Climate Progress

Concentrated solar thermal power — aka solar baseload — remains hot. The Daily Climate has a nice update:

All told some 60 plants are either under construction or under contract worldwide — with most in either Spain or the United States — for a total capacity just north of 5,700 megawatts

Here is the world list of projects. Here is the U.S. list.

I remain as convinced as ever that solar baseload could well be “The technology that will save humanity,” in large part because it is highly scalable, eventually able to achieve 50 to 100 gigawatts a year growth or more.

Indeed, given the immense challenges that coal with CCS faces (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“), I’m still happy, indeed eager, to bet that concentrated solar thermal will continue delivering more power every year this century than so-called “clean coal” — and at a far lower cost per kilowatt-hour.

Solar baseload’s ultimate “trump card” is, of course, storage:

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Barack Obama has created a top-notch team to guide his transition into the White House (see “Obama fills key posts on environment, energy teams“). Next, he should create a team to guide America’s transition to a new energy economy.

I’m not talking about the prestigious group of economic advisors Obama already has assembled to help him identify solutions to the economic meltdown. I’m talking about a team that includes experts in sustainable energy technologies, climate mitigation and adaptation, capital investment, state and local government, business, industry and labor.

Their job should be to fashion a deliberate, coherent and intelligent plan to move as rapidly and painlessly as possible from the old carbon-based economy to a brand new and long-overdue economic order powered by sustainable resources, dedicated to natural resource stewardship and striving to achieve a near-zero carbon society.

We have no such plan now. Instead, as I pointed out in Part 2 in this series, America’s de facto energy policy is a hodgepodge of self-defeating laws, programs and subsidies. Congress must make a critical decision: We either have to phase out fossil fuels or abandon any pretense that we care about climate change, despite its profound implications for public health, national security, peace and economic stability.

If we decide we really care, we need a transition plan for the economy — not just a stimulus package, but a program that focuses on long-term investment in a sustainable nation. What might such a program be like? Here’s one scenario:

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A key reason for Detroit’s woes is that for decades they successfully fought efforts to build the kind of fuel-efficient cars the public has increasingly wanted to buy. Virtually all independent observers acknowledge that fact, but no conservative leader can. After all, they provided the political support and the votes that blocked repeated efforts by progressive to toughen federal fuel economy standards.

Denying their contribution to the current mess, however, is not enough for these master deniers. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of conservatives, somehow a law passed last year to boost fuel economy standards to 35 mpg by 2020 — a weaker standard than China and Europe already have — is a key cause of the Big Three’s current troubles.

ThinkProgress has the surreal quotes:

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The League of Conservation Voters beat me to punch in trashing Chevron’s recent greenwashing ads, with “I Will Point Out Hypocrisy“:

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My occasional series on the conservative movement stagnation continues with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Government Elimination Tax Reform.

On Monday, the New York Times ran a long story, “Among Republicans, a Debate Over the Party’s Road Map Back to Power,” about the response of leading right-wing thinkers to the question “how can conservatives chart a path back to power after this month’s Republican defeats?”

Norquist offered a strong endorsement for continuing the GOP’s ostrich-like [dinosaur-like?] ignorance on climate change:

… he suggested that some calls to update conservatism — by taking global warming more seriously, for instance — were essentially disguised calls to move the party to the left.

“They will be cheerfully ignored,” Mr. Norquist said.

Denial is bliss.

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Ding Dong the Dingell is gone! Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) will take the gavel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in January.

This is huge for those who’ll want strong action on both climate change and clean energy and energy independence (and health care). Heck, it’s the second best piece of news on global warming this month!

I’m told the vote was 137-122. I will post updates as they come.

UPDATE 1: The NYT piece is now up: “Longtime Head of House Energy Panel Is Ousted.”

UPDATE 2: The E&E Daily piece (subs. req’d) is below:

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I’ve never done this sort of thing before, but I am asking you to nominate Climate Progress your favorite science blog (click here) for a Weblog award. Please read this whole post first, however.

If you go to the site, you’ll see why I am sticking my nose under the camel’s tent of shameless self-promotion beyond a general desire to win, drive traffic to this website, create a groundswell of support for strong climate legislation, and possibly save your children and my 22-month-old daughter from a ruined climate….

Certain websites, who will remain nameless www.climateaudit.org and wattsupwiththat.com, have, shall we say, very enthusiastic supporters … not that there’s anything wrong with that, unless, of course, having Climate Audit be cowinner of the 2007 Best Science blog rubs you the wrong way.

Please note the Rules and FAQs:

• The number of nominations a blog receives is irrelevant. One nomination is enough…
• Rather than add a “me too” nomination for a site you’re encouraged to use the “+” icon to indicate your preference for nominees. The “+” ratings are one extra piece of information the finalist selection panel can use to help generate the finalist slates in each category.
• The nomination period has been extended to Friday, November 21, 2008 [that would be tomorrow].

There will only be 10-15 finalists, so please do act now (click here). Thank you for your support.

Okay, I made up the last two, but the Washington Post reports today:

For the first time, a federal advisory board has approved criteria that clear the way for farmed fish to be labeled “organic,” a move that pleased aquaculture producers even as it angered environmentalists and consumer advocates.

You can put lipstick on a pig…. No, wrong aphorism. You can call a dog a horse, but it is still a dog … though some conservatives will no doubt try to ride it.

OK, maybe there isn’t a good aphorism, but this last minute frenzy of destruction is getting absurd (see “Bush makes final push to worsen warming, make our children dumber, and sicken all Americans“). The story offers several reasons why this latest assault on our language and environment is a bad idea:

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Part 1 looked at some of the climate actions Obama should take in his first hundred days. This post looks at some of the tough questions that are posed by the climate and energy dilemmas.

To lead America into a post-carbon economy, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have to revolutionize the biggest and most heavily lobbied of the government’s programs. That means taking on the armies of the status quo, who have money and inertia on their side.

It’s a battle that must be fought and won. Today, our public policy is riddled with crisis-inducing, self-defeating contradictions. The next Congress will have to resolve some tough questions that past Congresses avoided. For example:

1. What action will Congress take to prove to the world that the United States is serious about addressing climate action?

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The so-called paper of record ran a major story Tuesday on the country’s most infamous climate-driven pest, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West.” Great story, other than neglecting to mention climate change. It’d be like an article on an outbreak of avian flu that left out any discussion of birds

So we have the national “liberal” media, like the NYT and NBC, blowing this story, while the local, conservative media get it right, see “conservative San Diego Union knows climate change is killing Western forests” and “Oldest Utah newspaper: Bark-beetle driven wildfires are a vicious climate cycle.”

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as an April article made clear: “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change.” So does the Canadian media: “Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada’s Forests.”

The NYT did get the grim, superficial facts of the story right:

From New Mexico to British Columbia, the region’s signature pine forests are succumbing to a huge infestation of mountain pine beetles that are turning a blanket of green forest into a blanket of rust red. Montana has lost a million acres of trees to the beetles, and in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming the situation is worse.

“We’re seeing exponential growth of the infestation,” said Clint Kyhl, director of a Forest Service incident management team in Laramie, Wyo., that was set up to deal with the threat of fire from dead forests. Increased construction of homes in forest areas over the last 20 years makes the problem worse.

Yeah, home building is the cause of this problem — that’s why in Alaska, “over three million acres of forest land has been devastated by the beetle,” as senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) described in a May 2006 speech on climate change. Seriously, that is pretty much the only explanation the NYT story offers, although the accompanying video does inch much closer to the truth, strangely enough.

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