Climate Progress

The showdown in Kansas over two proposed coal-fired power plants continues to escalate such that any gamer or game theorist could be entertained for days on end.

After Secretary Rod Bremby rejected the coal plants’ permits, Governor Kathleen Sebelius has twice vetoed legislation attempting to leapfrog Sec. Bremby’s decision. A few weeks ago, the Kansas legislature came one vote short of overriding Sebelius’ veto. And the battle rages on.

The Kansas legislature is likely to try to override again. If they manage, Kansas Lieutenant Governor Mark Parkinson has begun to discuss the Administration’s willingness to take legal action.

The past few months Gov. Sebelius has been clear about her terms of acceptance for legislation. Accompanying her veto, she offered a compromise:

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Extended drought certainly leads to behavior change — and it’s one of the likeliest impacts of human-caused global warming.

Since “Australia today = U.S. southwest by 2050” — let’s go down under to see our future in the making. The BBC News has a good article on “The children at Wattle Park primary school [who] have only ever known drought” [see pretty but parched kids in picture on right].

What is life like for these kids?

When they wake up they use timers to take two minute showers, and collect the water in buckets so it can be re-used in the garden.

At school they have “scarecrow monitors” whose job it is to oversee the filling of more buckets from under the drinking taps to water the school vegetable patch.

Their teacher, Randall Simons, says every drop is now watched carefully, at school and at home.

Sounds like something out of Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. The Aussie kids have lived through ten years of drought, learning:

“Water is precious and we’ve got to realise that water’s not always there. You need to save it,” says Sonia, a pupil at Wattle Park Primary School in Melbourne.

This restriction would be the real toughie for Americans:

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The good news: The earth’s carbon cycle has natural negative feedbacks that reverse natural surges in carbon dioxide.

The bad news: We are spewing CO2 into the atmosphere 14,000 times faster than nature has over the past 600,000 years, far too quickly for those feedbacks to respond.

This comes from “Close mass balance of long-term carbon fluxes from ice-core CO2 and ocean chemistry records,” in Nature Geosciences (subs. reqd, news article here) by Zeebe and Caldeira. Put another way:

“These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change … that we’re going to see in the next several hundred years,” Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. “Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium.“

Zeebe notes that, “the average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume.” Humans have run up CO2 levels 100 ppm over the last two centuries!

In the ancient past, excess carbon dioxide came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed.

This antique excess carbon dioxide — a powerful greenhouse gas — was removed from the atmosphere through the weathering of mountains, which take in the chemical….

The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess carbon dioxide, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.

See, the skeptics were right: The planet is self-healing. You go, deniers [no, seriously, please, just go]! So my great-great-great-great — [insert 10,000 “greats” here] — great-great-great grand-kid will be doing just fine, thank you very much!

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Food riots? Rationing? Governments overthrown?

… a series of poor harvests in the area led to soaring bread prices, provoking food riots…. A worker’s daily bread took 97% of his income…. With bread prices at record levels, hungry mobs attacked the gates … where customs collected taxes on incoming grain convoys. They raided every possible source of arms, ending up with capturing the Bastille prison.

Oh, sorry, that was 1789. No worries, then. Not like that lead to a violent revolution or anything.

Anyway, the Washington Post has a terrific front-page article, “The New Economics of Hunger: A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world’s poor suffer most,” which is the first in a series.

No, national and global mandates for biofuels (= bad energy policy) aren’t the only reason for this emerging catastrophe. Obviously, high oil prices (= bad energy policy) play a role. And then there are those poor harvests in places like Australia due to climate change (= bad energy policy). OK — the last one was kind of a stretch, given that the amount of climate change to date was probably all but inevitable. But my point is that if we don’t drastically reverse our self-destructive energy policies soon, things are going to get much worse….

We have mandates for far more biofuels (see “The Fuel on the Hill — The Corn Supremacy), and we are going to see much higher energy prices (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“) and much worse global drought and desertification (see The Century of Drought“).

What they heck are people supposed to eat then — Biofuels? Apparently that’s what politicians in this country and Europe think. Heck, in a Friday article, “IEA warns against retreat on biofuels,” the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, ironically enough, has this to stay:

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Can’t say I thought there could or should be a climate bill this year (See, “Don’t hold your breath on Lieberman-Warner passing in 2008.”) But what’s going on in that House probably seals the non-deal. E&E Daily (subs. req’d) has the story:

A critical House committee tasked with crafting global warming legislation appears to be stuck in a partisan struggle to find a unified strategy for moving forward.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chairman of the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, complained yesterday that the committee’s GOP leadership won’t allow rank-and-file Republicans to enter negotiations on a mandatory cap-and-trade bill. Without Republicans, Boucher said he doubts there will be legislation.

“We cannot and we should not try to pass a bill through the committee and through the House that is a purely partisan bill,” Boucher said in an interview. “That would be bad policy and I do not think it’d be politically successful either. So unless the Republicans are prepared to cooperate with us, it’s difficult to see what the next step is.”

Hmm. I guess Boucher isn’t a big climate bill fan, if he’s tying its fate to what conservatives want. As if conservatives ever cared what progressives thought when they were running the House. The rest of the story continues:

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[I am retroactively inserting this entry in the series for the sake of completeness. Much of the content has been previously posted.]

What happens if we fail to take the following actions to reverse emissions trends starting in 2009?

1. Start a cap-and-trade system that sets a serious price for CO2.
2. Launch most of the 14 to 16 major mitigation strategies (wedges) described here.
3. Begin a global effort to ban new coal plants that do not capture and store their carbon, an effort that quickly brings in China and other developing countries.

Failing to do that, we are headed to 800 to 1000 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The idea of stabilizing at, say, 550 or 650 ppm, widely held a decade ago, is becoming increasingly implausible given the likelihood that major carbon cycle feedbacks would go into overdrive, swiftly taking the planet to 800 ppm or more. In particular, the top 11 feet of the tundra would probably not survive 550 ppm (a point I will be blogging about soon) and two other key carbon sinks — land-based vegetation and the oceans — already appear to be saturating. That said, even if stabilizing at 550 ppm were possible, it would probably bring catastrophic impacts and in any case requires implementing some 10 wedges starting now.

At 800 to 1000 ppm, the world faces multiple miseries, including:

1. Sea level rise of 80 feet to 250 feet at a rate of 6 inches a decade (or more).
2. Desertification of one third the planet and drought over half the planet, plus the loss of all inland glaciers.
3. More than 70% of all species going extinct, plus extreme ocean acidification.

LIVING/SUFFERING IN A 1000 PPM WORLD

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The Center for American Progress has a nice analysis of the history of incorrect predictions by the utility industry, which invariably overestimate the cost of environment regulations. Daniel J. Weiss and Nick Kong, in an article titled, “Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me,” which begins:

Recent studies by the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and the National Mining Association are predicting a rate increase for electricity if the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) becomes law. These studies–just like others we have seen in the past on acid rain legislation and other bills that address pressing environmental issues–are meant to spark fear in the hearts of legislators and paralyze them with worries about an angry public blaming them for skyrocketing electricity prices and other ills.

These types of predictions have been proven wrong time and time again. Public officials should ignore the rerun of these scare tactics.

You’ll want to read the whole article to catch the terrific table that shows how electricity rates have dropped substantially since 1990, even though the industry had predicted the Clean Air Act would increase rates.

Related Posts:

• Wrong Again 2: Delayers cry wolf with same old Garbage In, Garbage Out economic model
• Wrong Again 1: Business Attacks Climate Security Act

[UPDATE: MSNBC may be around 4:20 pm.]

… corn ethanol and offsets respectively.

Marketplace is local times — and everybody knows they are NOT NPR.

MSNBC is, I think, between 4 and 4:30.

Yes, I know. It’s too late to set your DVR’s. [Note to self: As if.]

Both of these were last minute.

The Marketplace story was triggered by this:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry asked the government to cut “skyrocketing” food prices by waiving half of the renewable fuel standard for ethanol made from grain.

What a great idea! Who ever said all Texas Governors were dumb!

Is $3.25 to $3.50 a gallon the long-awaited for inflexion point for driving a shift in U.S. car-buying habits? Obviously we can’t know for sure, but the Detroit News reported that “cars outsold light trucks” in March. [One auto industry insider told me yesterday that this was only the second time that has ever happened in some two decades.]

Yes, the recession no doubt had an impact on the sales of big, expensive vehicles. But since gasoline prices are going to mostly be going up over the next decade or two, possibly to well above $4 or even $5 a gallon (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!”), this should be (yet one more) wake-up call to Detroit.

What exactly happened in March? According to a cars.com blog:

In March, small cars like the Ford Focus — up 24% — and Honda Fit — up 73.8% — were bright spots almost universally among automakers. Hybrid sales were also up. On the other end of the spectrum, trucks like the Ford F-Series — down 23.8% — and Dodge Ram — down 31% — saw huge losses, as did truck-based SUVs.

Here are their numbers for March 2008 sales performance for a spectrum of cars, trucks, SUVs and hybrids:

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“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” A Biblical proverb for our times, it turns out….

The bark beetle is devastating North American trees (see “Climate-Driven Pest Devours N. American Forests“).

Global warming has created a perfect climate for these beetles — Milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in Wyoming from 80% per year to under 10%, and hotter, drier summers have made trees weaker, less able to fight off beetles. [Picture shows forests turned red by beetle.]

New reseach published in the journal Nature, “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change,” (subs. req’d, abstract reprinted below), quantifies the current and future impact just from the beetle’s warming-driven devastation in British Columbia:

… the cumulative impact of the beetle outbreak in the affected region during 2000–2020 will be 270 megatonnes (Mt) carbon (or 36 g carbon m^-2 yr^-1 on average over 374,000 km² of forest). This impact converted the forest from a small net carbon sink to a large net carbon source.

No wonder the carbon sinks are saturating faster than we thought (see here) — unmodeled impacts of climate change are destroying them:

Insect outbreaks such as this represent an important mechanism by which climate change may undermine the ability of northern forests to take up and store atmospheric carbon, and such impacts should be accounted for in large-scale modelling analyses.

Any “good news” here? Only if you like very dark irony. The accompanying news story (here, subs. req’d) notes:

Even if climate change brings further warm winters to the region, however, experts think this infestation has probably peaked. Mountain pine beetles can only reproduce in the largest trees, which were abundant thanks to a growth spurt after wildfires raged across western North America 80 to 140 years ago. Soon 80 to 90% of those large trees will be gone, Kurz says. “The beetle will eat itself out of house and home, and the population will eventually collapse.”

Hmm. “Eat itself out of house and home.“ Does the bark beetle sound like any other species we know? Finally, the species formerly known as homo sapiens sapiens is no longer alone in its self-destructive quest to destroy its habitat. Inhert the wind, indeed.

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