Climate Progress

[We are barreling headlong into “catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100. Bill Becker says it’s time for the federal government to stop subsidizing humanity’s self-destruction. That means the green eyeshades — fiscal managers, accountants, and economists — must start fully accounting for the harm that carbon emissions do to our health and well-being and for the cost of destroying ecosystem services.]

As Congress gets ready to debate an economic recovery package - and President Obama gets ready to sign one — they should use a simple test to determine who and what gets the money: Is the project friend or foe in regard to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing America’s energy security?

At some point, our energy producers, road-builders, auto manufacturers, building contractors and other sectors of the economy need an unequivocal message from Washington that public funds must pass a strict litmus test from now on. Unless there are legitimate overriding factors of national security or economic trauma, public funds will no longer support global climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels.

In other words, when it comes to taxpayer money, the carbon economy need not apply.

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Here are all the year’s posts viewed by 15,000 or more people.

It is a more arbitrary list than the most-discussed posts of 2008, since it is wholly determined by whether I get picked up by some uber-popular website like Digg or if the post pops up in search engines. But I will include this list in the year-end recap if for no other reason than it contains one post guaranteed to make you laugh:

15,933 Views: Physicists forced to reaffirm that human-caused global warming is “incontrovertible”

[The only post to make both lists.]

18,962: The truth-telling ad ABC won’t let you see — and what you can do about it

[This received 1700 Diggs and temporarily crashed my system — otherwise it probably would have gotten considerably more views.]

20,611: Bush launches Unendangered Species List, phones “Rename the Polar Bear” winner

[A lot of people come to Climate Progress after doing a search on polar bears.]

21,848: More conclusive proof of global warming

[If that post doesn’t make you smile, then you are simply impervious to schadenfreude.]

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CNN updates the coal story of the year:

Estimates for the amount of thick sludge that gushed from a Tennessee coal plant last week have tripled to more than a billion gallons, as cleanup crews try to remove the goop from homes and railroads and halt its oozing into an adjacent river.

That would be “enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools” assuming you wanted to fill your pool with “concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.” And that is, as Richard Graves puts it, “more than 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster and, in fact, more than every drop of petroleum used in the United States that day.”

The next time someone says “clean coal,” be sure to do that bit where you cough and say “B.S.” Or maybe skip the couging part.

Related Posts:

• The day ‘clean coal’ died
• Clean coal, meet harsh reality
• Clean coal: Claptrap or crap trap?
• Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?

Time is running out:

Climate change is happening more rapidly than anyone thought possible, the German government’s expert, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warned in an interview.

The threats posed by climate change are worse than those imagined by most governments, warned Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and acts as an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues.

Schellnhuber warns that previous predictions about climate change and its catastrophic effects were too cautious and optimistic.

“In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now,” Schellnhuber told the Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper in an interview published Monday, Dec. 29. “We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize.”

This isn’t news to top climate scientists around the world (see Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path) or even to top climate scientists in this country (see US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, SW faces “permanent drying”) and certainly not to people who follow the scientific literature, like Climate Progress readers (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius”).

But it’s always worth reporting when another leading scientist goes public with the truth that has been too long the bastion of “off the record” remarks:

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Right now, it’s mostly the worst of times for the environment — and hence the health and well-being of current and future generations. David Sassoon of the must-read climate blog SolveClimate has a Dickensian tale I’m reprinting it its entirety below — and what could be more Dickensian than coal and tar!

Coal ash deposits in the USA are now under renewed scrutiny after a giant spill just before Christmas released 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic sludge into Tennessee waterways. Water tests near the spill from the Kingston Fossil Plant showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders. The spill muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

So now a big question mark hangs over the hundreds of coal plants all across the country which store their fly ash in unlined embankments and ponds — like the one that failed last week. Most are situated near rivers that supply water needed by the coal plants to operate.

The NY Times reported that in the US, coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year. It’s the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste, and it’s storage and handling is unregulated. Who knew?

It is yet another measure of the high price of addiction to fossil fuels, which is not only polluting the air and warming the earth, but fouling the nation’s terrestrial and aquatic environment as well. The Tennessee coal spill is a wake up call not only for the coal industry, but the oil industry as well, and not only for America but for Canada, too.

Both nations, still in pursuit of endless supplies of fossil energy, are collaborating on the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands whose byproduct will be spills like the one in Tennessee, only on steroids.

In Alberta, visible from outer space, are 23 squares miles of unstable, unregulated and leaking man-made “tailings ponds” holding the toxic leavings of the mining process. A dam breach is only a matter of time.

Required reading on this subject is Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, recently published to wide acclaim in Canada and set for US release in March. In this context, one chapter in particular called “The Ponds” is of direct and chilling relevance:

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Technology Review has an excellent new article, “Lifeline for Renewable Power: Without a radically expanded and smarter electrical grid, wind and solar will remain niche power sources.”

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The above pics are the Matterhorn, 1960 and 2006. The website DoubleExposure explains:

Global warming is affecting our planet in countless ways, not in some remote future, but today. DOUBLEXPOSURE documents one aspect of the warming climate through fine-art photography that brings the viewer into panoramas of glaciers once grand but now receding. The compelling comparisons put into stark view the fact of melting glaciers.

The actual photos are going on display in a few cities:

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The McKinsey Global Institute has done some of the most comprehensive and credible recent analyses on energy efficiency potential and carbon mitigation cost curves (see “Must read McKinsey report shatters myths on cost of curbing climate change“). They have summarzed their work in “2008 Research in Review,” so this is a good opportunity to create one universal link for their work.

One core MGI factoid you can use: Nearly 40% of the U.S. emissions reduction potential by 2030 is from energy efficiency (see here).

MGI is best known for its comprehensive cost curve for global greenhouse gas reduction measures (click to enlarge), which concluded measures needed to stabilize emissions at 450 ppm have a net cost near zero — the same conclusion as the International Energy Agency and IPCC.

Another 2008 MGI report has its own stunning conclusion:

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If I weren’t on vacation, I wouldn’t have read Oprah magazine. No really. But then I would have missed a piece of misinformation gratuitously foisted on her readers.

For her legion upon legion upon legion of fans, the big news is the O has recently been losing her battle with weight [– one legion does not do her empire justice. Turns out a Roman legion isn’t that big, just a few thousand fighters. Who knew? In any case, Oprah is now bigger than ancient Rome. No, I don’t mean physically — give her a break, it’s only 40 pounds, and she’s under a lot of stress and has a thryoid problem to boot. But I digress]. Even legions have their limits in certain fights.

But for clean energy advocates, it is a single sentence buried deep in the magazine that should be a source of distress:

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The best eco-movie of the year is Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E — easily one of the best movie dystopias ever. It ranks with Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Matrix, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and the first two Terminator movies.

Yes, Hollywood loves dystopias. Perhaps because it is one (okay, technically Hollywood is an anti-utopia).

The worst eco-movie of the year for me was Quantum of Solace. I had been somewhat hopeful upon learning the villain was a green-washing “eco-entrepreneur.” But as a huge James Bond fan, I was quite disappointed. The writing and directing were dreadful, among the worst of the entire series. The story line was incoherent. The characters’ motivations were opaque. And the direction of the action scenes suffered from the Jason Bourne syndrome — way too much fast-cutting.

I still like the grittiness of Daniel Craig — his Bond is much more like Ian Fleming imagined in his books than anyone since the Sean Connery of the early movies. Still, the gritty realism is undercut again and again as one guy with a pistol keeps beating a dozen guys with machine guns — not something you find much in the books.

Environmentally, one incidental character did mention global warming in passing. The only “good” eco-point the movie “exposed” was the danger of hydrogen fuel cells. But even that was an absurd contrivance — with a hotel in the middle of nowhere apparently keeping hydrogen in every room. I’m afraid that’s less plausible than the repeated pistol victories.

As for the brilliantly crafted Wall-E, the movie deserves special attention for two reasons:

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