Climate Progress

L.A. is suffering through the “driest year in 130 years of recordkeeping,” as the Washington Post reports.

The nation’s second-largest city is short nearly a foot of rain for the year from July 1, 2006, to June 30. Just 3.21 inches has fallen downtown in those 12 months, closer to Death Valley’s numbers than the normal average of 15.14 inches.

Much of the Southwest is parched.

It is much the same all over the West, from the measly snowpack and fire-scarred Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada to Arizona’s shrinking Lake Powell and the shriveling Colorado River watershed.

Indeed, “America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.” Of course, Hell and High Water wouldn’t be complete without devastating rains elsewhere in the country:

(more…)

On Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee held a hearing on “Examining Global Warming Issues in the Power Plant Sector” (translation — cap and trade). A video of the hearing and all opening statements are available here.

President and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation provided great entertainment as a witness. His remarkably memorable claim that the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were responsible for ending marriages most certainly caught the attention of those present, including our intern on the scene, Nat Gryll.

In Murray’s rant — and if you watch the video, you’ll see “rant” is the right word — he accused Rachel Carson of killing millions and the Democrats of destroying the economy, exporting jobs to China, and not caring about working people. (EPW Chairman Barbara Boxer responded by bringing up a 2006 article showing that Ohio’s two largest mines, owned by Murray, “recorded injury rates about one-fourth higher than the national average last year.“)

In fact, we will destroy our economy if we do not prepare our utilities for an emissions cap or similar global warming policy that Congress will discuss in the fall. As we procrastinate meaningful policy, the U.S. is failing to lead in innovation and clean technology exports. And inaction guarantees the high economic cost of catastrophic global warming.

On the bright side, the same day Senators John Warner (R-VA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) announced plans to write an economy-wide cap and trade bill. With the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, present as a witness at today’s hearing, and Republican Sen. Warner open to a cap an trade proposal, the environment and the environmental committee seem ripe for action.

Since 1990, Great Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 15%, while its GDP has risen 45%.

–Cited by Barbara Boxer in Thursday’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on “Examining Global Warming Issues in the Power Plant Sector” (at 1:51:00).

So you can have both climate protection and economic growth. It has been done. The time to act is now!

UN: Floods, heatwaves send signal about global warming - M&G Online. “Heavy rainfalls in Pakistan, India and northern England and heatwaves in Greece, Italy and Romania are indications of what might happen more frequently and more severely across the globe as a consequence of global warming,” said Salvano Briceno, director of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. Heatwaves and deluges, Hell and High Water. Sound familiar?

A milestone on the road to green fuel - The Independent. Factoid: Biofuels from straw, timber, manure, rice husks, and agriwaste could achieve a 91% reduction in CO2 emissions.

Averting water wars in Asia - International Herald Tribune. Factoid: “Asia has less fresh water - 3,920 cubic meters per person - than any continent other than the Antarctica.” Global warming and population growth will inevitably shrink that number coming decades.

Ford, Chrysler Join U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) - GreenBiz News. USCAP has expanded to 29 organizations and plans to step up its push to enact federal climate change legislation.

Everybody loves trees. They are so popular as offsets they even make Wikipedia’s definition:

When one is unable or unwilling to reduce one’s own emissions, Carbon offset is the act of reducing (”offsetting”) greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. A well-known example is the planting of trees to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from personal air travel.

But does planting trees reduce global warming? Not in most places on the Earth. The Carnegie Institution’s Ken Caldeira summarized the result of a major 2005 study (detailed below) this way:

To plant forests to mitigate climate change outside of the tropics is a waste of time.

Why? Because forest canopies are relatively dark, compared to what they replace outside the tropics–grass, croplands, or snowfields–and so they absorb more of the sun’s heating rays that fall on them. That negates the “carbon sink” benefit trees have soaking up carbon dioxide. Worse, the study found that planting a large number of trees in high latitudes would “probably have a net warming effect on the Earth’s climate.” Ouch!

So what about an offset project involving tree planting in the tropics where water evaporating from trees increases cloudiness, which keeps the planet cool, according to models? Tropical-tree-planting offset projects suffer from a different problem:

(more…)

Alabama is in the midst of a brutal, Biblical drought. Click on the map on right, which shows that more than 40% of the state is suffering exceptional drought (brown) and nearly 90% of the state is suffering severe drought (orange or darker).

So what is the strategy of Governor Bob Riley? As the Birmingham News reports today: “The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.”

Given that global warming is going to make these brutal droughts more common and more severe in the coming decades, perhaps the governor should be joining California and other states in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

So far, successfully fending off GOP efforts to promote something lame.

E&ENews PM (subs. req’d) has a long story on the effort by House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Joe Barton (R-Texas) to push a weak CAFE amendment to House energy legislation. The story of what Barton tried to do, and what the Democrats plan to do on both CAFE and energy, is rather involved, so I’ll just repost the whole story below the fold:
(more…)

The first rule of Carbon Offsets is, you do not talk about Carbon Offsets.

Just kidding. This isn’t Fight Club, but I do aim to pick a fight with those overhyping offsets.

If a smart company like Google can seriously think it can go green by burning coal and then buying offsets – and if a smart company like PG&E is bragging about a new program that allows customers to offset their electricity emissions by planting trees (a dopey program I’ll blog about later) — then something is very wrong about the general understanding of offsets.

For those who want a basic introduction to offsets, Wikipedia has an excellent entry. I believe the more you know about and think about offsets, the less appealing they are, as these articles make clear.

No rules of the road exist for offsets. Until now. In subsequent posts, I will offer my own rules based on dozens of discussions over the past decade with environmentalists, energy experts, corporations, and would-be offsetters. I’ll post the first rule tomorrow, but it can be summed up in two words: No trees!

As ABC did last month, NBC reported last night not on the book, but on the painful twin reality of terrible wildfires (along with heatwaves) and flooding hitting this country at the same time.

No mention of climate change — this is the mainstream media, after all — but ABC did note the rain fell in Texas “in almost Biblical amounts,” as much as 19 inches in 24 hours — just the kind of deluge scientists expect to become more common thanks to global warming.