The live webstream is here. It starts at noon EST.
I can’t live blog it for obvious reasons.
The event will be also be posted for appointment viewing a few hours after it concludes (here).
Here is CAP’s “A Strategy for Green Recovery.” The jobs analysis is here.
Every few years, people need to be reminded that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion lasts a long, long, long time. How long?
A 2005 study by Geophysicist David Archer, “Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time,” (subs. req’d.) concluded that a large fraction of the CO2 emitted by humans last well in excess of 1000 years:
The mean lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 is dominated by the long tail, resulting in a range of 30–35 kyr.
That’s why we need to stop and reverse the growth of fossil fuel emissions immediately (see “Dr. Hansen to Dr. Merkel: Carbon is forever — so ban new traditional coal plants now“). That’s why we can’t have climate regulations that let companies keep burning coal while they buy rip-offsets.
In the interest of reminding people of this central fact of climate science, Nature online has published, “Carbon is forever.” Turns out Archer has a book out, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, which has this useful figure:
International negotiators are flocking to Poznań, Poland to figure out how to extend the Kyoto protocol, whose climate targets end in 2012. I believe that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process is essentially dead — especially from a United States perspective — as I will discuss this week.
Still, Poznań will be getting a lot of media attention from December 1 to 12, even if the United States is still represented by a bunch of bad cops. So here’s what you need to know. As the website on Poznań, aka COP-14, explains:
In part one, I suggested four principles that President-elect Obama’s economic team should follow as they create an economic recovery package. To sum up,
Obama clearly understands this prescription. He has announced that he will champion a two-year recovery package to create 2.5 million jobs, in part by “creating the clean energy infrastructure of the twenty-first century.” To his credit, he told governors and international leaders meeting in
“I promise you this,” he said in a taped address. “When I am president, any governor who’s willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in
The question is whether the Congress and the American people will support a recovery package designed not just for short-term stimulus, but for long-term health.
Obama hasn’t said how big his investment package will be, but there is speculation it could climb to as much as $700 billion. Here are some suggestions on how some of that money should be allocated:
The Canadian Coast Guard has confirmed that in a major first, a commercial ship travelled through the Northwest Passage this fall to deliver supplies to communities in western Nunavut.
The MV Camilla Desgagnés, owned by Desgagnés Transarctik Inc., transported cargo from Montreal to the hamlets of Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven and Taloyoak in September.
“We did have a commercial cargo vessel that did the first scheduled run from Montreal, up through the eastern Arctic, through the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to communities in the west,” Brian LeBlanc of the Canadian Coast Guard told CBC News.
“That was the first — that I’m aware of anyway — commercial cargo delivery from the east through the Northwest Passage.”
NEW ERA IN ARCTIC SHIPPING?
[Update: The Green Recovery event at CAP will be webcast live here Monday, noon EST.]
When Barack Obama introduced us to his economic team in Chicago this week, you could almost hear an intercom blasting in the background: “Dr. Obama, please report to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, stat.”
The new advisors gathered around the President-elect looked like a crew of brilliant doctors about to go to work on a patient who is flat on his back and suffering a heart attack together with a bunch of strange and confusing symptoms — an apt description of the our economy today.
[JR: Thankfully, Barack is not cantankerous, misanthropic, and Vicodin-addicted, like a certain TV doc modeled after Sherlock Holmes. And hopefully, unlike both George Bush and Gregory House, team Obama won’t nearly kill the patient several times before finding the right cure.]
How the Obama team chooses to diagnose and treat the patient will mean everything for the long-term prognosis. The economy needs more than a jolt from a defilibrator; it needs a heart transplant. The doctors should use the paddles if they must, but the patient needs a lot more treatment, both short and long term.
As Obama’s team begins work on a recovery package, I hope they’ll keep a few guiding principles in mind.
The Washington Post has a good piece on the Herculean effort the new heads of the EPA and Interior Department will face in dealing with the mess the Bushies made. This mess is comparable to the one Hercules cleaned up in his fifth labor when he diverted an entire river to clean up the Augean Stables.
The article also includes the long list of the names that have been floated so far for both agencies
Few federal agencies are expected to undergo as radical a transformation under President-elect Barack Obama as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which have been at the epicenter of many of the Bush administration’s most intense scientific and environmental controversies.
The Politico noticed the “overheated” response to their journalistic blunder (see “Politico pimps global cooling for Hill deniers“). To their credit, they partly acknowledge they made a mistake:
Giving voice to the losing side of a national debate is often fraught with peril. It requires navigating a terrain littered with grudges, slights, insults and hard feelings.
To do that without becoming ensnared requires extraordinary care. In Politico’s case, we slipped.
The article in question was never intended to offer a sweeping examination of the scientific support for or against climate change.
It set out only to provide an update on the last hold-outs against global warming given the dramatic shifts — both electorally and in public opinion — against their position.
Politico found them still feisty and readying for a fight despite their diminishing odds.
That’s the part we got right.
Here’s where we slipped: The headline overstated what was in the story. That’s a chronic problem in the industry that might have been mitigated if the article had plainly stated its narrow intent, which it didn’t. It also should have included the challenges to the cited scientific data.
Indeed, the headline was especially bad: “Scientists urge caution on global warming.” But so was the whole story, which Politico is still reluctant to accept:
[JR: The story doesn’t say, but I assume the solar from the Mojave would be solar baseload aka CSP.]
In Los Angeles on Monday, Mayor Villaraigosa’s office presented a ground-breaking plan to generate 1.3 GW of solar electricity by 2020. But this effort is just one of many initiatives that LA has taken as a leader in urban sustainability and green policies.
The LA Times reports the specifics of the solar plan that Mayor Villaraigosa’s office is hoping to put into action in coming months:
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Climate Progress selected as one of Time Magazine's Fifteen Favorite Websites for the Environment
