Climate Progress

about global warming Denyers from Nexus 6. Hat tip to Deltoid.

The House Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, will hold a hearing entitled “The benefits and challenges of producing liquid fuel from coal: The role for federal research,” on Wednesday September 5 at 10 a.m. in Rayburn 2318. It will be webcast.

This beats a one-sided debate any day. Testifying is one of my favorite activities, and this is one of my favorite committees — since they care about science and technology. And liquid coal is one of my favorite subjects, as readers of this blog know.

I’d love your thoughts on what I should say. Here are some of my posts on the subject:

Some Thoughts on Coal to Diesel

Congress should say NO to coal-to-diesel

Plug-in Hybrids Beat Coal-to-Liquids (Duh!)

And here is one of the best recent charts:

Hopefully that means they will upload the video later.

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Bracken Hendricks. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP). He has a forthcoming book on climate solutions with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) — Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. You can read his full bio here. I first met Bracken when I was at DOE, and he was a Special Assistant to Al Gore. Then we were both on the Energy Efficiency panel of the Energy Future Coalition. Now we are both Senior Fellows at CAP. He brings a unique perspective to the energy/climate debate. Welcome, Bracken!

As we approach the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is time to begin the work of ensuring that there will be no more climate refugees. “Forecast: Storm Warning,” a report released today by the Center for American Progress, does just that.

Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the first line of defense against fiercer hurricanes from global warming, but as the real-world impacts of climate change begin to materialize, it’s time to prepare our communities to be more disaster resilient — to reduce future damages and costs of severe storms from global warming. This will take strong federal leadership and public support.

Readers of this blog know that there is an emerging consensus among climate scientists that global warming is increasing the ferocity of hurricanes, as shown in the work of Michael Mann and Kerry Emanuel, linking increased sea surface temperatures to more severe storms. A 2006 study in Science goes even further, strongly indicating that warming may even be increasing the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms. Many more studies are here.

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I will post a link to the video of the Independent Women’s Forum debate if C-SPAN gets around to uploading it. It was me against 3 or 4 disbelievers, so I had only a limited ability to reply to the endless stream of misinformation.

One thing is clear — the Denyers just keep repeating the same myths over and over again. I promised on air I would post debunkings. The following aren’t exact quotes.

“The same scientists who are screaming about global warming today were screaming about global cooling two or three decades ago.” NOT. Like Dracula, this myth can’t be killed, but if you want some good rebuttals, try this RealClimate overview post and this one too, as well as this excellent post on “Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the ’70’s by scientists, in scientific journals?”

“17,000 scientists signed the Oregon petition saying climate change isn’t happening.” Another vampire-like myth. A good rebuttal is at Deltoid and Mediamatters.

And, of course, the newest baby vampire, “NASA was recently forced to revise its temperature data proving the 1930s were warmer than today.” That one’s so new, even Climate Progress has debunked it.

Where is Buffy when we really need her?

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A study came out recently claiming to prove a Hummer has lower lifecycle energy use than a Prius. Because the result was so obviously bogus — and in sharp contradiction with every other major lifecycle analysis ever done — I didn’t spend time debunking it.

But it has made it into the comments of this blog and continues to echo around the internet and the authors keep updating and defending it. A couple of good debunking studies — by the Pacific Institute and by Rocky Mountain Institute — haven’t gotten much attention according to Technorati, so let me throw in my two cents.

The study’s title is revealing: Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles From Concept to Disposal, The non-technical report, from CNW Marketing Research, Inc. Yes, although life-cycle energy use is probably the most complicated kind of energy analysis you can do, this 458 report is “non-technical” and by a market research company to boot.

Their website says the report “does not include issues of gigajuelles [sic!], kW hours or other unfriendly (to consumers) terms. Perhaps, in time, we will release our data in such technical terms. First, however, we will only look at the energy consumption cost.”

Wouldn’t want to confuse consumers with unfriendly technical stuff such as kilowatt-hours like those annoying electric utilities do every month. No. Let’s put everything in dollar terms so no one can reproduce our results. When you misspell gigajoules on your website — and have for a long time (try googling “gigajuelles”), you aren’t the most technical bunch.

I am mocking this report because it is the most contrived and mistake-filled study I have ever seen — by far (and that’s saying a lot since I worked for the federal government for five years). I am not certain there is an accurate calculation in the entire report. I say this without fear of contradiction because this is also the most opaque study I have ever seen — by far. I defy anyone to figure out what their methodology was.

In this post I’m just going to highlight the most inane claims — and again, they can only be treated as claims because the report omits all the underlying calculations.

Let me first give one rule of thumb. U.S. energy costs have been about 7% to 8% of GDP for most of the last two decades, but were a bit higher during the energy shocks as well as the last couple of years. The Energy Information Administration projects energy costs will be 5.3% of GDP in 2030. As a rough estimate, then, you can figure the dollar value of energy embedded in most products as 5% to 10% of their cost — and that includes all the energy consumed in the product life-cycle, such as manufacturing and shipping .

The CNW study makes the astonishing claim that the Prius has life-cycle energy costs of $3.25 per mile (of which its on-road gasoline consumption is only $0.075 [yes, 7.5 cents] , whereas a Hummer H3 has an energy cost per mile of $1.95 (of which $0.187 is direct fuel consumption). I kid you not.

In direct contradiction with essentially every other life-cycle study ever done, in which direct fuel consumption is typically 70% to 90% of a vehicle’s life-cycle energy use (see here), CNW finds it comprises about 2% to 10%!

This range of energy costs per mile leads to one obvious question about CNW’s results, which many people have raised. Let me quote one Roy W. Spencer — yes, the global warming denyer — from the Report’s Appendix:

Question: I was wondering, how can a car that costs the consumer, say, $20,000 new and uses around $15,000 in fuel over a 100,000 mile lifetime end up having a total energy cost of, say, $250,000 ($2.50 per mile)? (Since this is way more than the consumer has paid, …which is more like $35,000.) If $250,000 really was the true energy cost, wouldn’’t a car be much more expensive to the buyer than it is now?

Duh! Or maybe, Doh! Indeed, since, as noted, embedded life-cycle energy costs are typically 5% to 10% of a product’s total life-cycle costs, CNW’s study implies that the total ownership cost of a family car is, roughly, $2.5 to $5.0 million — or about $400,000 to $800,000 a year! You never knew you were so rich.

How could CNW possibly come up with such absurd results? I can’t say for sure since the report omits any methodology, but CNW’s unbelievable answer to Spencer contains some clues:

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… if their website is to be believed. I’ll be debating (sort of) G. Gordon Liddy’s daughter on a panel moderated by John Stossel. Well, it’s not like the moderater has picked sides on global warming. Anyway, details on the program are here, though I confess I’m not 100% certain of the exact format with 8 panelists and Stossel dividing up 90 minutes plus audience questions.

In my first post, I promised to offer some new rules for climate action. But that promise was swept away this past week by the Great Floods of 2007.

Apocalyptic storms have been slamming Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin, dislodging homes from foundations and flooding entire communities. Along the Kickapoo River in southwestern Wisconsin, where I published a weekly newspaper 30 years ago, all the villages are under water. Except for one community called Soldiers Grove.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (more recently known for its flawless protection of New Orleans) proposed building a $3.5 million levee around Soldiers Grove. I cranked up my printing press and wrote a counterproposal: We’d take the money and move the town to higher ground. Rather than re-engineering the river, we’d relocate the people, never to be flooded or to require federal disaster relief again.

The Corps didn’t buy it, but we found other state and federal agencies willing to help, kicked in our own money and moved the town between 1979 and 1983. Fresh from the second Arab Oil embargo of the 1970s, we decided to make Soldiers Grove the nation’s “first solar village.” With unanimous support, the Village Board passed the nation’s only ordinance requiring that all new buildings receive at least half their heat from sunlight.

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Doubters who are new to the site often question whether I am green, presumably trying to show me up as a hypocrite, as someone who doesn’t practice what I preach. Here’s a typical recent comment:

People who really are worried about AGW [anthropogenic global warming] should go beyond indulgences (sorry, offsets) - that is - they should buy offsets, but also make some real sacrifices - painful ones, like cut down their air-traveling, cut down their electricity consumption, and their consumerism, in general.

Dr. Romm - would you care to tell us what you’ve been doing along these lines ? Would you like to mention the “sincere attempts to reduce your carbon footprint” that you have made, and their results ? Would you care to publish your carbon footprint, and the multidecadal trend in it (up or down) ?

I tend to think the question is largely irrelevant. I worry about AGW a great deal, but I don’t advocate individual sacrifice, since it won’t solve the problem — nor is it necessary. For instance, you don’t need to cut down on your electricity consumption if you purchase renewable power (although efficiency will be good for your pocketbook).

We need collective action at a national level and then at a global level. That is the focus of this blog. I don’t preach sacrifice so I don’t practice it. That’s one reason I’m not as big an advocate of offsets as some.

Still, Problogger says you should tell readers about where you are coming from. So — without implying others need to do the same — here is a list of the things I have done to lower my carbon footprint:

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The Chinese link their recent record flooding to global warming.

China’s coal use has made it the world’s top CO2 polluter.

“Flooding set off by torrential rains trapped 172 men deep underground in a coal mine in eastern China.”

‘Nuff said.