Climate Progress

Crafting Biofuel Rules With Eye on Environment - Reuters. “In March, European Union leaders agreed to set a binding target for biofuels to make up at least 10 percent of petrol and diesel used by vehicles by 2020.” And the law contains specific provisions to ensure the biofuels were “sustainable” and to promote “second generation” biofuels, so-called “cellulosic ethanol” from non-corn sources. Our response: “From the US perspective, we think some of the sustainability criteria — you’re tying yourself in knots over [it] …. I think it’s going to be enormously difficult to figure that out.” Well, yes, being unsustainabile is easy, but self-destructive.

Costa Rice Aims to Win “Carbon Neutral” Nation Race - Reuters. “The country generates 78 percent of its energy with hydroelectric power and another 18 percent by wind or geothermally. It now plans to cut emissions from transport, farming and industry.” Yet another country the U.S. could learn a thing or two from.

China ready to take global warming step — The Times Online. “The Chinese Government is close to dropping tariffs [some up to 16%] on technologies that increase energy efficiency and decrease pollution in what would be the country’s biggest move towards tackling global warming.” Some day there will be a story reporting the U.S.’s big move toward tackling climate change, but that will probably have to wait two years.

There are but a few true experts on turkey crap and its potential as an alternative energy source. Climate Progress, however, works hard to keep current on all potential climate solutions (it is a dirty job). Indeed, we have previously blogged on the subject.

So when the Associated Press needs a quote on a new 55-megawatt poop-to-energy plant in Minnesota, they know who to call:

Joseph Romm, a former top Energy Department official under Clinton and author of the global warming book “Hell and High Water,” agreed, saying the plant would be considered greenhouse-gas neutral.

“Obviously there aren’t enough turkeys to generate enough poop to power a nation,” Romm said. “On the scale of things, it’s not a game-changer. … It’s certainly more good than bad.“

So the next time some global warming Denier tells you Climate Progress doesn’t know sh*t, give them this link.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped 1.3% in 2006, as the Energy Information Administration reported yesterday.

President Bush immediately took credit:

“We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment.”

[Please, no laughing.]

Perversely, in spite of the fact that Bush has actually gutted programs aimed at the promoting clean energy technologies, last year’s emissions dropped because of 1) higher gasoline prices, 2) a sharp drop in heating demand from an unusually warm winter, which helped bring about 3) a decline in natural gas prices (and hence more use of this clean fuel for electricity generation ).

Hmm. An unusually warm winter — wonder what caused that. And high gasoline prices — maybe the president does deserve credit after all.

Planet Gore chimes in that this means “we can indeed reduce our greenhouse gas emissions intensity (the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per dollar of economic output) at a rate that exceeds our economic growth rate.” Well, yes, but contrary to PG’s implied support of Bush’s do-nothing climate policy, this fact argues for greenhouse gas standards and major clean technology investment– so we don’t have to rely on random fortuitous factors to get our emissions reductions to coincide with economic growth.

(If PG thinks Bush’s policies are the cause of the drop, then they should be happy to take a wager on 2007 emissions. I’ll give them $100 for every 0.1% emissions drop this year if they’ll give me $100 for every 0.1% rise this year.)

For those scoring at home, I’m going to count this as PG Disinfotainment Watch #7 — two in one day, you just can’t keep up with all of the entertaining disinformation from PG’s dirty dozen.

Study shows that climate change could harm crops - Environmental News Network. “During the next 50 years, more than 60 percent of 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of 108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct because of climate change.”

Germany and Japan press U.S. to agree to leadership role on climate change — International Herald Tribune. And I’m willing to take a large bet they’ll be just as successful as Tony Blair was.

Climate Progress wrote last year about the UK’s important Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. That report concluded avoiding catastrophic climate change might cost countries 1% of GDP (spent largely on clean energy technologies that have many other benefits such as reductions in urban smog), but failing to act could cost up to 20% of GDP as the world must deal with impacts such as massive flooding and hundreds of millions of environmental refugees.

Unsurprisingly, Planet Gore intensely dislikes the Stern Review. In Sterling Burnett’s recent post that misrepresented both the MIT report and CBO report on climate costs — to perversely argue that the media’s neglect of those reports is evidence of pro-warming bias — he writes:

By comparison, the now thoroughly discredited Stern report and the recent IPCC report on the costs of combating climate change were front page news.

As is typical on PG, he uses the phrase “now thoroughly discredited,” without a single link to an article or study. Such articles do exist, since the economic community in particular criticized certain assumptions in the Review. They especially don’t like his choice of a low discount rate. Boo-hoo! Stern places a higher value on future generations than many economists or conservatives. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

In fact, the Stern Review is not thoroughly discredited nor was its choice of discount rate flawed, as argued here and here in some detail. This issue of the Stern Report and the discount rate is sufficiently important that I will return to it in future posts.

Start here.

Kudos to RealClimate for creating “a one stop link for resources that people can use to get up to speed on the issue of climate change.”

NYC’s taxi fleet going green by 2012 - Associated Press/Yahoo News & Mayor Plans an All-Hybrid Taxi Fleet - New York Times. Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for taking a leadership role on climate change with practical action.

Battle Heats Up Over Emissions - Washington Post & California urges EPA to change greenhouse gas rules - LA Times. The Bush administration continues to drag its feet as leading states want to take action to impose tougher standards on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

Warming blamed for frog die-offs - Reuters. Quotable Quotes: “It is believed climate change is raising temperatures allowing a skin fungus to enter the places where the amphibians resided” and “It’s going to be a fact that we see a large extinction.”

Britain Sees No Talk of Emissions Targets at G8. Lame Quote of the Week: British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett — “I don’t think anyone envisages the idea that there should be some discussion about setting numerical targets at Heiligendamm.”

In fact, The Guardian had reported on May 15: “Tony Blair believes he is close to persuading George Bush to accept an ambitious plan to bring the world’s greatest polluters into international partnership to fight climate change for the first time.” Yes, and monkees will fly out of my — but let it go.

The Bush administration has been working for a while to weaken the G-8 statement. As noted last week, our negotiators oppose “a pledge to limit the global temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as an agreement to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.”

Beckett also lamely said, “There has been a misunderstanding of the nature of the discussions that we expect.” The only misunderstanding has been Blair misunderstanding who he has been dealing with all these years.

While Planet Gore now has the market cornered on entertaining global warming disinformation, Michael Crichton perfected it. For those last two or three people who still think the technothriller writer has his facts straight, check out reasic’s terrific post on Crichton’s inane 2003 talk, “Aliens Cause Global Warming.”

Yes, Crichton, a real medical doctor, actually said:

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Wow! Not knowing the difference between weather and climate is like not knowing the difference between a general practitioner and an epidemiologist. I don’t know what’s worse — the possibility Crichton is just spouting standard Denyer crap he knows is crap or the possibility he actually believes what he is saying.

Kudos to “A Few Things Ill Considered,” for pointing this post out.

A stunning new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds the growth rate of CO₂ emissions has tripled in recent years:

CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1%/year for 1990-1999 to >3%/year for 2000-2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s.

That’s right. CO₂ emissions are rising faster than in the most pessimistic U.N. scenario. So much for all those ostriches and Global Warming Delayers who say that economic growth is the key to solving global warming or that the U.N. scenarios are too extreme.

The study finds “Global emissions growth since 2000 was driven by a cessation or reversal of earlier declining trends in the energy intensity of gross domestic product (energy/GDP) and the carbon intensity of energy (emissions/energy), coupled with continuing increases in population and per-capita GDP.” Sadly, “No region is decarbonizing its energy supply.” In short, coal remains king.

The study also makes an important point about equity in global climate negotiations:

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