Climate Progress

The story is at ThinkProgress. Money can’t buy you happiness, but apparently it can buy you silence, which, apparently, is sometimes just as good.

Change — a perennial theme in presidential campaigns — has taken on a more serious meaning this election season. Of all the promises being put forward by the presidential candidates, change may be the most frequent

“Change” usually is a word used by candidates who don’t have much Washington experience, but want to package their inexperience as a virtue. But allegiance to “change” is far more important If we want to confront global warming, energy insecurity and peak oil over the next 4-8 years — not to mention Iraq, the deficit, health care costs and several other messes the Bush Administration is leaving to its successors — change will be the name of the game. Big change, in fact.

There is wide acknowledgment that America needs to come together to solve some of these problems. We need a uniter not a divider in the White House, for real this time. We have enough common causes, certainly, around which we should rally. What we don’t have is trust.

If you asked most Americans today what one word comes to mind when they think about the White House, “trust” probably would not be their answer. It’s not good sport to take potshots at lame ducks, so I’ll resist the temptation to rant. I’ll just say that the presidency we’ve experienced in the past seven years (think Cheney energy plan, Plame, WMDs, censured science, fired attorneys, erased CIA videos, lost White House e-mails, etc.) has reinforced the perception that Washington is a culture not only of incompetence, but of flagrant and unabashed dishonesty. It has been a great seven years not only for Leno, Stewart and Letterman, but also for the cynicism industry.

But cynicism will not get us through problems as urgent and intractable as global warming. If I were writing the talking points for the candidates, I would have them say this: The first item on the national agenda is not a change in policies; it’s a change in our culture of leadership.

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The Center for American Progress has put out a clear and concise description of “What Is Cap and Trade, and How Can We Implement It Successfully?”

Related Post:

• How is cap & trade like musical chairs?

I have a new article in Salon, “The car of the future is here,” about plug-in hybrids. The two central points of the article are:

1. Plug-in hybrids (and electric cars) are an essential climate strategy, enabling renewable power (even intermittent sources like wind) to become a major low-cost transportation fuel.
2. Practical, affordable plug-in hybrids will be here in a few years — even if we don’t get a technology breakthrough in batteries.

[I am even more confident of these conclusions given the amazing joint announcement today by Renault-Nissan, Project Better Place, and Israel — see below.]

If you read the Salon article, you’ll know more than billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who recently said:

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

The subject deserves a far more serious discussion. Transportation is the toughest sector in which to achieve deep carbon emissions reductions. Of the three major alternative fuels that could plausibly provide a low-carbon substitute for a significant amount of petroleum:

• I am excited about the near-term reality (next five years) of plug in hybrids and electric cars
• I am hopeful that cellulosic biofuels could be a medium-term strategy, rather than a long-term one, especially for long-distance travel by air, sea, and land (which batteries probably can’t handle).
• I am increasingly convinced hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end especially from the perspective of avoiding catastrophic climate change (which requires deep emissions reductions by 2050). I’ll have a long article on hydrogen in the near future.

I was especially impressed by AFS Trinity’s plug-in hybrid design, which I test drove last year:

I am even more heartened about the prospects for pure electric vehicles (EVs) in other countries after seeing the following truly ground-breaking announcement today.

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I meant to blog on this earlier, but lost track of it after failing to find the original study (for reasons that will become clear). The bottom line is:

Global warming could cut the rate at which trees in tropical rainforests grow by as much as half, a new study based on more two decades of data from forests in Panama and Malaysia shows.

The effects, so far largely overlooked by climate modellers, Nature magazine said, could severely erode or even remove the ability of tropical rainforests to remove carbon dioxide from the air as they grow.

More evidence that the carbon sinks in the ocean and on the land may saturate sooner than scientists expected, which will inevitably lead to an acceleration of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (see below).

You might think from this article or even this blog, which begins, “The study is contained in Nature magazine,” that the original study is from Nature. But, nooooo! Someone — we won’t name names — could waste a lot of time looking for it there before they found out that it was only written about in Nature.

The actual study is from Ecology Letters, and here is a preprint. The abstract is sobering:

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The international dimension of climate in Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):

The “international fairness” issue is the emotional home run. Given the chance, Americans will demand that all nations be part of any international global warming treaty. Nations such as China, Mexico and India would have to sign such an agreement for the majority of Americans to support it.

–Frank Luntz, 2002

We don’t need an international treaty with rules and regulations that will handcuff the American economy or our ability to make our environment cleaner, safer and healthier.

–Frank Luntz, 2002

What country’s insatiable thirst for oil imports is most responsible for the tightening world market since the mid- 1990s? Hint: It’s not China. From 1995 to 2004, China’s annual imports grew by 2.8 million barrels a day. Ours grew 3.9 million. China sucks up about 6 percent of all global oil exports. We demand 25 percent, even though China has a billion more consumers.

In what year will China’s total contribution to climate change from burning fossil fuels surpass ours? Hint: Climate change is driven by rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and those concentrations have been driven by cumulative emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution. While China’s CO2 emissions might well exceed ours by 2010, its cumulative emissions might not surpass ours until after 2050.

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[Note: This post is slightly off topic.]

Take it back, America bashers, or we’ll sic Chuck Norris on you:

Chuck Norris brought his tough-guy approach to the campaign trail Sunday, taking aim at John McCain’s age and suggesting the Arizona senator might not last even a single term.

Norris, an ardent supporter of Mike Huckabee, told reporters he believes serving as president accelerates the aging process 3-to-1.

“If John takes over the presidency at 72 and he ages 3-to-1, how old will he be in four years? Eighty-four years old — and can he handle that kind of pressure in that job?” Norris said, as Huckabee looked on.

Yes 72 + 3×4 = 84! You go, Chuck. And here all along I thought you were just another dumb action star. My bad!

So a Kansas state House member Larry Powell has sent a copy of Fred Singer’s lame denier treatist, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years to every Kansas legislator. Of course, he sent one to Governor Sebelius, who denied a permit for two large coal-fired power plants in his home county.

Since Climate Progress has been blogging regularly on Kansas (see below and thank you Kari!), Kansas reporter Sarah Kessinger called me Friday for my opinion on Singer’s book and what legislators should do to become informed on climate. The book has been widely debunked, see this post on RealClimate.

The most absurd thing about the book is that … wait for it … the Earth wasn’t actually in a warm trend — unstoppable or otherwise — 1500 years ago! [Yes, during the Medieval Warm Period, parts of the earth were a bit warmer, but that peaked (below current temperatures) 1,000 years ago.] I thought the reporter would like that fact:

“I don’t think there’s anybody in the scientific community who takes Fred Singer seriously,” said Joseph Romm, a Washington scientist and author. Romm said the 1,500-year cycle theory isn’t possible considering the earth wasn’t in a warming trend 1,500 years ago.

Duh! I mean, seriously: Every book contains at least a few small errors, but most real scientists, heck, even most global warming deniers, try to avoid putting egregious factual mistakes in the title of the book. That is a pretty good sign you can skip the contents.

An even better reason to skip the book — in 1998 coathor Fred Singer testified to Congress that “the climate is not warming,” and as recently as November 2003, he wrote in the Financial Times:

The irony is that there is no convincing evidence that the global climate is actually warming.

I kid you not. So four years ago, Singer said the scientific evidence of warming was not compelling. By 2007, he was publishing a book saying that the science clearly shows we are in a natural warming cycle.

Why, why, why traditional media do you keep quoting someone who just keeps making stuff up and contradicting himself as he goes along???

Singer has been an unstoppable industry gun-for-hire for a long, long time — even for the tobacco industry:

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The rest of the solutions discussion in Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):

We have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.–President Bush, 2006

In the absence of revolutionary changes in energy policy, we are risking multiple disasters for our country that will constrain living standards, undermine our foreign- policy goals, and leave us highly vulnerable to the machinations of rogue states.–Senator Richard Lugar, 2006

Our ever- worsening addiction to oil makes America less secure. Since 1990, we have fought two wars in the Persian Gulf. We suffered a major terrorist attack funded largely by Persian Gulf oil money. Every year we send more than $250 billion overseas because we import most of our oil. Oil prices keep spiking above $70 a barrel, and gasoline above $3 a gallon. The economic lifeblood of our country is held hostage to countries that are antidemocratic and politically unstable–and to terrorists who keep targeting the world’s oil infrastructure. Price spikes above $100 a barrel (and $4 a gallon) are all but inevitable in the coming years. And many fear we may be close to seeing worldwide oil production peak and then decline, which will bring an era of steadily rising oil and gasoline prices.

It’s no wonder that politicians–even those who don’t worry about global warming–keep talking about oil. So why haven’t we taken any serious action on oil for decades? The answer is simple– reducing U.S. oil consumption requires a major government-led effort, such as much tougher mileage standards, and our political leaders have rejected such efforts (except for ones that are merely cosmetic).

The astonishing January 2006 statement by President Bush’s EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, bears repeating: “Are we going to tell people to stop driving their cars, or do we start investing in technology? That’s the answer, investing in those technologies.” This false choice leaves the nation with no oil policy except strong, empty rhetoric suggesting that the cure for our addiction to oil can be found in happy talk about future technology.

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Climate Progress is no fan of using food crops for fuel. Neither, it seems, is the New York Times or the world’s undernourished, with this long article, “An Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories.” The whole story is worth reading, especially for biofuel fanatics (you know who you are, Vinod), but I’ll just reprint the opening here:

Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.

This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.

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