Climate Change

Here are some great stories from major media that merit a look.  Beyond these stories, these publications have consistently great coverage on climate change and matters directly relevant to our subject.  There’s also a book here for your consideration.

National Geographic – This old and universally respected magazine has had an increasingly high profile on critical environmental stories over the past several years.  Here is one startling and, frankly, depressing article about the decimation of Borneo’s rainforests in the service of producing palm oil for junk food.  At the NGM page for Borneo’s Moment of Truth, you will find a video, some of the stunning photography, and the article itself.

Borneo seems a microcosm of much of what’s wrong in the world:  our appetite for energy and cheap consumer goods, our disdain for biodiversity and the lives of indigenous peoples, and our indifference to rainforest destruction and how that relates to global warming.  The photographs and video remind me of the havoc wreaked in Appalachia, another breathtakingly wild and diverse environment, by mountaintop removal coal mining.  (See last post below.)

For more on palm oil, see this report from Greenpeace:  Forest destruction, climate change and palm oil expansion in Indonesia.

© Greenpeace / Natalie Behring Chisolm

There’s another compelling story at NGM, on light pollution:  Our Vanishing Night.  The excellent environmental writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, writes about the surprisingly enormous burden imposed on wildlife by the lights of cities and industrial complexes – even fishing fleets.  As an urban dweller (a small metropolis called New York City), I can attest to the fact that we’ve got too much light.  The article references the work of the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit “dedicated to protecting and preserving the nighttime environment and our heritage of dark skies through quality outdoor lighting.”  See also the Dark Sky Society.

I’ve noted the amazing, now-annual phenomenon of Earth Hour.  Light pollution not only disrupts the natural cycles of wildlife, it also sucks thousands of megawatts of  power, unnecessarily, from our grids, hugely exacerbating global warming.  Simple stuff, it seems to me.

Update:  See this article from the “NY Times” on efforts in the Big Apple to cut down on unnecessary lighting. 

The NY Review of Books – This eminently intelligent and readable periodical has had, like NGM and many others, more and more to say about climate change.  Their go-to environmentalist is the incomparable Bill McKibben.  (See any number of references I’ve made to him and his writing at the blog, including talking about the “Step It Up 2007” campaign.)

In the most recent issue, McKibben reviews Tom Friedman’s new blockbuster Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America.  The review is titled “Green Fantasia.”  McKibben both praises the book for some of its emphases and damns it for an overabundance of conventional thinking.  Indeed, the review opens by saying:  “Thomas Friedman is the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they’re in-the-know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease.”  Ouch.

An example of praise:  “His basic policy guidelines, and most of his specific suggestions, for managing this crucial transition are sound.”  McKibben here notes another useful insight:  “Friedman knows that innovation in the financial services industry will be almost as important as progress in engineering.”   But McKibben also derides Friedman for, for all intents and purposes, dismissing the important arena of international climate regimes:  What was finalized in Kyoto and what will be, ostensibly, finalized in Copenhagen in December 2009 to replace the existing protocol, are of utmost importance. 

He also gets to the crux of the title of his review here:  “Does it ever occur to him, in the grip of a fantasia like this, that if the sun is shining brightly, or the breeze is blowing steadily, you could dry your clothes on a $14 piece of rope strung off your back deck, or for that matter on a foldable rack in the apartment hallway? And that since most of the world already knows how to do it, we might be smarter moving in their direction instead of insisting that they buy into our entire high-technology suburban dream?”

That’s been one of my thoughts, and occasionally an argument here:  Why don’t we try to get more bang out of the low-tech buck?  Solar-box cookers and, indeed, hanging the laundry out to dry!  I wrote about Galloping Consumption a while back.  I said then, in conclusion:  “Can we reduce our dangerous rates of consumption and maintain and improve our standards of living worldwide?  You bet.  Making Peace with the Planet will also make us happier.  You can take that to the bank.” 

Great review.  Check it on out.

“Der Spiegel” – This venerable German periodical has a most useful section devoted to Climate Change here.  For a particularly good and well-informed look at what’s going on in Germany and Europe, you should check in here from time to time.

DK – Dorling Kindersley has a fabulous series of “Eyewitness” books that illustrate all sorts of important subjects with interesting text and eye-catching, vivid graphics.  When I visited the AMNH exhibit on climate change (see post below from Oct. 20), I picked up their new volume Eyewitness Climate Change.  This is great for kids, particularly, but it’s perfectly great reading for adults too.  It’s quite informative, very good at making some complex ideas accessible.  With a CD-ROM of clip art, and a great poster too, you can’t miss.

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.

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. 

A truly classic quote, as reported in the Year in Review, came from Fred Krupp, influential president of the Environmental Defense Fund, in referring to the White House talks on climate change in September: “It was a lost opportunity. America needs to lead, and we can lead, but now the spotlight shifts to the Congress because the president has refused to accept the only path that’s ever solved an air pollution problem — and that’s mandatory legal limits.”

Krupp and EDF have been a powerful force in getting the mainstream environmental movement more in tune with the realities of the private sector. Instead of always confronting big business on issues of energy and the environment, they have very often worked with business to effect positive change. That does not mean, in any sense, that organizations as powerful as EDF, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which bears many of the same attributes as EDF, don’t take their shots at irresponsible and dangerous actions by industry in the courts and in the offices and lobbies of government when industry’s actions merit it. It does mean that EDF recognizes the value of getting business to act responsibly in whatever ways are effective. Hell, even Greenpeace works with Coca-Cola and Unilever these days. (See that story toward the end of this from July.)

Krupp and EDF made an enormous breakthrough in February of 2007 when they negotiated the shelving of eight coal-fired power plants in Texas. Former EPA administrator William Reilly and Krupp were the architects of a deal that permanently altered the map of power production in this country. You can see this segment from Frontline’s “Hot Politics” to get a bigger picture.

Now Krupp and the journalist Miriam Horn have come out with a book, Earth: The Sequel – The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming. It looks at some amazing initiatives that are being aggressively pursued: the use of “concentrators” to intensify the sunlight directed at solar thermal arrays or photovoltaics, colocating solar and wind farms to get the maximum generating potential of those two, bottling heat in giant thermos-type containers as a storage mechanism, using biotechnology to produce biofuels and nanotechnology to radically improve the properties of silicon for use in PV cells, power-generating buoys, geothermal units that can be deployed all over the world to take advantage of the crust of the earth’s tremendous heat and also the hot water that comes up with oil at wellheads, and underground coal gasification, among many others.

My favorite is the pilot in Arizona that is using carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant stacks to feed algae which, in turn, can then be converted to a potent biofuel. The process is water-intensive but it can tolerate wastewater so that is another waste stream that is incorporated. This scheme would also use nitrogen from the emissions as fertilizer. Eventually, the coal in the plant could be replaced by the algae, leading to a carbon-negative situation. (See also this recent piece from Matt Wald at the “NY Times.”) I’ve been writing about Renewable Energy since the beginning of this blog and I continue to find these ideas and initiatives, as Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

One of the leitmotifs of the book is the entrepreneurial, even frontier spirit of the innovators bringing some of these solutions into being. Venture capitalists get their due here. But what drives capital? The promise of a return on its investment. What then is the single-most important driver in the quest to realize a good “return on capital”? Krupp and Horn iterate (and reiterate) it’s setting a price on carbon. Why? To “level the playing field” with the fossil fuel and nuclear suppliers of energy. What’s the best mechanism for doing this? A cap-and-trade system. This brings us back to Krupp’s quote above regarding the necessity to institute “mandatory legal limits.” That’s the cap. The trade part is what you do when you’ve gone below your capped emission limit and can then sell the difference between what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been mandated to achieve. (I’ve written about this mechanism a number of times at Carbon Markets.)

EDF, led by economist Dan Dudek, was one of the pioneers of cap-and-trade back in the 1980’s in order to effect dramatic reductions in acid rain precursors. (I had the privilege of working with one of their senior scientists, Michael Oppenheimer, back then on the acid rain problem when I was an activist with the Sierra Club. Michael has been a critical figure in bringing the science of global warming to the fore. He was right there with James Hansen at that epic hearing in Washington in the summer of 1988 that brought global warming fully into view for the American public. See from about 2:45 in this segment from “Hot Politics.”)

Earth: The Sequel also discusses other critical approaches to confronting global warming such as halting tropical rainforest destruction. 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.)

The book also notes the critical importance of energy efficiency. (See my post Energy Efficiency for Fun and Profit.)

The book is engaging, informative, and hopeful. It gives us the perspective of those scientists, policy innovators, entrepreneurs and, in some cases, visionaries, who are going to make the earth a safer, more prosperous, smarter, and more equitable place for us all to live. It’s a stimulating read, to say the least.

For more, go to the book’s website and also see the trailer.