’re going to have a POTUS who will get more things done to address these concerns. 

John McCain, as you no doubt know, coauthored cap-and-trade legislation a few years back and he appears pretty serious about climate change.  See On the Campaign Trail with John McCain from May.  He had a new ad out the other day.

For more on his views, see McCain’s website.

The big news from Barack Obama this week was his endorsement by Al Gore.  See this from “The Guardian” and this video from the BBC.

For a video of Obama giving his views on energy and the environment, see this.  See more at Obama’s website.

Let’s, over the next several months, keep an eye on whether climate change gets the attention it deserves - from the media and the candidates - as a critical issue for American voters.

Okay, so a lot of scientists and engineers are working on CCS. That’s clear. The question is: Will their hard work and expertise translate into a viable, affordable mechanism for eliminating, or even curtailing the massive, climate-altering impact of the carbon dioxide that spews inexorably, interminably from the world’s thousands of coal-fired power plants?

Remember, also, that there are impacts from fossil-fueled power plants other than carbon dioxide? There’s sulfur dioxide, a precursor pollutant for acid rain, and mercury, and the particulate matter that is also a prime and vicious air pollutant. See this post from April on black carbon and its effects. Remember that nearly all of the power plants in the rapidly industrializing countries of China and India have virtually no pollution controls. There’s the sludge and the toxic ash too, and there’s also massive water use. See this from the Union of Concerned Scientists. And then there’s the environmental havoc that coal mining wreaks. See The Crime of Mountaintop Removal Mining from May.

This is all just a sketch of the environmental problems. See the magisterial Big Coal for the full picture. It’s a truly excellent book, in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Okay, so let’s look at the technology. The scientists I noted on June 11 below have called for an accelerated program of research and development on CCS. See this story from “The Times.” The US Dept. of Energy has a lot of information on carbon sequestration programs at this website. Bellona, a foundation begun in the 1986 to highlight Norwegian environmental problems and then later the specter of nuclear contamination from Russia, concerns itself with CCS. See this from them. Ten things you need to know about carbon capture is also useful from “The Times.” Like the article from “Trading Carbon” cited in the previous post, it looks at some of the things that are going right and some that are going wrong for CCS.

I referenced Shell in the previous post.  If you are interested, they’re having a webcast at 11 AM Eastern Time on this Thursday, June 19, to discuss CCS.  You’ll be able to ask questions online.  Go here to register.   

There certainly is a truckload of work getting done. There’s no getting around that. The question is, though, is there more heat than light? Are we getting anywhere or are we just spinning our wheels?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago here on clean coal technology.  First of all, let me explain that I am not rooting against the possibility of finding some way to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and other sources.  It’s just that there is so much reliance on coal now, and it appears for the foreseeable future, and we still have no reliable technology on hand that utilities and others see as cost-effective, that it seems the much more intelligent choice to phase coal and other fossil fuels out.  That’s what it comes down to at this point.  We will do much better, environmentally and economically, if we move away now from the massive reliance on coal.

Now when I say we, I mean the US which still relies on coal for 50% of its electricity.  I also mean the Europeans who, believe it or not, are looking to build new plants.  I, of course, also mean the Indians and especially the Chinese.  See China Increases Lead as Biggest Carbon Dioxide Emitter from today’s “NY Times.”  Elisabeth Rosenthal, their international health and environmental reporter, looks at the new study from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and writes:  “China is heavily dependent on coal and has seen its most rapid growth in some of the world’s most heavily polluting industrial sectors: cement, aluminum and plate glass.”  Listen to Rosenthal’s interview at this terrific podcast.  You can also see the discussion at the blog “Dot Earth.”  

So, if we stick with coal, it’s going to cost us dearly, either with an inexorable slide to real climate change catastrophe – see the IPCC’s projections – or, if we face the challenge of CCS, with astronomical costs.  “Trading Carbon,” ” which is published by Point Carbon, the excellent news and information service on energy and environmental markets, had a story in their May issue on CCS.  Robin Lancaster, the editor, and the writer of the story, says in his lead editorial in the magazine “… the technology is available to capture carbon dioxide at its source, transport it, and then store it underground.  However, the extra cost of putting this technology in place is currently one of the main stumbling blocks to project development.”  You can read Going Underground here.  It’s a great, comprehensive look at the forces working for and against a commercially viable CCS technology.   

Here’s another recent story, from the “FT” - BP axes plan for carbon capture plant in which we learn that the canceled project in question, for a coal-fired plant in Australia, follows on the heels of another cancellation in Scotland.

For more perspective on CCS, you can visit the website for European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plants (ZEP), an industry group, and this from Shell.   

(I’ll have some more on CCS in the next day or two, so stay tuned.)

The leading scientists of 13 nations yesterday called for significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.  The science academies of the G8 plus those of Brazil, Mexico, India, China and South Africa issued a joint statement on “Climate Change Adaptation and the Transition to a Low Carbon Society.”  See this from Reuters.  The statement targets the G8 Summit to take place in Japan in early July.  (I wrote about last year’s G8 Summit and its implications for the climate change debate here.)

The scientists said “We have advised prompt action to deal with the causes of climate change and cautioned that some climate impacts are inevitable. However, progress in reducing global greenhouse gas emission has been slow.”  On adaptation, the joint statement said “Climate change is a pressing issue for today. Action on adaptation is needed now and failure to respond poses a significant risk.” 

They further noted:  “The transition to a low carbon society requires: setting standards; designing economic instruments and promoting energy efficiency across all sectors; encouraging changes in individual behaviour; strengthening technology transfer to enable leapfrogging to cleaner and more efficient technologies; and investing strongly in carbon-removing technologies and low-carbon energy resources: nuclear power, solar energy, hydroelectricity and other renewable energy sources. These points are also stressed in the InterAcademy Council report.”  (See Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future from October.)

Scientists are conservative, folks, if you didn’t already know that.  They are trained to tread carefully, to look at all sorts of variables, to reject unsound hypotheses and tainted evidence.  Yet the world’s leading science academies, echoing the call of the IPCC, are calling on the world community to get it into another gear, to step it up, as Bill McKibben and his colleagues would say, to address climate change now and much more vigorously. 

For more on the work of two of these academies, see Climate & Global Change @ the National Academies (for the US) and this from the UK’s Royal Society. 

For another recent perspective, from four top scientists, and published in “Nature Reports - Climate Change,” see Squaring up to reality.  “Both emissions reduction and adaptation will need to be much stronger than currently planned if dangerous global impacts of climate change are to be avoided.”  This sounds precisely the same notes as the message from the national academies.