Climate Progress

Evworld has a very good article on the recent purge bloodbath personnel turmoil at start up electric vehicle company, Tesla motors:

On January 10, 2008, the Tesla Founders Blog published a list of employees who had recently been terminated from Tesla. This list included multiple vice presidents, lead engineers, and a variety of other folks from all areas of the Tesla organization. The blogosphere erupted in speculation about the future of the company.

Always worth remembering that good technology does not make a successful company — good people do.

Have you been scratching your head about the basis for the widespread claim — “to have a 50% chance to stabilize at 2ºC (global average temperature above pre-industrial) industrialized countries need to reduce their emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020″?

You can find a good explanation here.

Of course this country isn’t going to cut emissions that far that fast, making clear just what a tragic mistake it was for us not to embrace the Kyoto Protocol, which history will certainly view as the best chance humanity had to start down a plausible path to sustainability. At this point, just returning to 1990 levels by 2020 would be an astonishing achievement for America, especially given our current politics.

As I discuss in my book, this doesn’t mean 2ºC is unattainable — we could still embrace a World War II type strategy starting around 2020, though conservatives would almost certainly block such an effort. Let us hope that 2.5ºC is not fatal to the planet, and that we get started soon enough to achieve it.

“… clean energy technology … advanced batttery technology … new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions … new international clean technology fund…. The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change, and the best way to meet these goals is for America to continue leading the way toward the development of cleaner and more energy-efficient technology.”

For Bush/Luntz energy/climate policy, “Technology, technology, blah, blah,” the State of the Union never, ever changes.

That was Bush’s only use of the word “climate” in the speech — though he did also say, “let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.” Potential! This is the last friggin’ year of your second term and your big plan for dealing with climate is the potential of new technology and an agreement that has the potential to reverse emissions trends — which itself is just doubletalk since you’ve spent 7 years working to block any international (or domestic) agreement.

I propose a new drinking game: one shot when Bush says something that isn’t true, and a double shot when he says something that is actually the exact opposite of the truth. Unfortunately for me, before the actual SOTU, the White House released its State of the Union energy talking points, titled “Increasing Our Energy Security And Confronting Climate Change: The Administration Is Taking Steps To Reduce U.S. Dependence On Oil, And To Advance U.S. Leadership In Developing A Global Response To Climate Change.”

And I passed out shortly after finishing the headline.

It is a laugh-til-it-hurts (and I mean root-canal-without-novocaine hurts) document, as the speech was.

Lets see. After 7 years:

• Record oil imports. Check.
• Record oil prices. Check.
• Record trade deficit in oil. Check.
• Endless war in the Persian Gulf. Check.
• Iraqi oil exports below pre-war levels. Check.

Now that’s what the White House calls “Increasing Energy Security.” I’d hate to imagine what it would take for the White House to say we were Decreasing Energy Security.

And don’t get me started on “Confronting Climate Change.” The thing to always bear in mind:

President George W. Bush doesn’t just fiddle while the planet burns, he actively fans the flames and thwarts the fire-fighters.

Thank goodness this is the last Bush SOTU we’ll have to endure.

Maldives Builds Barriers to Global Warming - NPR Report. The Republic of Maldives, a nation of small islands, is among the most threatened by sea level rise in the coming century. Having tried for decades to address the coming doom, their president has found a solution aimed at adapting to sea level rise, spreading out the nation’s population, and building sturdier cities in general.

Antarctica on alert for alien invaders - Reuters. Scientists in Antarctica fear that global warming and travel to the island could cause a mass introduction of species new to Antarctica - like rats.

Let’s hope talk on climate change is not just hot air - The Times (UK). From the author of The Rough Guide to Climate Change, in anticipation of Bush’s second meaningless climate PR stunt major emitter’s meeting - to be held in Hawaii (!) later this week:

Talk of global warming will fill the balmy air of Hawaii this week. President Bush will host representatives of 15 of the world’s biggest economies that lead the global pack on greenhouse emissions to discuss setting goals that can take over where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off in 2012.

However, Earth’s atmosphere isn’t exactly waiting in the wings. Change is already occuring, due to gases emitted over the past hundred years. A century is a long time — but what about what happens in the next five minutes:

– Burning oil, petrol and coal will throw about 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air.

– Human-produced greenhouse gases will trap enough sunlight to power a 40-watt lightbulb for every 40 square metres on Earth.

– Two people will die from illnesses related to global warming.

The flip side of these ominous numbers is that personal and societal actions make a concrete difference here and now, not just in a hazy climatic future. Let’s say you replace an incandescent lightbulb with a compact fluorescent or, for your holiday, opt for a train to Nice instead of a flight to Cyprus.

Imagine a half-tonne of refuse strewn across a tropical ocean for a hundred years. Then imagine having it within your power to keep it from getting there. In the ocean of air in which we live and breathe, we have that power.

If you must buy carbon offsets, caveat emptor — in particular, don’t buy them from the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). That is the point of a terrific front-page article in today’s Washington Post “Value of U.S. House’s Carbon Offsets Is Murky, Some Question Effectiveness of $89,000 Purchase to Balance Out Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”

Yes, it is nice to be quoted above the fold in any major newspaper — the quote in the headline is from me — but the reason I think the article is important is that the reporter took the time to track down the offset projects the taxpayer money went to. The results are not encouraging. I am not a fan of offsets (see my many posts dissing “Offsets” under that category on this blog’s side bar) — and certainly wasn’t a fan of the House buying offsets from the CCX in the first place.

But I was surprised by the overall lameness of the specific projects and utterly shocked to read the words of CCX CEO Richard Sandor (a man I have a fair amount of respect for):

It basically rewards people for having done things that had environmental good in the past and incentivizes people to do things that have environmental good in the future.

Shame on him for having this policy, and double shame if he actually believes it is the right thing. Offset money is supposed to cause carbon emissions reductions that would not otherwise have happened without that money (the so-called additionality criteria), in order to offset our own emissions (which we have first worked hard to reduce). We are most certainly not expecting our money go to rewarding people for having done things that had environmental benefit in the past. Geez — I’ve done a whole bunch of things that had environmental benefit in the past — see list here — does that mean I’m entitled to some of Sandor’s CCX money? Absurd!

An old friend of mind, consultant Mark Trexler, put it well in the article when he said,

If you don’t have additionality, you know what you’re getting. You’re getting nothing.

Kudos to uber-capitalist Sandor. He has proven you can get nothing for something.

Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, regularly has me on his Earthbeat radio show, so I’m returning the favor with this great letter to the editor he had in the Washington Post yeterday:

Fact: Virginia gets less than 1 percent of its electricity from “green” sources such as the wind or the sun. Fact: Virginia ranks 38th among U.S. states in energy efficiency. Fact: Climate change is real, and fossil fuel substitutes are needed, according to President Bush’s State of the Union address last year. So how would Dominion Virginia Power respond to these facts?

• Savagely blow up entire mountains in southwest Virginia.
• Feed the resulting exposed coal to a proposed power plant that is unnecessary and would cost ratepayers at least $1.8 billion.
• Create lots more greenhouse gases in the process.
• Doom the good people of southwest Virginia to living with a brutal extraction industry that has no future.

Whew! Talk about getting everything wrong.

And yet Gov. Tim Kaine supports the plan:

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For those interested in sources of growing carbon emissions, the N.Y. Times ran an important article today, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.” Here’s a startling factoid:

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

And the indirect effect of growing meat consumption on the climate is equally large:

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The chapter on the media in Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):

In the end, adherence to the norm of balanced reporting leads to informationally biased coverage of global warming. This bias, hidden behind a veil of journalistic balance, creates . . . real political space for the U.S. government to shirk responsibility and delay action regarding global warming.

–Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, 2004

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

–Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

If we do not avert Hell and High Water, global warming will be the news Story of the Millennium. In a world where sea levels are rising a foot or more every decade for centuries, our coasts are ravaged by superstorms, and we face endless mega-droughts, global warming won’t be the most important story–it will be the only story.

If we do avert catastrophe, global warming will still be the Story of the Century. Starting very soon, and for many decades to come, the top news will focus on the country coming together to embrace an aggressive government- led effort to preserve the American way of life by changing everything about how we use energy–on a scale that dwarfs what the nation achieved during World War II.

While the media has begun providing more coverage of global warming, that coverage is still a long way from adequately informing the public about the urgency of the problem and the huge effort needed to avert catastrophe. The media’s miscoverage of global warming makes it much less likely that the country will act in time, and it is a key reason why only a third of Americans understand that global warming will “pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime,” according to a March 2006 Gallup Poll.

We don’t have any Edward R. Murrows today, at least not on the climate issue. What we do have is a declining number of science reporters, and only a handful of those are dedicated to covering climate. Worse, the media has the misguided belief that the pursuit of “balance” is superior to the pursuit of truth–even in science journalism. The result is that global warming and its impacts are systematically underreported and misreported.

Next month, our nation’s top climate scientist is receiving the Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility from the AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society. The award is very well deserved.

Hansen has just released a long discussion of the sad state of scientific freedom in the Bush era. It begins:

I just did an interview with CNN (Miles O’Brien) re “censoring science”. The point I emphasized is that overreaching by the Executive Branch, trying to make government science submit to political command and control, is a threat to our democracy, and, as a result, a threat to the planet. The scary part about this story is that seeds have been sown, and a playbook has been codified (although not written!), that will make the situation much worse unless the American public recognizes the problem and makes an issue of it. This is a bi-partisan problem — and neither party is trying to fix it. It is remarkable how wimpish Congress has become in accepting subjugation to the Executive Branch, contrary to designs and intents of our Founding Fathers.

You can say that again, Jim! Congrats on the award and please keep speaking out, showing all of us what true straight talk is.

If you think Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is a straight-talking courageous politician on the issue of global warming, watch this jaw-dropping clip from last night’s Republican presidential debate:

The transcript is online, so we can go through McCain’s entire Orwellian answer to moderator Tim Russert [Note: This was following a question to Giuliani about the global warming threat to Florida and his opposition to mandatory caps, which I’ll briefly discuss at the end.]. Russert said, correctly:

Senator McCain, you are in favor of mandatory caps.

And, as you’ve seen, McCain immediately answers –

No, I’m in favor of cap-and-trade. And Joe Lieberman and I, one of my favorite Democrats and I, have proposed that — and we did the same thing with acid rain.

And all we are saying is, “Look, if you can reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, you earn a credit. If somebody else is going to increase theirs, you can sell it to them.” And, meanwhile, we have a gradual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

As a great American once said — you cannot be serious! My jaw dropped (yes, I was watching, and yes, I’m a hardcore political junkie). I know McCain was beaten up in Michigan by Romney for supporting CAFE standards to deal with global warming, and I know “mandates” are as popular with conservatives as taxes are, but this is Romney-esque doubletalk. Europe has a mandate. We dealt with acid rain with a mandate. And McCain’s own climate bill with Lieberman is a mandate.

A straight talker would not use those two wishy-washy “can’s.” Nothing mandatory or threatening to conservatives about “can.” What a wonderful world McCain is imagining: If “somebody else” increases their emissions — not you, of course, you’ll be the one reducing emissions cheaply and getting rich with all the credits — “you can sell it to them.” Well, that is double double-talk.

First, a straight talker would note that the person who increases their emissions must buy a credit (though obviously not necessarily from you). Second, a straight talker would not imply that the point of a cap-and-trade is to allow someone who decreases their emissions to sell credits to someone who increases them — the point is to set the cap well below current levels (as McCain’s own bill does) so that everyone decreases their emissions, but allowing those who can achieve very deep reductions cost-effectively to sell to those who can’t.

If John “Straight Talk” McCain can’t tell conservatives the truth about what this country will need to do to stop catastrophic global warming, who can? Buck up, John — A real man says “mandate.”

The rest of his answer is equally unsettling:

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