Climate Progress

He may be a “venture-capital star” who is now putting a lot of money into biofuels — but he is no clean tech expert, as he proved during a keynote address at ThinkEquity Partners’ ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco. In remarks that should worry anybody relying on his judgment, Khosla said:

Forget plug-ins. They are nice toys. But they will not be material to climate change.

Very, very wrong. Plug ins are likely to be a central strategy for dealing with climate change, as readers of Climate Progress know (see below). I hope cellulosic ethanol will be, but that still remains to be seen.

Contrary to what Khosla says, affordable cellulosic ethanol probably requires a major breakthrough — and to play a major role in climate change, it needs a major new infrastructure investment. I recently test-drove a prototype plug in that avoids the need for a battery breakthrough (more on that after the Detroit auto show). And plug ins don’t need a major new infrastructure investment. They are not toys.

Khosla should stick with what he knows.

Related Posts:

• The Car of the Future: Plug-in Hybrids
• Plug in Hybrids are Green (Duh!)
• Iacocca: Plug-in hybrids, not hydrogen “the wave of the future”
• Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia”
• The Book to Read on “Freedom from Oil”
• A New Fleet of Plug-in Hybrid books
• GM may make 60,000 plug-in hybrids in 2010
• Google Jump-Starts Plug-In Hybrids

We all know about the War on Hanukkah. And last year I discussed the War on White Christmas. But it is increasingly clear that the assault on the Christmas tradition by those who oppose action on global warming goes far beyond the inevitable reduction in late December snowfall we will face when the country is 10°F warmer (or more) by century’s end.

The question of the season is — What will happen to Santa Claus when the Arctic is ice free?

On our current path, this could happen as early as 2013 according to researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School and no doubt will happen before 2030.

Where will we tell kids that Santa lives? Some sort of North Pole Atlantis? But he can’t live under the water, since much of the Arctic will still ice over by December, though a few feet of ice can’t support a huge house and a factory and an elf-dormitory. Kids are smarter than that. If only adults were smarter….

Probably the best choice is to ship him off to the South Pole (with Superman’s Fortress of Solitude). Indeed the fact that Santa lives in the North Pole is no doubt a residue of our general Northern-hemisphere-centric worldview. How ironic would it be to outsource Santa to the Southern hemisphere. Not the Antarctic Peninsula or West Antarctic ice sheet, of course, since those may not last the century — we don’t want to keep moving him! — but much of the East Antarctic ice sheet will probably hopefully be around for centuries, and, in any case, Antarctica is a real continent, so even when the ice is gone, Santa can still have his whole operation above water.

Of course, if we ruin the Christmas tradition with our short-sighted inability to develop sane greenhouse gas policies, Santa may just decide all of us are too “naughty” to deserve his largess.

I also wonder what future generations will think about all those old Christmas movies with Santa based at the North Pole. Probably the same thing they think about all those epic stories of brave explorers struggling to get to the North Pole. More tall tales from adults, no doubt — at least until they are old enough to understand the sad truth.

If we don’t change course soon, we won’t just transform the climate — we will transform our culture, from one of abundance to one of scarcity — and that has profound implications for all of humanity, including our native optimism and our generous, gift-giving nature. ‘Tis the season to say: ‘Tis time to act!

Here’s a test.

Think back to the Sunday political talk shows and the major presidential debates of the past year. Now, think about the questions the candidates were asked by Tim Russert, Chris Wallace, Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanapoulos and Bob Schieffer.

How many interviews did the Fab Five conduct with the presidential candidates during 2007?
a) 550
b) 47
c) 120

How many questions did the Five ask the candidates?
a) 536
b) 1,069
c) 2,275

How may of those questions dealt with global warming?
a) 400
b) 100
c) 3

If you guessed “c” to all three questions, congratulations! You’ve got a good handle on the ludicrous state of television news. Make that “news”.

The always vigilant League of Conservation Voters has taken the trouble to count the questions from the debates and Sunday talk as we approach the end of 2007.

The first prize in the “Let’s Ask About the Most Important Issue of Our Time” contest goes to Chris Wallace of Fox (!), who asked the candidates two (2) climate questions. Running a close second was Wolf Blitzer with one.

What topics got more air time? There was the intrigue over Dennis Kucinich’s startling admission that he’d seen a UFO; questions about whether the candidates favored the Yankees or the Red Sox; and breaking news about Chuck Norris’s endorsement of Mike Huckabee.

If you’d like to urge the Five to ask the presidential candidates more about climate change, what they’d do about it, and when, the League has made it easy. Sign its petition at www.whataretheywaitingfor.com.

– Bill B.

A great little story today in Tom Rick’s Inbox, from the Washington Post’s military correspondent:

As most Americans prepare to celebrate the holidays, others are marching off to war. One of the unusual aspects of the Iraq conflict is that the same people keep going back, which means that they often take with them the no-nonsense attitude of the combat veteran. Here, Lt. Col. Mark Yanaway, an Army reservist returning for his second tour, reports on his first steps on the road back to Baghdad, from the New York area to Fort Bragg, N.C.:

The next morning we were up early and off to Newark Airport. We breezed through the check in despite having large numbers of large boxes and duffle bags. (I managed to keep mine down to a small footlocker and partially filled duffle bag).

Our flight was uneventful. On the way to Charlotte a lady sitting next to me got to talking and eventually inquired as to what she could to do to help out the troops. I responded, “Stop using so much oil.”

Sadly, that is one way of supporting the troops that just never seemed to catch on with the American public….

In Part I, we saw how conservatives were turning their backs on the moral issue of our time–global warming.

Here we’ll examine the many reasons conservatives should share ownership of this issue. Global warming and its solutions involve issues that are important to conservatives, progressives, Independents and even political agnostics. For example:

National security: “Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States,” 11 retired admirals and generals concluded in a security analysis last April. “The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.”

Jobs: The global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is arguably the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity the United States has known. Billions of the world’s people need access to clean energy, a market of unprecedented scale. Here in the United States, according to an analysis by the Management Information Services in Washington, D.C., energy efficiency and renewable energy can create 40 million jobs by mid-century, at skill levels stretching from entry level to the highly technical.

Competitiveness: Two of the fastest-growing renewable energy technologies today — solar electric cells and wind turbines — were invented in the United States, but we gave up our lead to Japan, Germany and Denmark — and China! We need to get it back. America remains the world’s top innovator; unleashing that talent is a key to our economic security in a post-carbon world. If we want to be the global market leader in green technologies, little steps and tentative leadership won’t do the job. As Sam Walton said in building his business empire: “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. We don’t want continuous improvement; we want radical change.”

(more…)

In recent years, conservatives have mastered the art of hijacking morality. They have positioned themselves as the champions of family values, faith and good old-fashioned patriotism. But on what some regard as the moral issue of our time, the party’s presidential candidates are turning their backs.

That issue is global warming.

Al Gore is not the only prominent leader who considers climate change a moral issue. Three years ago, the National Association of Evangelicals issued its “Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” It reads in part:

We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part. Because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation. At about the same time, Christianity Today, an influential evangelical magazine, opined that “Christians should make it clear to governments and businesses that we are willing to adapt our lifestyles and support steps towards changes that protect our environment.”

The magazine endorsed the bipartisan global warming bill co-sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman (I/D CT) and John McCain (R-AZ).

Yet, the other Republican presidential candidates are keeping their distance from the issue as though it is their weird Aunt Ethel with halitosis.

For those who believe that global warming transcends parties, there was a momentary glimmer of hope on Dec. 11 when, on the CBS Evening News, Katie Couric asked five of the GOP candidates point-blank whether they think climate change is overblown. Only Fred Thompson retreated into full waffle, saying we need more research.

Mitt Romney answered, “I think the risks of climate change are real…And I think human activity is contributing to it.”

Rudy Giuliani answered, “There is global warming. Human beings are contributing to it.”

Mike Huckabee said, “I don’t know…. But here’s one thing I do know, that we ought to not let this become this big political football and point of argument. We all ought to agree that we live on this planet as guests. I think Republicans have made a big mistake by not being more on the forefront of conservationism.”

McCain showed he still is capable of straight-talk: “I have been to Greenland, I have been to the South Pole. I’ve been to the Arctic and I know it’s real,” he said. “I’ve been involved in this effort for many years. And we’ve got to act. And unfortunately, we have not acted either as a federal government or a Congress.”

Why not, Couric asked him.

(more…)

So Sen. James “global warming is a hoax” Inhofe (R-OK) issues a report in which he claims:

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming.

“Padded” would be an extremely generous description of this list of “prominent scientists.” Some would use the word “laughable” (though not the N.Y. Times‘ Andy Revkin, see below). For instance, since when have economists, who are pervasive on this list, become scientists, and why should we care what they think about climate science?

I’m not certain a dozen on the list would qualify as “prominent scientists,” and many of those, like Freeman Dyson — a theoretical physicist — have no expertise in climate science whatsoever. I have previously debunked his spurious and uninformed claims, although I’m not sure why one has to debunk someone who seriously pushed the idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs! Seriously.

Even Ray Kurzweil, not a scientist but a brilliant inventor, is on the list. Why? Because he apparently told CNN and the Washington Post:

These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous, they don’t account for anything like the technological progress we’re going to experience…. None of the global warming discussions mention the word ‘nanotechnology. Yet nanotechnology will eliminate the need for fossil fuels within 20 years…. I think global warming is real but it has been modest thus far - 1 degree f. in 100 years. It would be concern if that continued or accelerated for a long period of time, but that’s not going to happen.

And people say I’m a techno-optimist. So Kurzweil actually believes in climate science — rather than the reverse, as Inhofe claims — but thinks catastrophic global warming won’t happen because of a techno-fix that stops emissions. If wishes were horses … everyone would get trampled to death. In the real world, energy breakthroughs are very rare, as we’ve seen, and it’s even rarer when they make a difference in under several decades.

Then we have the likes of this from Inhofe’s list:

CBS Chicago affiliate Chief Meteorologist Steve Baskerville expressed skepticism that there is a “consensus” about mankind’s role in global warming.

Wow, a TV weatherman expressed skepticism. If only the IPCC had been told of this in time, they could have scrapped their entire report. Seriously, Wikipedia says “Baskerville is an alumnus of Temple University and holds a Certificate in Broadcast Meteorology from Mississippi State University.” I guess Inhofe has a pretty low bar for “prominent scientists” — but then again he once had science fiction writer Michael Crichton testify at a hearing on climate science.

I don’t mean to single out Baskerville. Inhofe has a lot of meteorologists on his list, including Weather Channel Founder John Coleman. I have previously explained why Coleman doesn’t know what he is talking about on climate, and why meteorologists in general have no inherent credibility on climatology. In any case, they obviously are NOT prominent scientists.

Then we have people like French geomagnetism (!) scientist Vincent Courtillot, geophysicist Louis Le Mouël, geophysicist Claude Allègre, geomagnetism (!!) scientist Frederic Fluteau, geomagnetism (!!!) scientist Yves Gallet, and scientist Agnes Genevey — whose “research” on global warming is brutally picked apart by RealClimate here and especially here (and again here by other scientists), who together “expose a pattern of suspicious errors and omissions that pervades” their work.

So, yes, the Inhofe list is utterly ignorable compared to either the IPCC report or the Bali declaration by actual prominent climate scientists. The notion it is relevant to the climate debate is laughable, as even a cursuory examination makes clear. And yet in an article unhelpfully titled, “Climate Consensus ‘Busted’?” the NYT’s Andy Revkin amazingly writes of it:

(more…)

This is a good time of year to highlight a new blog on Climate Change and Poverty from Oxfam. Oxfam does good work — I previously wrote on a study of theirs in “Weather disasters have quadrupled in 20 years.”

They don’t have a lot of content yet — they need to work on that! — but some of the better posts are:

• Bali

• George Monbiot video

• Food miles

• Climate Alarm - 20 years on from first Oxfam paper on climate change

I hope you’ve all bought LED lighting for your trees — they are much more efficient and safer, too, because they generate less heat! We have, and so has the White House and Rockefeller Center (see below).

Here is an Electric Power Research Institute fact sheet to answer all your questions on LED vs conventional Christmas lights.

Happy Holidays!

UPDATE: This post does not mean I am done blogging for the year….

It took less than 12 hours.

The Democrats got rolled again.

Bush started the day signing the energy bill that Nancy Pelosi called “earth-shattering change in terms of energy policy” and Sierra Club’s Carl Pope said “is a clean break with the failed energy policies of the past and puts us on the path toward a cleaner, greener energy future.” To get a bill the president would sign, out dropped any challenge to big oil’s obscene profits, a national renewable electricity standard, overwhelmingly popular wind and solar tax credits, and plug-in hybrid credits that might truly jumpstart an alternative automotive future.

They decided passing an energy bill and raising CAFE standards was worth any price. And now they’ve paid it.

They don’t know how to lose with dignity and purpose. They could have done a bill, with solar and wind and RPS and plug-in credits and taxes on oil companies to pay for and seen it vetoed. Then when Bush had the EPA kill the CO2 waiver too he’d have looked like the enviro monster he is. Now he disingenuously argues the energy bill provided a 50 state solution, not a patchwork, as the automakers like to say.

So now we have a do-little energy bill and years more litigation.

– Marc G. of Plugs and Cars Blog