Climate Progress

My mother happened to take Amtrak down to DC Friday — the day they were handing out trees to offset train travel, which is how I heard of this dubious program.

My mother received a transparent plastic cylinder containing a small Colorado Blue Spruce with the label “plant this tree and offset the carbon output from 14,000 miles of train travel.”

Yes, like the Pope, Amtrak never got the “trees are lousy offsets” memo from here or Gristmill. Fortunately, Amtrak is the energy efficient way to travel inland, and trees are great things to have — though it is a bit odd handing out the state tree of Colorado, which is native to the West, in DC.

Anyway, the plastic cylinder directs us to “Learn more @ whistlestop.Amtrak.com” where we meet “Arte the environmental engineer,” probably the lamest corporate environmental mascot ever. Arte is named for Amtrak Recognizes the Environment — yes, we all recognize the environment as it whizzes by us at 60 mph. More strangely, Arte is a typical leaf, but the Blue Spruce is an evergreen conifer.

Well, at least Amtrak isn’t handing out iron for ocean fertilization.

This offset business has given me my 15 minutes of fame. I was extensively quoted in a recent article on the subject, “Are green-minded folks getting their money’s worth?” But first, here’s a supporting view from the piece:

A spokesman for the Sierra Club says the group does not suggest members buy carbon offsets.

“I think it’s wonderful that people are thinking about their carbon footprint,” says Josh Dorner. “But the carbon-offsets market is completely unregulated, so it’s questionable whether it is really doing anything to reduce global warming. So what we recommend is that people take other steps in their life, such as driving a smaller car or unplugging appliances when they are not in use, that are verifiably productive.”

Here’s the part I’m quoted in:

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Wow, two Republicans representing two very different groups have been going after each other on the blogosphere with words and phrases like “It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar” and “nasty-gram” — OK, nasty-gram isn’t a word, but what do you expect from CEI?

It’s Michael Eckhart, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) versus Marlo Lewis a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). You can read Lewis’s side at Planet Gore (where else?) and Eckhart’s side at ACORE’s blog.

I know Eckhart and he’s a solid guy — plus I’m not a big fan of 1) people who post private emails on the internet and 2) professional global warming Denyers — so I’ll take ACORE over CEI/PG any day. Also, this paragraph by PG is illuminating:

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No, not supermodels. I feel obliged to include this part of Hansen’s e-mail for completeness’s sake, though it will probably not be of interest to general readers:

For fellow technocrats: “Climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS modelE”, to appear soon in Clim. Dyn., is available here.

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“Lago Agrio is a forsaken little town where something rather large is going down.”

Lago Agrio, Ecuador, in English “sour lake”, is a former site of 20 years’ worth of oil extraction by Chevron (formerly Texaco), now witness to one of the world’s largest environmental lawsuits, potentially worth $6 billion.

The lawsuit first came to my attention at Live Earth, when Sting left the stage after immediately turning over his press time to his wife, who deferred to a U.S. advocate and the two lead Ecuadorean lawyers, all of whom plead their case (translators on-hand) before the dwindling number of press representatives (preparing for Sting’s stage performance).

In case you missed it (because I did), May’s Vanity Fair featured one of the lead lawyers, Pablo Fajardo, in a good-sized article on the case.

Vanity Fair traces the historical context of the oil extraction, the social and environmental devastation, including off-the-charts contamination levels, and, most poignantly, Fajardo’s personal battle leading up to his involvement with the case.

That said, I’d like to echo Fajardo’s final words of wisdom from the article:

One of the problems with modern society is that it places more importance on things that have a price than on things that have a value. Breathing clean air, for instance, or having clean water in the rivers, or having legal rights–these are things that don’t have a price but have a huge value. Oil does have a price, but its value is much less. And sometimes we make the mistake.

I was seduced back in May by GM’s seeming sincerity in developing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. We must always remember, however, GM is a master greenwasher.

An article in Edmunds, “Chevrolet Volt Goes to Washington To Underline GM’s Anti-CAFE-Increase Argument,” suggests GM is using the Volt the same way it used fuel cell cars to kill the electric car in California (as the movie explains):

General Motors’ North American operations chief, Troy Clarke, is meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill today, and he’s bringing along the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid prototype. GM hopes the Volt will help convince lawmakers that electric and alternative-fuel vehicles are the route to energy independence. The Big Three have strenuously opposed a proposed increase in CAFE standards, saying the cost of meeting higher mpg averages would take away resources that could be put toward development of alternative-energy vehicles.

Sad. If the Volt is mostly or even partly a head fake, then Toyota will win surely win the race for the car of the future.

At the same time, the automakers may be winning the fight against the Senate CAFE bill, according to the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) and E&E News (subs. req’d), excerpted below:

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Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science has a good op-ed:

With respect to climate change, we have abruptly passed the tipping point in what until recently has been a tense political controversy. Why? Industry leaders, nongovernmental organizations, Al Gore, and public attention have all played a role. At the core, however, it’s about the relentless progress of science. As data accumulate, denialists retreat to the safety of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page or seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby from whom they first learned to “teach the controversy.” Meanwhile, political judgments are in, and the game is over. Indeed, on this page last week, a member of Parliament described how the European Union and his British colleagues are moving toward setting hard targets for greenhouse gas reductions.

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More from our top climate scientist (I told you it was a long email — we’re about half way through):

California had a regulation that would have required automobile manufacturers to produce a small percentage of cars without emissions by such-and-such date, and a larger percentage later. Automakers despised this rule, and decided that they had enough clout to ignore it, arguing that it was impractical. Environmentalists seemed to conclude that they were overmatched. Rather than go to the mat, they decided to play ball with the automakers, to try to work with them, accepting promises that the automakers would do everything that they could to improve vehicle efficiencies and reduce emissions.

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I know you’ve all been eagerly waiting for this–don’t worry, I don’t have many more rules. I got sidetracked by last week’s offset hearing.

Offset projects should deliver climate benefits with high confidence — that’s a key reason trees make lousy offsets, especially non-urban, non-tropical trees. An even more dubious source of offsets is geo-engineering, which is “the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment” to counteract the effects of global warming.

As John Holdren, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted in 2006, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“

The only reason for this rule is that a company, Planktos, wants to sell offset credits for carbon that is supposedly sequestered when iron is seeded in the ocean to create algae blooms. Seriously. (This is the same company that is selling trees as offsets to the Vatican.)

This is such a dubious idea that 18 leading experts from 13 countries, who comprise the Scientific Steering Committee of the Surface Ocean–Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS)–a leadin group studying the ocean-atmosphere system–went to the trouble of issuing a “Position Statement on Large-Scale Ocean Fertilisation” last month:

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Here are the interactive graphics from a recent Washington Post article. The original article is here. An online chat about the article/graphics is here.