Climate Progress

[In his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote: “The English language … becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” He warns that “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The importance of language and rhetoric is a subject near to my heart (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers” and Part 1.]

Washington, D.C., is to the English language what Paris is to fashion. Every season, perfectly good words go out of style and new ones are trotted out on the national runway of rhetoric. Some words are considered so worn out, politically incorrect or laden with baggage that they can no longer be used in public discourse. When that happens, people like me find ourselves scrambling for suitable synonyms.

That was the case a few years ago with “sustainable development.” I operated the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development at the U.S. Department of Energy, helping communities understand and apply the practice. Before long, signals came down from Capitol Hill that the words “sustainable development” had become the kiss of death for any program that used them. The term “smart growth” was invented to take “sustainability’s” place.

More recently, Congress has avoided using the word “climate” in legislation that clearly is meant in part to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions — legislation such as the “Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007″. The Bush people call torture “enhanced interrogation” and call kidnapping “rendition.” Healthy Forests and Clear Skies became the titles of the Bush Administration’s programs to cut trees and pollute the air, respectively.

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If the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) starts acknowledging that residential energy efficiency has a “positive rate of return” — and advocating federal support to capture the full energy savings possible — perhaps the world is changing.

Then again, it may just be temporary institutional schizophrenia, since others in AEI continue to assert (without any supporting evidence), “No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” (see “AEI: Still crazy with denial and delay after all these years“).

Kevin Hassett, AEI’s director of economic-policy studies, has a Bloomberg News column I am excerpting below, because of its surprising degree of common sense — and because he cites actual research:

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Part 1 presented a new study that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!

Nuclear plants with such incredibly expensive electricity and “out of control” capital costs, as Time put it, obviously create large risks for utilities, their investors, and, ultimately taxpayers. Congress extended huge loan guarantees to new nukes in 2005, and the American people will be stuck with another huge bill if those plants join the growing rank of troubled assets (see “Nuclear energy revival may cost $315 billion, with taxpayers’ risking over $100B“).

The risk to utilities who start down the new nuke path is also great. A June 2008 report by Moody’s Investor Services Global Credit Research, “New Nuclear Generating Capacity: Potential Credit Implications for U.S. Investor Owned Utilities” (PR here), warned that “nuclear plant construction poses risks to credit metrics, ratings,” concluding:

The cost and complexity of building a new nuclear power plant could weaken the credit metrics of an electric utility and potentially pressure its credit ratings several years into the project, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service….

Moody’s suggests that a utility that builds a new nuclear power plant may experience an approximately 25% to 30% deterioration in cash-flow-related credit metrics.

And this would likely result in a sharp downgrading of the utility’s credit rating.

The application by Florida Power & Light (FPL) for a large nuclear plant came in at a stunning $12 to $18 billion, and the utility concedes that new reactors present “unique risks and uncertainties,” with “every six-month delay adding as much as $500 million in interest costs.”

The report Climate Progress published this week, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power by power-plant cost expert Craig Severance, has an extended discussion of the business risks to utilities and hence investors:

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The imminent reality of peak oil production should be clear to all by now (see “Normally staid IEA says oil will peak in 2020“).

Now some very serious people are suggesting that there is a lot less accessible coal out there than most folks believe. If we are nearing peak coal (and peak oil), then we would need to embrace the rapid transition to a clean energy economy almost as urgently as we need to embrace it to avoid destroying the climate.

Let’s start with the U.S. Geological Survey’s stunning 131-page analysis from December, “Assessment of Coal Geology, Resources, and Reserves in the Gillette Coalfield, Powder River Basin, Wyoming” [big PDF]:

The Gillette coalfield, within the Powder River Basin in east-central Wyoming, is the most prolific coalfield in the United States. In 2006, production from the coalfield totaled over 431 million short tons of coal, which represented over 37 percent of the Nation’s total yearly production.

The “total original coal resource in the Gillette coalfield” without applying any restrictions, “was calculated to be 201 billion short tons.” Then USGS subtracts out the inaccessible coal, and then mining and processing losses, which leaves 77 billion tons, and finally:

Coal reserves are the portion of the recoverable coal that can be mined, processed, and marketed at a profit at the time of the economic evaluation. With a discounted cash flow at 8 percent rate of return, the coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total) for the 6 coal beds evaluated.

Ouch! And this analysis was done at a time of soaring coal prices.

The National Research Council’s Committee on Coal Research, Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy wrote in a 2007 report:

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Part I introduced urban heat island mitigation (UHIM). It discussed how lighter colored (or reflective) roofs and pavement, plus urban trees, can save energy, cut CO2 emissions, cool a city, and reduce smog.

But a global “cool roofs” strategy can achieve far bigger benefits — the equivalent of several trillion dollars worth of CO2 reductions — since it can increase the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet, thereby directly reducing the absorption of incoming solar radiation and hence planetary warming. The strategy proposed below “is equivalent to taking the world’s approximately 600 million cars off the road for 18 years.”

[100 m2 (~1000 ft2) of a white roof, replacing a dark roof, offsets the emission of 10 tonnes of CO2.]

This is technically geoengineering, although I’d call it geoengineering light or geo-reverse-engineering, since we are mostly undoing the albedo decrease caused by all the dark roofs and dark pavement we have covered the planet with.

A forthcoming article in Climatic Change, “Global Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2,” provides the detailed calculations. A two-page non-technical summary, “White Roofs Cool the World, Directly Offset CO2 and
Delay Global Warming,” has been written by two of the country’s leading UHIM experts: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Hashem Akbari and California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld (coauthors with me on “Paint the Town White–and Green“). I reprint it below:

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[I am reprinting a post from the excellent blog Solve Climate on one individual who is trying to make a difference in a rather unusual way.]

On December 24th we [Solve Climate] carried a report about Tim DeChristopher’s heroic act of civil disobedience: he went to an auction of public lands and outbid oil and gas companies for 22,500 acres of land — in order to protect it from fossil fuel development. The price? A whopping $1.8 million the University of Utah student doesn’t have.

The downpayment is due on January 9th, a mere $45,000, and on the advice of the legal team working to protect him and keep him out of jail, DeChristopher is trying to raise the money. So far, he’s got $18,000 in hand, and a campaign that’s gaining steam.

Below is DeChristopher’s appeal letter, and the link for making a contribution is here.

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Andy Revkin is tracking the story at Dot Earth.

The drop-off in demand — and in carbon emissions — is certainly temporary, but may provide a window of opportunity for Obama to begin crucial negotiations with the world’s other big emitter. If the planet is to have any chance of stabilizing at 450 ppm, we must cap emissions by 2020, and China must cap emissions by 2020 (see “Must-read IEA report explains what must be done to avoid 6°C warming“).

E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reports:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said today that she has enough votes to pass cap-and-trade legislation aimed at curbing the effects of global warming but would not commit to holding a vote in 2009.

The more Hill staffers and others I talk to, the less likely I think it is there will be a climate bill finalized and passed this year. Then again, more important than passing a climate bill this year is:

• Passing a stimulus with hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for clean energy (see “A Strategy for Green Recovery“)
• Passing the biggest energy bill in history, with a primary emphasis on renewables and energy efficiency
• Using EPA’s existing authority to stop building new coal plants (see “Obama to declare CO2 a dangerous pollutant“)
• Starting serious negotiations with the big global emitters, especially China (see “What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China“).

At the same time, 2009 must also see serious work on a comprehensive climate bill that can be passed in 2010 — one with a 2020 target for CO2 emissions below 1990 levels the subject of a future post). The E&E story continues:
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I use the excellent Climate Ark news feed, so I’m delighted to congratulate them on their tenth anniversary.

Here is their news release:

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h/t Skeptical Science