Climate Progress

Occasionally, deniers commenters say I focus too much on the inordinate number of positive or amplifying feedbacks, whereby an initial warming causes changes that lead to more warming:

• Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks
• Wetlands destruction — another climate feedback
• Tundra 3: Forests and fires foster feedbacks
• Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees — thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
• The desertification-global warming feedback.
• Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part II

But just to show how balanced this blog is, I’m happy to report that researchers have found a (temporary) negative feedback that could slow some of the impacts of global warming:

(more…)

[This series is based in part on the Salon article, “Why we never need to build another polluting power plant.”]

Energy efficiency is by far the biggest low-carbon resource available (see Part 1) — and it is as limitless as wind, PV, and solar baseload (see Part 2). It is also the cheapest power you can buy, by far.

California has cut annual peak demand by 12 GW — and total demand by about 40,000 GWh — over the past three decades. The cost of efficiency programs has averaged 2-3¢ per kW — which is about one fifth the cost of electricity generated from new nuclear, coal and natural gas-fired plants. And, of course, energy efficiency does not require new power lines and does not generate greenhouse gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.

“Power plants costs have doubled since 2000” and electricity from new nuclear plants, in particular, has become absurdly expensive — 15¢ a kilowatt hour. Even wind power, now the cheapest of all new generation, has seen its price creep up in recent years — although that is expected to reverse over the next few years.

But year after year, efficiency stays absurdly cheap — indeed, it has even gotten cheaper as utilities have gotten smarter, as is clear from analysis by the California Energy Commission:

(more…)

Polluters pay McCain, that is, when he flip flops.

“Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling” blares the Washington Post headline today:

Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month — three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban — compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

(more…)

Joe Romm, one of the fastest bloggers in the post-typewriter era, was both quick and correct in his analysis of T. Boone Pickens’ energy plan. If you’re reading this, Mr. Pickens, have your people call Joe’s people. You guys need to talk.

Since Pickens’ $58 million ad campaign is likely to be with us for awhile, I’d like to add some thoughts to Joe’s, particularly about the highest and best use of America’s remaining and responsibly recoverable natural gas supplies.

First, my two cents on wind: As Joe points out, Pickens’ wind strategy is on the right track. In effect, the former oilman is proposing that America do what Texas is doing. Texas leads the nation in wind power. In a series of progressive actions in recent years, the state legislature established a renewable energy portfolio standard that was quickly achieved, and put a program in place to identify where the electric grid should be expanded to reach places where the wind blows most. Today, Texas is considering an investment of $6.4 billion to build new transmission capable of moving 17,000 megawatts of new wind power.

Pickens doesn’t want to wait for the bureaucracy. He’s investing $2 billion to build the world’s largest wind farm and plans to pay for the transmission lines that will carry the power from the Texas panhandle to Dallas.

(more…)

Mapping out policy work for the next couple of months and pushing aside today’s hottest energy issues for tomorrow’s, one topic is emerging as a painfully true, slumbering giant - the rising costs of home heating during the winter and the additional financial burden on Americans.

I could explain more, but I don’t really have to. The New York Times editorial team took care of it in this morning’s paper, and it’s worth reiterating here, there and everywhere:

(more…)

India develops a ‘policy framework’ to deal with climate change - ClimateWire (subs. req’d): The Indian government has taken a major step as a developing country (and emerging economy) to outline a policy framework that recognizes anthropogenic warming and creates eight issue-specific initiatives, most specifically on energy efficiency and solar technology development and deployment.

The response from experts and the international community has been varied. Clearly, there’s evidence of significant political progress. But the action plan is still just a plan, with no numeric targets for reductions and lacking details for execution. And the plan still prioritizes economic development over lowering emissions. India has a right to develop, but at this point, clean economic development should trump all.

Of course, another major setback to the report is that the balancing act it’s attempting is clearly a signal that India is waiting on meaningful action from the United States before it puts itself too far out on the limb.

World Bank Criticized on Environmental Efforts - New York Times:

(more…)

Some of us had high hopes for Stephen Johnson when President Bush appointed him in March 2005 as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Johnson was not a former oil-industry lobbyist or Halliburton executive. He was a career civil servant who had been with the federal government for 24 years. He was a scientist, not a political hack, and he had served under both Democrat and Republican presidents.

I could relate, although my federal career was the reverse of Johnson’s:

(more…)

I’m supposed to be on today to discuss the results of the new United States Geological Survey of fossil resources north of the Arctic Circle:

The assessment, which took four years, found that the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

As I noted two years ago,

The Arctic has enormous oil resources, but, of course, the burning of oil is one of the principal sources of human-generated greenhouse gases. So If you look up “irony” in some not-so-distant-future dictionary, you may well see a picture of an oil tanker in ice-free polar waters filling up on an Arctic oil well.

I’ll blog more on this later, but here are the key new factoids from the USGS survey:

(more…)

Energy efficiency is by far the biggest low-carbon resource available (see Part 1). It is also, as we’ll see, every bit as renewable as wind power, solar photovoltaic, and solar baseload.

People who have little experience with what serious energy efficiency investments can do for a company or a state — this means you, neoclassical economists who consistently overestimate the cost of climate mitigation! – think it is a one-shot resource wherein you pick the low hanging fruit. In fact, fruit grow back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more and more people.

After leading the country in comprehensive efficiency efforts that have kept per capita electricity demand flat for three decades, California does not merely believe it can continue at this pace, they plan to accelerate their efforts and actually keep electricity demand itself flat. I have discussed California’s efforts and plans in previous posts (see Policies in Need of Californication and California makes efficiency “business as usual”), and will discuss them further in Part 3.

The focus of this post is the best corporate example of the inexhaustible nature of the energy efficiency resource — Dow Chemical’s Louisiana division.

(more…)

Carbon Retirement — you read it here first (or maybe second).

I don’t normally endorse individual companies. But I have long thought European allowances were the best alternative to offsests and am delighted someone has made a business out of it.

The business opportunity is clear — offsets suck. At a policy level, they can destroy the environmental value of climate legislation (see “Boxer bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025” and “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“).

At a personal level, lots of vendors are selling very dubious offsets, including CCX (see here and here and here). I can’t imagine why you would waste your money on the most popular offsets, trees (see no trees and certainly not a Northern forest — heck, even offset seller Terrapass disses trees). And don’t get Climate Progress started on the other popular offset, RECs (see “Schendler Part II: Good RECs vs. Bad RECs“).

But I know some of you out there really want to be carbon neutral, and while you have bought 100% renewable power for your superefficient home that uses a geothermal heating and cooling system to replace natural gas, and you bought a Prius for the family car and you telecommute, you just haven’t figured out how to avoid some driving and flying.

What to do? Buy real emissions credits from the European market and retire them permanently! Now that is the best idea since solar baseload.

(more…)