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Archive for March, 2009

White House endorses Waxman-Markey, Senate Majority Whip Durbin says he doesn’t have 60 votes for it — House GOP keeps lying

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

The White House today offered its endorsement to the 648-page draft climate and energy bill unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman of California and Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts.”President Obama is committed to an energy policy that launches a new sector of clean energy jobs, makes our economy more competitive, and weans the nation off its dependence on foreign oil,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an e-mail. “While we are still reviewing the details, it is clear that Chairman Waxman’s legislation would advance all of those goals, and the president looks forward to working with members of Congress in both chambers to pass a bill that would transition the nation to a clean energy economy.”

So reports E&E News PM (subs. req’d, excerpted below) reports on the new House climate bill (see “First impression of Waxman-Markey” for more details).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she’d try to get GOP votes, but wouldn’t hold the bill up waiting for them.

“We would hope to have Republican votes as we go forward on this,” Pelosi said. “Will I not put it forth unless I do? No. No. There’s an inevitability to this that everyone has to understand.”… House Republican leaders signaled little interest in working with Democrats on the climate and energy bill.

Duh. Then E&E News PM reprinted the standard conservative lie:

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Post by Joe in Politics | 7 Responses

FedEx, GM, Microsoft, Toyota, Visa, and WalMart support Cato, which is buying expensive global warming denier ads attacking Obama

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Comcast, FedEx, GM, Honda, Microsoft, TimeWarner, Toyota (!), Visa, VW, and WalMart — these are among the brand name companies who support the global warming denial promoted by the Cato Institute (full list below).

Many of you have probably now seen that absurd anti-scientific denier ad Cato is spending big bucks to put in major newspapers. “The New York Times ad alone would have cost over $150,000, based on the newspaper’s published ad rates,” notes one article.

The ad attacks President Obama and the whole notion of strong climate action with studies that don’t even support its basic premise — see New study quoted by Cato deniers concludes “warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models” and RealClimate’s excellent post (here).

The ad’s premise — “We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated” — has been utterly debunked by the most comprehensive and up-to-date scientific research in the past two years (see “M.I.T. doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C and “Hadley Center warns of catastrophic 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path” and “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm).”

If we listen to Cato and the ad’s signatories, we are sure to destroy a livable climate for our children and their children and the next fifty generations (see “Intro to impacts: Hell and High Water“).

So I thought as a matter public service, you’d like to see the corporate sponsors of Cato, whose money goes to support its efforts, including this ad and their general disinformation effort (see “The intellectual bankruptcy of the Cato Institute“).

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Post by Joe in Media | 32 Responses

Best headline of the year from World Nuclear News

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

“Money no object for Indian reactor plans”

That is certainly the attitude you need to have if you’re planning to build a bunch of nukes:

Post by Joe in International | 4 Responses

ACEEE: House “CARS” bill to accelerate vehicle scrappage “would not achieve its energy and environmental objectives.”

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

The recently introduced Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save (CARS) Act (H.R. 1550) is seriously flawed, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

The ACEEE is one of the most respected organizations in the country analyzing and promoting sound energy efficiency policies. I have worked with them many times over the past two decades. Here is their press release:

March 31, 2009

Washington, D.C.: ACEEE commends the intent of Representative Sutton, sponsor of the CARS Act, to help the U.S. auto industry emerge successfully from the current crisis while reducing oil dependence and global warming emissions. Unfortunately, the vehicle scrappage program outlined by the bill as introduced would not achieve its energy and environmental objectives.

The most serious shortcomings of the bill are:

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Post by Joe in Solutions | 6 Responses

First impression of Waxman-Markey: A solid bill that boosts the economy, creates green jobs, and puts the country on a path to preserve a livable climate. Grade: B+

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ed Markey (D-MA) are releasing their long-awaited draft energy and climate bill today. Based on reports from a Committe debrief and an E&E Daily story this morning (subs. req’d, excerpted below) and a Reuters story (here), I’ll give some first impressions.

[UPDATE: Full 648-page (!) bill is here and summary is here. More comments to come, but first impression stays the same. I agree with the Greenpeace statement, "Waxman-Markey Draft a Good First Step, but Improvements Needed."]

Waxman-Markey seems pretty good. It will jumpstart the crucial transition to a green economy. It keeps the overall impact to U.S. businesses and consumers very low (as any smart climate bill would, see “Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar“). And it has the targets needed for the U.S. to join other countries in averting catastrophic lobal warming impacts that are inevitable if we stay on our current emissions path.

I’d give it a B+.The bill, as Friday’s Waxman-Markey-Dingell-Boucher letter suggested, uses the flawed US Climate Action Partnership proposal as a blueprint (see “NRDC and EDF endorse the weak, coal-friendly, rip-offset-heavy USCAP climate plan“).

But it has stronger near-term targets: “a 20 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2020.” And the bill embraces the useful USCAP notion of a medium-term target — in this case “a 42 percent reduction in 2030.” That target sends a strong message that business-as-usual is off the table for fossil fuel companies. It also keeps the needed 80% cut in 2050.

It has both a renewable electricity standard for utilities (25 percent in 2025, though “a fifth can be met with efficiency measures”) and an energy efficiency resource standard — two essential provision for jumpstarting a transition to a clean energy, green jobs economy, while keeping total energy bills low. It also establishes a Low Carbon Fuel Standard — eventually, which is to say apparently after 2022.

One reason the bill doesn’t get an “A” is because it still allows too many offsets — 2 billion, whereas total U.S. GHGs in 2005 were about 7.2 billion tons (see “Bush policies cause U.S. GHG emissions to soar 1.4% in 2007“). The good news is you apparently have to purchase 5 tons of offsets to substitute for 4 tons of actual emissions reductions and you can’t get international offsets from a country that has not agreed to reduce its emissions — which together are vast improvements over USCAP.

The provisions on new coal plants do not strike me as tough enough for the next few years, but don’t lose much sleep — or lower the overall grade for this bill too much — over this since the Obama administration is probably not going allow very many new dirty coal plants anyway (see “EPA makes landmark finding: Global warming threatens public health and welfare“).

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Post by Joe in Politics | 13 Responses

Only the most ambitious emissions reductions under discussion within UNFCCC can achieve climate goals

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Countries representing 190 nations are participating in United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change talks this week (see Climate Envoy Stern in Bonn: The U.S. can’t “ride in on a white horse and make it all work”). Guest blogger Andrew Jones and Elizabeth Swain has been doing important modeling work on what climate commitments are needed to avert catastrophic impacts in a post first published here.

mar-28-croads-graph-3The diplomats at this week’s UNFCCC meeting in Bonn will need to aim towards the most ambitious proposals offered so far within the UNFCCC process if they want a global agreement later this year that will stabilize CO2 levels in the range of 350-450 ppm.

The figure to the left — the output of the C-ROADS simulator — explains why.

We collected emissions reductions proposals in the public domain up until March 10, 2009 (called “Current Proposals” in the graph and documented here) — and found that even if they were fully implemented they would be far from sufficient to meet the goal of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels at or below 450 ppm, reaching instead about 730 ppm by 2100.

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Post by Guest in International | 13 Responses

Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Since the nation is about to launch into a long debate about the costs of climate action versus the cost of inaction, here is an overview of the major cost analyses of global climate action.

In its definitive 2007 synthesis report of the scientific literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded:

In 2050, global average macro-economic costs for mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1% gain and 5.5% decrease of global GDP. This corresponds to slowing average annual global GDP growth by less than 0.12 percentage points.

So global GDP drops by under 0.12% per year — about one tenth of a penny on the dollar — even in the 445 ppm CO2-eq case (through 2050, see Table SPM.7). And this is for stabilization at 445 ppm CO2-eq, which is stabilization at 350 ppm CO2 (see Table SPM.6).

And that has a very good chance of averting the incalculable cost of catastrophic global warming impacts to the next 50 generations, which means the cost of action is far, far less than the cost of inaction.

The IPCC’s conclusion — and every single word in the report — was signed off on by 130 nations including China and the Bush Administration. Nor is this an especially controversial conclusion, at least among the few groups that have done comprehensive global economic and energy modeling:

mgi-cost-curve-small.jpg

How can the world’s leading governments and scientific experts and McKinsey and the traditionally conservative International Energy Agency agree that we can avoid catastrophe for such a small cost?

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Post by Joe in Economics | 25 Responses

Global warming denier Dennis Avery doesn’t know the difference between growth and growth rate

Monday, March 30th, 2009

The American Daily has just published this laughably wrong piece of disinformation by long-term global warming denier Dennis Avery, “Now CO2 is Declining as well as Temperatures.” Before AD and Avery take it down, let’s look at what passes for analysis among the deniers. The piece opens:

The atmospheric CO2 levels at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory have declined since 2004. How can this be when humans keep emitting more greenhouse gases? Could declining atmospheric CO2 levels mean that the whole Greenhouse Warming theory is collapsing?

Now let’s look at the Mauna Loa data, something Avery didn’t bother to do (from the NOAA website here):

mauna-loa.gif

Doh!

Avery is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. I guess for conservative economists, “declined” means “steadily increased.” I guess that’s why, after eight years of being run by conservative economics, the economy is in such bad shape. [Insert your conservative economist joke here in the comments.] But I digress.

What’s especially laughable about this piece of “analysis” is that not only didn’t Avery check the Mauna Loa data, which would take maybe 10 seconds to find with Google — he apparently didn’t bother reading his original source or look at the title of his own footnote, which is “Mauna Loa Rate of Change.”

Avery’s inanity is actually based on some torturous and cherry-picked analysis from the winner of the 2008 Weblog Award for Best Anti-Science Blog, “Watts Up With That” [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"].

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Post by Joe in Science | 45 Responses

Senate energy bill starting point

Monday, March 30th, 2009

The House will be announcing its comprehensive energy and climate bill Tuesday. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, however, “has been working to produce a bipartisan, comprehensive energy bill since the beginning of this Congress,” as a new press release explains.

The Committee, chaired by Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), will be marking up their bill Tuesday. They have just released an outline of key details, which I reprint below. Key features include authorizing the doubling of R&D, a major initiative to create a domestic battery industry for electric vehicles, and a major push to develop and deploy energy-efficient and low-carbon technologies for industry (which I will blog on a later).

Notably missing is a renewable electricity standard and an energy efficiency standard:

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Post by Joe in Politics | 7 Responses

Must read Newsweek stunner: Why the “status quo” establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatally useless, Part 1

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Averting catastrophic global warming requires completely overturning the status quo, changing every aspect of how we use energy — and doing so in under four decades (see “The full global warming solution“). Failure to do so means humanity’s self-destruction, Hell and High Water.

Media coverage of the problem and the solution has been dreadful (see “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress” and here). But why?

In his new cover story on Paul Krugman, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas unintentionally provides the answer — the shocking, unstated truth about the media elite: They have “a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are.”

Assuming we don’t spend the mere 0.11% of GDP per year needed to avert catastrophe, future generations who are puzzled about our fatal myopia need look no further for explanation than Thomas’s full remarks. He begins with the amazing admission, “If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am),” and continues with words that should be emblazoned across journalism schools around the country and read out loud at every Ivy league college graduation:

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Post by Joe in Media | 21 Responses

Climate Envoy Stern in Bonn: The U.S. can’t “ride in on a white horse and make it all work.”

Monday, March 30th, 2009

You will not hear anyone on my team cast doubt upon or downplay the threat of global climate change. The science is clear, and the threat is real. The facts on the ground are outstripping the worst case scenarios. The costs of inaction–or inadequate actions–are unacceptable.

But along with this challenge comes a great opportunity. By transforming to a low-carbon economy, we can stimulate global economic growth and put ourselves on a path of sustainable development for the 21st century. I would go so far as to say that those who hang back and cling to a high-carbon path will be economic losers in the end because with the scientific facts of global warming getting worse and worse, high-carbon products and production methods will not be viable for long.

So chief negotiator Todd Stern told delegates to the 190-nation climate talks kicking off today in Bonn, Germany. In a Q&A, he said, “The United States is going to be powerfully and fervently engaged in this process.”

You can read a U.S. news story, “U.S. Climate Envoy Vows Support: Commitment to Global Talks Affirmed Even as Caveat Is Issued,” here; a German one, “Bonn Climate Talks Give Obama’s Green Team First Chance to Impress,” here; and Stern’s full transcript here. Stern acknowledged the need for U.S. action:

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Post by Joe in International | 5 Responses

Waxman, Markey, Dingell, and Boucher embrace climate action, praise USCAP proposal

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Four key members of the House Energy and Commerce committee sent a letter to President Obama Friday (full text below) embracing the urgent need for climate action:

We represent different regions of the country and approach energy issues from different perspectives, but we are united in the view that now is the time for Congress to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation….

As scientists learn about the dangers of “tipping points” in the global ecosystem and their potentially disastrous consequences, the need for decisive efforts grows increasingly urgent.

Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ed Markey (D-MA) — who will release a draft energy and climate bill Tuesday — were joined by the two people they dethroned (see here and here) in this call for action.

Unfortunately, they seem to embrace the relatively wimpy US Climate Action Partnership proposal (see “NRDC and EDF endorse the weak, coal-friendly, rip-offset-heavy USCAP climate plan“):

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Post by Joe in Politics | 2 Responses

A Call for Action from China Hands

Monday, March 30th, 2009

[With global climate negotiators meeting in Bonn, this week will have more of an international flavor. Here's another guest post from Charlie McElwee, an international energy & environmental lawyer and Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of Law who writes the blog China Environmental Law.]

A number of well-respected US think tanks and NGO’s have recently issued reports and roadmaps that urge greater cooperation between the US and China on global warming issues and less finger pointing. For the most part, the proposals make very positive contributions and should aid the fight to reduce the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Many other NGO’s have been working on the ground in China for years and are also making important contributions to efforts to trim China’s carbon emissions. These efforts deserve our support (and thanks), and should continue.

Here’s the problem. We are fast approaching the point (Copenhagen, December 2009) where the rubber will (must!) hit the road. We are operating under an international framework that supports a “common, but differentiated” approach to global climate change negotiations. The “differentiated” component means that less is expected of “developing” countries, like China, than developed ones. The crucial question is how “differentiated” should China’s obligations be? Is China more like the US or more like Haiti? China’s historical as well as current and future carbon emission projections need to be considered in answering this question and tailoring its contributions to carbon reduction efforts.

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Post by Guest in International | 2 Responses

NYT’s Matt Wald blows the “Alternative and Renewable Energy” story, quotes only industry sources, ignores efficiency and huge cost of inaction

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

[If readers have other good sources and citations for electricity costs, please put them in the comments.]

I have known the New York Times energy reporter, Matt Wald, for 15 years, and generally think he is pretty good. But he has published perhaps the most flawed, inaccurate, and indefensible article in his career.

Wald’s piece could also be a poster child for award-winning journalist Eric Pooley’s searing critique of the media’s coverage of climate economics (see How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics — “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress”).

And, amazingly, as we will see, a report by one of Wald’s two industry sources completely disagrees with the report by the other industry group Wald cites! In fact, new Concentrated solar thermal power Solar Baseload is already competitive with new gas-fired generation and likely to have better economics in 2015.

The first flaw is that Wald completely ignores the lowest cost electricity strategy — energy efficiency — even though the article’s headline is “Cost Works Against Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources in Time of Recession,” and a major point of the piece is that “Curbing carbon dioxide emissions — a central part of tackling climate change — will almost certainly raise electricity prices, experts say.”

Wald never tells the reader that until the economic collapse, traditional sources of power have been rising much faster in cost than alternatives (see “Power plants costs double since 2000 — Efficiency anyone?“). He also never mentions that efficiency, which costs two cents to four cents a kilowatt hour (not counting ancillary benefits, including no need for new transmission), is the only new source of power that is both pollution free and far cheaper than current electricity rates (see “Efficiency, Part 3: The only cheap power left“).

The media simply needs to start talking more about electricity bills, which encompassses, efficient use of energy, than electricity rates.

Second, just as Pooley specifically warns against, Wald only cites industry sources for cost — and, surprise, surprise, they have absurd and indefensible numbers. Indeed, the clearest evidence article of bias is the utterly insupportable cost estimate for nuclear power Wald cites from a Black & Veatch study, “a new nuclear reactor, 10.8 cents.”

Matt, say it ain’t so. Let’s be clear here. That number is beyond unsupportable. There is not a utility or nuclear power plant provider in the country who would guarantee 10.8 cents/kwh in a Public Utility Commission (PUC) hearing. You would have trouble finding one that would guarantee twice that rate in year one of operation.

Let’s remember that “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour.” Moody’s — a far less biased source than Wald cites — puts new nuclear at over 15 c/kwh (see here). Earlier this year, Time wrote “new nuclear energy is on track to cost 15¢ to 20¢ per kilowatt-hour,” and I published a detailed cost study this year that put it at 25 to 30 c/kwh (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“).

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Post by Joe in Economics, Media | 17 Responses

NYT’s Tom Friedman updates the global warming threat and spells out the solution

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

[Please Digg this post by clicking here.]

The NYT columnist Tom Friedman has another terrific global warming piece today, “Mother Nature’s Dow.” He is the only major national columnist or reporter consistently warning the public of what science now tells us is likely result of continuing on our current greenhouse gas emissions path — unmitigated unconscionable catastrophe. And he is the only one laying out the solution in detail. In this post I will endeavor to annotate his column for new and old readers who want more.

Friedman begins by noting, “I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once.” This piece is in some sense a sequel to his one from three weeks ago, see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?” He then lays out the climate realist position, noting:

If you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago.

He cites two scientific sources:

For more sources on this climate realist position, see “An introduction to global warming impacts.”

Then he lays out the five key policies needed to avert this catastrophe, the “climate bailout.” He cites Hal Harvey, CEO of “a new $1 billion foundation, ClimateWorks, set up to accelerate the policy changes that can avoid climate catastrophe by taking climate policies from where they are working the best to the places where they are needed the most”:

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Post by Joe in Solutions | 23 Responses

An Introduction to Climate Progress

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

For any first time visitors here because of Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday New York Times, “Mother Nature’s Dow,” this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress. [I will blog later Sunday about the column itself.] Tom described me in an earlier column as

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

U.S. News & World Report features me in their April issue as one of five “key players” who are “Driving Public Policy in Washington,” writing:

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Post by Joe in Climate Progress | 31 Responses

Great music video (!) on energy efficiency

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

“This record’s going LEED platinum.”

Post by Joe in Humor | Leave a response

And Obama gives the best clean energy and global warming solutions job to …

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

http://i.fe.imwx.com/web/fe/2008/11/hotlist-08czoi.jpgCathy Zoi, CEO of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) under Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Zoi has a unique combination of expertise in clean energy and high level federal government experience — she was Chief of Staff in the Clinton White House Office on Environmental Policy, managing the staff working on environmental and energy issues (full bio here, recent writing below). Since I have known Zoi for nearly 2 decades and since in 1997 I held the job she is now nominated for, I can personally attest she will be able to hit the ground running in the crucial job of overseeing the vast majority of the development and deployment of plausible climate solutions technology.

What does EERE do? You could spend hours on their website, here, exploring everything they are into. Of the 12 to 14 most plausible wedges the world needs to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm — the full global warming solution — EERE is the principal federal agency for working with businesses to develop and deploy the technology for 11 of them!

The stimulus and the 2009 budget dramatically increases — more than doubles — EERE funding for technology development and deployment. Zoi’s most important job is deployment, deployment, deployment. And again she is a uniquely qualified to get clean energy into the marketplace. Zoi was a manager at the US Environmental Protection Agency where “she pioneered the Energy Star Program,” which was the pioneering energy efficiency deployment program launched in the early 1990s.

So we know Zoi gets energy efficiency. Here’s what she wrote last year about “Embracing the Challenge to Repower America“:

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Post by Joe in Solutions | 21 Responses

“Three Mile Island still haunts U.S. reactor industry” on 30th anniversary of partial meltdown

Friday, March 27th, 2009

three-mile-island28mar04.GIF

Inside a nuclear power plant 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, the first of a series of pumps supplying vital cooling water to the reactor unaccountably “tripped,” or shut down, at 36 seconds after 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979.

The tense, sometimes terrifying week that followed, marked by official confusion and “surreal” misstatements about the crisis’s severity, became known forever as the Three Mile Island accident, named after the reactor site on the Susquehanna River.

So opens the Greenwire (subs. req’d) story, the source for my headline. Now the nuclear power industry is trying to make a comeback, 30 years after the event that defined it for a generation.

But the legacy of TMI looms. As Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner, has noted:

The abiding lesson that Three Mile Island taught Wall Street was that a group of N.R.C.-licensed reactor operators, as good as any others, could turn a $2 billion asset into a $1 billion cleanup job in about 90 minutes.

Nuclear power has many, many other limitations:

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Post by Joe in Solutions | 27 Responses

What exactly is the power industry’s position on cap and trade?

Friday, March 27th, 2009

The electric power industry would be affected more than any other by a major climate bill. So the industry’s position on climate legislation is worth understanding. Consider this post weekend reading on the subject.

As Peter Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, testified to Congress in 2007:

If we do not act now, the U.S. will miss the opportunity the become a technology leader, improving our competitiveness, while at the same time increasing the risks that dramatic climate change will occur, stressing both our economy and our citizens.”

To the extent that the power industry speaks with one voice — which as we will see it doesn’t (see article reprinted at the end) — it is represented by Edison Electric Institute here, which offers these principles:

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Post by Joe in Politics | 6 Responses

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