Climate Change

I’m sorry to report that the backers of renewable energy tax credit legislation today failed to get enough votes to get a vote on the legislation itself, H.R. 6049, the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008.  This is getting tired.  I reported yesterday on the continued blossoming of activity in renewables.  However, things are going to slow down if the production tax credits and other vehicles are not renewed.  See this today from the AP and my post on this from May 24. 

As expected, the climate change bill died in the Senate because of an inability to invoke cloture.  See this from the AP.  You didn’t have to be a seer to predict this.  See my item on this under “Melange” from May 3 below.

Don’t worry, though.  We’ll get this done in 2009.  Early.

Senate on Climate Change – In the US, the Senate began debate yesterday on legislation to address climate change. The “SF Chronicle” reports here that the opponents and proponents were so eager to start bare knuckling over the bill that they voted 74-14 to proceed to debate. The bill “…would require about 2,100 major U.S. emitters - mostly coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and chemical plants - to pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Proceeds from selling or trading those permits could total over $6 trillion over the next 40 years, and would be reinvested in renewable energy and rebates to consumers.” Here’s a graphic from the “NY Times” illustrating the geography of carbon emissions in the US.

S.3036 has been the focus of much debate already, both on the Hill and off. Here’s one analysis of some of the policy and politics from the Center for American Progress. Another CAP, the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a grouping of industry and environmental groups, agrees on six principles, but differs internally on critical issues such as to what extent permits will be given away or auctioned to industries.

As I’ve noted recently, we’re not going to have a climate change law in the US this year. The debates on this legislation now are important, though, for staking out various positions, and putting the issue out before the public.

Solar Power Economics – The “FT” had a nice story the other day on the Silver lining in solar power storm clouds. (Remember, you may have to register, but it’s free and otherwise painless.) The line that caught my eye was that, according to one industry analyst, “…the global capacity for production of photovoltaic equipment - the biggest section of solar power technology which converts sunlight directly into electricity - is set to increase ‘dramatically,’ from 3 gigawatts last year to 15 to 20 gigawatts of production in 2010. Much of the growth is coming from China.” 2010 is right around the corner!

Take note also that “Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative intends to spend more than $2 billion to build a thin-film solar manufacturing subsidiary,” according to the Dow Jones news service here. (I wrote about the Masdar project here last month.)

Two Important Conferences – The first of these is the meeting in Bonn that began yesterday. “More than 2,400 participants, including government delegates from 172 countries and representatives from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions are attending the two-week meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),” reads this release. The AP reports “The Bonn talks are to go into the details of an agreement to be concluded in December 2009 and signed in Copenhagen, Denmark. The talks are based on an accord reached in Bali last December when the United States, India and China indicated they would take part in a post-2012 arrangement,” said the AP here. You can follow all the proceedings at the UNFCCC website and at the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD) here. (I highlighted the IISD’s “knowledge management project,” Climate-L.org, on May 29 below.)

The other conference is the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that began today in Rome. Billed as the “World Food Security Summit,” there were more than 40 world leaders gathered at the emergency meeting and UNSG Ban Ki-Moon told them hunger breeds “social disintegration, ill health and economic decline,” according to the “LA Times” here. See also this release from the FAO with details of their Director-General Jacques Diouf’s impassioned speech. Diouf said “The structural solution to the problem of food security in the world lies in increasing production and productivity in the low-income, food-deficit countries.” (I referenced the new, comprehensive report, “OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2008-2017,” in the context of the food-biofuel controversy on May 30 below.) In the context of issues that we’re looking at here, Diouf also said: “Nobody understands how a carbon market of 64 billion dollars can be created in the developed countries to offset global warming but that no funds can be found to prevent the annual deforestation of 13 million hectares, especially in the developing countries whose tropical forest ecosystems act as carbon sinks for some 190 gigatonnes,” and “Nobody understands how 11 to 12 billion dollars in subsidies in 2006 and protective tariff policies have had the effect of diverting 100 million tonnes of cereals from human consumption, mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuel for vehicles.”

The somewhat ubiquitous IISD is also in Rome. See their coverage here. Their coverage, by the way, can be found not only in English, but in French, Spanish and Arabic as well.

REDD – I referenced the movement for “reducing emissions from deforestation and ecosystem degradation” in my last post below. Here’s a little more insight from “The Economist” going back to March. They mention projects that are trying to prevent rainforest destruction through various approaches to “voluntary” credits.

The smart money, though, is on a post-Kyoto, UN-administered system that will grant offset credits for forest projects. I wrote in my review of an important new book, Earth: The Sequel, “A post-Kyoto international regime that set a reasonable price on carbon ($30 a ton) would allow Brazil alone to realize $168 billion profit from protecting its rainforests while preventing emissions of six billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to the Woods Hole Research Center. (Pop quiz: After the US and China, which two countries are the biggest contributors to global warming? Brazil and Indonesia - because of rainforest destruction.)”

I sat in on the last day of this event in New York City on Friday, hearing two fascinating panels discuss “Corporate Strategies For Carbon Reduction” (in the context of federal cap-and-trade legislation) and Clean Tech’s role in getting GHG’s down.  The main sponsors of the summit were EcoSecurities, one of the world’s largest developers and suppliers of emission reductions, and Baker & McKenzie, a law firm with a well-developed practice in renewable and carbon offset projects.  The event was run by Infocast.  They’re covering an awful lot of ground these days on energy, the carbon markets, renewables, and other things. 

The focus of the first panel was how industry sectors are going to respond to federal climate change legislation.  The panelists represented the power production, transmission and distribution industry; the natural gas production and distribution industry; and insurance.  There has been a lot of analysis done in these industries, as you would expect, on the implications of a cap-and-trade regime in the US.  (See my notes on May 29 on the vehicle that’s going to be discussed this week in the Senate, “Cap-and-Trade Bonanza” from May 16 below, and also Good Grief, More Carbon Markets from a year ago.)

The director of AIG’s Office of Environment and Climate Change, Alice LeBlanc, was supportive of the idea of including reforestation and agriculture initiatives as eligible offsets in a US law, these areas accounting for nearly 40% of GHG emissions.  Bruce Braine, the Vice President for Strategic Policy Analysis of American Electric Power, talked about carbon capture and storage.  AEP is, by Braine’s own admission, the largest coal-fired producer of electricity and carbon dioxide emitter in the US – so CCS would be high on their agenda.  See Braine’s powerpoint on this from last fall at a UN meeting.  Nate Hanson, Florida Power & Light’s VP in charge of renewables, noted that there is no real CCS system available now and so public service commissions are looking askance at new coal-fired projects.  FPL has, not incidentally, the largest portfolio of renewables in the US power sector.  (Go here for information on their environmental and sustainability programs.)  CCS – or more precisely the lack thereof – was the subject of the “NY Times” lead article I cited in my previous post below. 

The discussion of the climate change bill in the Senate by the panel revealed what seemed to me to be an alarming disconnect on the Hill between what the bill offers now and both what the international community has already created via the Kyoto Protocol and what’s being negotiated now for a post-Kyoto regime.  I noted the other day that nobody realistically thinks legislation is going to be passed by this Congress, and that they’re gearing up for a bill in 2009, but I was a bit shocked to see the lack of conformity to where the international community has already been and where we’re going.  Witness LeBlanc’s comment, for example, on the need to incorporate principles being ironed out on REDD – “Reducing emissions from deforestation and ecosystem degradation.”  The critical UN meetings in Bali in December accepted the principle and there continues to be a lot of activity.  Let’s hope the next Congress and the next President figure out the considerable bang for the buck in this.  They need, clearly, to think about all the international ins and outs of climate change. 

During the break, I asked EcoSecurities’ US director, Eron Bloomgarden, about this.  He said that there were Congressional staffers who’d gone to Bali and they are aware of the international initiatives.  He also flagged the Presidential Climate Action Project to me.  The PCAP, modestly, “… has developed a bold, comprehensive and non-partisan plan for presidential leadership rooted in climate science and designed to ignite innovation at every level of the American economy.”  In talking to LeBlanc privately, she noted that the international community is itself very closely watching what’s happening now on the Hill.

The other panel I heard had some fascinating insights on clean tech.  (See Green Tech, Low Tech, Clean Tech, New Tech and any number of posts on Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency.)   One of the panelists was Frank Alix, the CEO of Powerspan, a company that has advanced pollution control technologies for power plants.  They’re developing a carbon dioxide control technology, not surprisingly.  Mitch Tyson is the CEO of Advanced Electron Beams.  AEB deploys its clean energy technology across a wide range of industrial applications, including pollution control.  Tyson is also involved in a number of regional initiatives including the New England Clean Energy Council and the Massachusetts High Technology Council.  He’s extremely knowledgeable, as you’d imagine, about his industry, and passionate.  So is Al Forte, Director of Carbon Practice for Nexant, a high-tech provider to the energy and petrochemical industries.     

Forte talked about what he characterized as the best Renewable Portfolio Standard program in the country – Connecticut’s.  It very effectively fosters renewables and energy efficiency, including the issuing of energy efficiency credits for eligible projects.  See the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund and the Connecticut Energy Efficiency Fund.  In the same vein, Tyson talked about the Cambridge Energy Alliance.  These folks are also fostering a considerable effort on reducing energy use.  This is all on the general theme of demand-side management.  Tyson pointed out that Massachusetts is moving to “decoupling” in which utilities are given incentives to promote energy efficiency.  I pointed out that New York State used to have it and it lapsed.

Another nugget:  Forte at one point said that there’s 800 GW of generating capacity in the US and it’s operating at an average of 28% efficiency.  He more or less characterized this as criminal and wondered why there isn’t more use of cogeneration.   

For more, see Energy Efficiency and Energy Efficiency for Fun and Profit, items I’ve had here recently on this subject.

Here’s a post I had in February: Coal Takes Some Lumps.  I looked then at the demise of the federal government’s flagship project on coal capture and storage (CCS) and at the concerted, and sometimes vicious, counterattack launched by a utility in Kansas against the denial of its permits for two new plants.

Today’s lead story in the “NY Times,” part of their excellent series “The Energy Challenge,” was Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal. The great Matt Wald, who I’ve lauded and cited here many times, reports, in a nutshell: “Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.” 50% of US electricity comes from coal. 80% in China. (Gulp.) See the blog item from Andrew Revkin, also from February, Dot Earth: Is Capturing CO2 a Pipe Dream?

I attended a conference today on carbon investment and finance and heard one speaker who runs a technology firm offering clean coal technology say that the utilities are, for all intents and purposes, in panic mode. (More tomorrow about that, and some other interesting perspectives from the conference.)

A prominent item in the Business section today was on food production competing – and losing – to biofuels. (I’ve written any number of times about that here: see Biofuels and Agriculture.) Food Report Criticizes Biofuel Policies reports on new findings from the OECD and FAO that agricultural commodity prices are staying high and getting more volatile. This release from the OECD says: “Growing demand for biofuel is another factor contributing to higher prices. World fuel ethanol production tripled between 2000 and 2007 and is expected to double again between now and 2017 to reach 127 billion litres a year. Biodiesel production is seen to expand from 11 billion litres a year in 2007 to around 24 billion litres by 2017. The growth in biofuel production adds to demand for grains, oilseeds and sugar, so contributing to higher crop prices.”

Many food policy experts have called for a reversal of the US and EU mandates and subsidies for biofuels. I reported here in March that one of the world’s leading development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, had characterized these policies as “misguided.”

Finally, Andy Revkin, the “NYT” lead reporter on climate change, tells us here that “The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, has released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impacts of human-caused global warming in the United States.” You can find the report at the website of the US Climate Change Science Program. John Kerry is quoted in the Times article: “The three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change.” Don’t hold back, John. Tell us how you really feel.

Not only is the planet heating up, but, as we’ve seen here, so is the intensity and the seriousness of the debate on how to get GHG’s down.  One persistent theme is the necessity of “setting a price on carbon.”  We’ve heard this from the Stern Review, the IPCC, Lehman Brothers in their reports on the Business of Climate Change, and numerous economists.  The US Senate will shortly begin debate – as early as next week – on a vehicle for a comprehensive federal approach, with a cap-and-trade system at its core.  (See A Summary of the Boxer Substitute Amendment To the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act and this look at the state of legislation in Congress from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.)  Realistically, nobody expects a bill to be passed by this Congress and signed into law by this President.  However, the lessons we will learn as legislation progresses this year in Congress will serve as the foundation for the law that will emerge from the next Congress and that will be signed by the next President.  Beyond an American cap-and-trade regime, of course, there is the international agreement that will be finalized in December of 2009 in Copenhagen.

So, as the pace quickens over the next few months and into next year, there will be more and more analysis emerging from various worthy think tanks and other keepers of the policy flames.  Here, for instance, is a paper on “Economic Incentives in a New Climate Agreement” from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.  The paper looks at the “… potential use of market-based or economic-incentive instruments to ensure that polluters face direct cost incentives to mitigate emissions at the lowest possible cost. The first section describes various economic-incentive policy instruments and the second section discusses their potential application in the design of an international climate policy agreement.”  This is the language that the international negotiators on the post-Kyoto agreement are speaking.  (For more on their activities, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has comprehensive coverage.) The Belfer Center paper is a good, digestible look at some of the basics of where we’re going.

Another approach to curbing GHG, particularly from newly and rapidly industrializing economies such as China’s and India’s, is to use trade instruments.  How do you do that?  One way was detailed by Yale professor Judith Chevalier in an op-ed from the “NY Times” in December:  a tax on carbon consumption.  I wrote about this here and described it thus:  “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.”

“Policy Innovations,” a Carnegie Council online magazine, has this recent take:  Can Green Trade Tariffs Combat Climate Change?  The federal legislation under consideration “…would also levy punitive tariffs on greenhouse-gas-intensive products imported from countries that lack comparable action’ to that of the United States, starting in 2020.  Industrial lobbies and labor unions are pushing hard for these sanctions to take effect more quickly.”  So, this is not just some wonks pushing ideas around in space any longer.  This could become one of the keystones of an American approach to the global crisis.  And not just American.  The Carnegie Council article reports that “European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and industrial chambers of commerce strongly advocate a similar tariff system, leading many analysts to predict that the EU will also adopt some sort of green tariff system in the next few years.” 

I’ll give you one more tactic to consider:  feed-in tariffs.  What are FIT laws?  “They place a legal obligation on utilities to purchase electricity from renewable energy installations. The tariff rate is guaranteed, and in the best examples, for a long period — say 20 years. The tariff rate is scientifically determined for each technology, to ensure profitable operation of the installation.”  (This is from an excellent paper by an analyst from The World Future Council, courtesy of RenewableEnergyWorld.com.)  A new report from the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Energy in the USA - a Policy Update, looks at how FIT’s have driven growth in Europe, what the experience has been in the six US states where they’re on the books, and the proposal in Congress for a federal law.

Break out your old economics textbooks.  There’s going to be plenty to look at and analyze.

Tax Credits for Renewables – The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 (H.R. 6049) passed the House on Wednesday. See this from RenewableEnergyWorld.com and this from Gristmill. Although it was looking like a done deal not long ago – see Tax Breaks, Finally, for Renewables – there may yet be choppy waters reconciling the House bill with the Senate’s and getting it out to the White House. Not surprisingly, I am sad to say, the White House has threatened a veto. See this more in-depth story from RenewableEnergyWorld.com. There’s some good inside baseball on the legislation here.

These credits expire at the end of this year and it’s pretty important to get them renewed. The renewables industry continues to put on the pressure. The president of the Solar Energy Industries Association issued this statement saying, among other things, “This legislation secures America’s clean-energy future by closing a tax loophole enjoyed by hedge-fund managers on their ‘Cayman Island’ income. For the Senate, the choice is now clear: they can either protect tax loopholes for privileged investment managers, or create tens of thousands of green-collar jobs in a troubled economy.”

California Standards – Several months back, the EPA denied California’s request to implement its landmark law limiting global warming pollution from new automobiles. I wrote here about the lawsuit that ensued, filed by California and other states and several environmental organizations. EDF’s general counsel said at the time: “The agency’s decision defies the law, the science and the will of states representing nearly half of the U.S. population.”

California Congressman Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee found recently that the White House had influenced the decision by EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson for political reasons, a clear violation of the ex parte arrangement for EPA decisions of this type. Waxman had Johnson before the committee this week and it was, by all reports, not too pretty. See EPA Chief Silent on White House Involvement in Key Decisions from the Environment News Service. This follows on the report from the committee from December in which they found, as their release was entitled, the White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science.

Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works voted to instruct the administration to sign the waiver allowing the California rule. See this release from the Committee in which California Senator Dianne Feinstein says: “The time has come to take the decision on California’s waiver out of the hands of the EPA. The senior leadership of the EPA has failed to demonstrate that it has the integrity or independence to make decisions based on sound science.” David Doniger, NRDC’s Climate Center Policy Director, said here: “The landmark standards adopted by California and 17 other states will be the single most important step taken so far to curb the heat-trapping pollution that causes global warming. One way or the other – through this new law, a court case, or a new decision by the next president – Americans will soon have cleaner cars as required by California’s clean cars law.”

Christians and Global Warming - Christians Launch Campaign against Global Warming Hype is the story from “The Christian Post.” “The ‘We Get It!’ declaration, which currently has nearly 100 signers, is backed by prominent Christians including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, and U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.” (The title of their initiative is obviously a play on Al Gore’s ambitious new project: The We Campaign.)

Jim Inhofe, you will remember, is the leader of the Republican minority on the Environment & Public Works Committee, its former chair, and an ardent opponent of even acknowledging the reality of climate change.

This, obviously, is an important story as these folks have the rapt attention of a lot of Americans. There’s a highly relevant counterview, though, within the conservative Christian community, and it’s exemplified by the National Association of Evangelicals. Here’s what I wrote going all the way back to March 2007 at this post:

The other story that I want to flag for you concerns the very public spat between elements of the Evangelical Christian community in the U.S. One recent focus of the contention has been the very active campaign waged against global warming by Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals. The NAE, for your information, is an umbrella group, with hundreds of organizational members, and represents on the order of 30 million Americans. See “NAE rebuffs critics, affirming Cizik and a wider agenda” from “The Christian Century.” (Bill McKibben is another featured writer for them.) The NAE has an active “Creation Care” initiative. You can hear Cizik talk about that here at NPR. You might also check out the Evangelical Climate Initiative. It’s being led by some pretty heavy hitters out there, among them Rick Warren, Jim Wallis, Leith Anderson, and former New York City congressman Floyd Flake.

Cizik, perhaps not incidentally, was named a couple of weeks ago to the Time Magazine world’s most influential list. See also this from the NAE.

For another take on this, see Creation Care Leaders Join National Campaign to Protect Wildlife Threatened by Global Warming.  “Faith leaders are joining together with science, art, and justice groups in a national campaign to protect plants and animals threatened by global warming.”  To see the partners in the campaign and their projects, go to Irreplaceable - Wildlife in a Warming World.

Biofuels from GMO – I’ve been an environmentalist, and I think a pretty progressive and well-informed one, for a good long while. I have not been able, in all that time, to entirely fathom the full-throated opposition to GMO’s in much of the environmental community. It is, in my mind, a very good thing to think about plants that may be able to prosper without pesticides and fertilizers, and therefore produce more food with fewer inputs. There is enormous potential. To me genetically modifying organisms is little more than accelerating the process of hybridization which humans have been doing for thousands of years. Yes, there is, of course, potential for abuse by corporate interests and danger to the balance of nature. A student of mine just delivered an excellent paper recounting, among other things, a number of the ills in GM corn production. Nevertheless, there is a huge body of research, development and practice that shows that GM crops can significantly contribute to sustainable development worldwide.

One avenue with huge potential is the production of “second-generation” biofuels. (I’ve visited the problems with food crops being used for biofuel production, and the associated problems of land-use changes and the massive loss of carbon sinks at a number of posts here.) See this article, Biofuels strengthen case for GM crops from the “FT” and the article from “Nature” to which it refers: Plant genetic engineering for biofuel production: towards affordable cellulosic ethanol. (You have to register at these sites to get full access, but it’s free.)

Growing Opposition to Federal Biofuels Policy – While we’re on the critical subject of ethanol, see this article, Coalition presses Congress over ethanol, also from the “FT.” “Interests ranging from US food manufacturers and livestock producers to environmentalists, humanitarian aid agencies and consumer groups are calling for Congress to rethink so-called ‘food to fuel’ mandates that would require the US to use 9bn gallons of ethanol this year.” The Grocery Manufacturers Association is a key cog in the machinery. See their press release from late last year on the federal energy bill. Referring to the biofuel mandate, they said, “…we are disappointed the Senate did not heed the warnings expressed by a broad range of scholars, economists, environmental leaders and consumers about the adverse impacts an aggressive mandate could have on food prices and the environment…”

If you want to go much deeper into the question of the global food crisis, you could do a lot worse than checking out the “FT’s” comprehensive special section, The Rising Cost Of Food, particularly this part of the website with interactive graphics.

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.