Climate Progress

Amusing, if harsh….

NASA’s James Hansen just circulated the following email:

My testimony submitted to the Iowa Utilities Board on Monday October 22 is available here. Because of recent distractions, but mainly because of my plodding writing pace, I only completed text for the introductory and paleoclimate parts. I included figures for the remaining parts and added a quick caption to each figure.

As it turns out, we were then granted a 10-day extension, so I will be sending another version late next week. And I hope to make a better presentation for later coal cases, so any criticisms are welcome.

If you have any comments, post them and I’ll pass them along.

What is Hansen’s bottom line?

Saving the planet and creation surely requires phase-out of coal use except where the CO2 is captured and sequestered.

Here! Here!

When I was a child in the 1950s, I went about my business with a little cloud hanging over my head. It didn’t matter whether I was playing in the backyard, studying in my bedroom or suffering from my first romantic crush (Annette on the Mickey Mouse Club). The cloud was always there.

It was the fear of nuclear war. We lived in suburbs west of Chicago. All day long, jets flew overhead on their way to O’Hare International Airport, sometimes so high that they were just a silver spot gleaming in the sun as they moved across the sky. When I saw one, I stopped what I was doing and waited several minutes to see if a mushroom cloud appeared to the east over Chicago. Once I saw the mushroom, I knew from school, our neighborhood would be flattened a few seconds later.

It never happened, of course. I can’t say that the cloud ruined my childhood or followed me into adulthood, but its shadow came back to mind Friday night (Oct. 19) as I watched John Stossel’s latest “Give Me a Break” segment on ABC.

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Carbon emissions are soaring at an unprecedented rate, as previously noted.

We’re reaching the point where, without a World-War-II scale effort to change our energy system, it might be easier to just remove the words “and our posterity” from the Preamble to the United States Constitution.

This point was underscored yesterday, or at least implied, at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where global-ecology scientist Chris Field presented the results of an astonishing paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks” — the paper is not yet online (I will post the link when it is) but you can see the press release here.

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In an op-ed titled, “Save the Planet: Vote Smart,” N.Y. Times columnist Tom Friedman makes a point that is a central theme of this blog:

People often ask: I want to get greener, what should I do? New light bulbs? A hybrid? A solar roof? Well, all of those things are helpful. But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.

Why? Because leaders write the rules, set the standards and offer the tax incentives that drive market behavior across a whole city, state or country. Whatever any of us does individually matters a tiny bit. But when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the whole marketplace. And the energy-climate challenge we face today is a huge scale problem. Without scale, all you have is a green hobby.

Have no illusions, everything George Bush wouldn’t do on energy after 9/11 — his resisting improved mileage for cars and actually trying to weaken air-conditioner standards – swamped any good works you did….

So if you want to be a green college kid or a green adult, don’t fool yourself: You can change lights. You can change cars. But if you don’t change leaders, your actions are nothing more than an expression of, as Dick Cheney would say, “personal virtue.”

From October 12th through 18th architecture and engineering students from 20 universities camped on the National Mall as part of the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, which takes place every two years. You can get a virtual tour of all the houses here.

The purpose of the competition is to envision, design, construct and operate a home that runs entirely on solar energy. The university teams take part in ten contests for which they receive marks to determine the decathlon’s winner. The contests include architecture, landscaping, engineering, appliances, hot water, lighting, marketability, the ability to maintain a comfortable temperature inside the home, and ohters.

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The drought/climate connection is starting to get more attention, as evidence by

1. A long, must-read article in the New York Times magazine, “The Future Is Drying Up.”
2. A great interview on the Diane Rehm show on U.S. Weather Patterns and Drought with Gerald Galloway, former brigadier general in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; Mark Svoboda, climatologist, National Drought Mitigation Center; and Richard Heim, Meteorologist NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center
3. A good post from RealClimate on the drought in Turkey.

The Times piece has some great material:

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On October 11, one of CAP’s interns, Zoe Brown, attended an Innovation Symposium with a handful of climate-concerned characters (see below). Here are her thoughts:

“The Atlantic and BMW sponsored From Ideas to Solutions: Overcoming the Challenge of Climate Change, held at the Meridian International Center Meyer-White House. The panel discussion included Nancy Kete from the World Resources Institute, Gregg Easterbrook from Brookings, John Podesta from the Center for American Progress, and moderator Jason Grumet from the National Commission on Energy Policy.

Many issues were covered by the panelists, but what struck me as especially relevant was their discussion of the U.S.’s role on the international scene. The panelists took this opportunity to address the U.S.’s use of the ‘China excuse.’

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This morning the Center for American Progress hosted an event on Green Collar Jobs — sort of like blue collar jobs, but with an environmentally-sustainable edge to economic development.

The panel was packed with four leaders (an activist, a community organizer, a city government rep. and a private real estate developer). They were: Van Jones (Ella Baker Center in Oakland, CA), Majora Carter (Sustainable South Bronx in NYC), Sadhu Johnston (City of Chicago), and Carlton Brown (Full Spectrum, LLC).

Collectively, they outlined the problem:

• global warming
• environmental injustice: the likelihood of low-income communities also being where waste facilities and power plants tend to concentrate — and, most likely to be where African-American and Latino communities are located
• unemployment, its correlation with imprisonment, and the generally poor management of human capital

More importantly, they focused on the solution:

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Well, they dropped a bundle to get a quarter-page “Clean Power” ad in the Washington Post (page A21 today) so the least I can do is give them a shout out on Climate Progress.

CLEAN is a “clean power and coalfield state grassroots organization” circulating a comprehensive national “call to action” on energy policy that includes:

• a five-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants
• increased investments and tax credits for stepped-up renewable energy production
• greater emphasis on energy efficiency in all new construction
• a sharp jump in federal mile per gallon (MPG) fuel efficiency standards
• changes in personal energy consumption patterns.

And a lot more — you can read the long version of the call to action text here.

Glad to see more groups joining the fight to conserve a livable climate.