Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Despite promises to fast-track development of three electric car models using federal loan dollars to prevent its bankruptcy, Chrysler announced yesterday that it will instead disband the engineering team responsible for the projects.

For decades Chrysler has relied on selling gas hogs like trucks and minivans to turn a profit. As the producer of five out of the top 10 most polluting, inefficient passenger vehicles in America, Chrysler has not surprisingly seen its sales plummet by half in the last few years of volatile gas prices. So the plans to become a leader in the electric vehicles market introduced under pre-bailout CEO Bob Nardelli seemed like a welcome change of direction for this old industrial giant.

However, Chrysler’s new CEO Sergio Marchionne, who took leadership of the company after the government-brokered merger with Fiat, is himself personally skeptical of electric vehicles, stating that E.V.’s will only account for one to two percent of overall production by 2015 – a mere 60,000 vehicles.

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An alliance that includes the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI), Johnson Controls, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Jones Lang LaSalle — has come together to green the world’s most famous office building.  By 2013, a team of experts assembled by these organizations aims to reduce the Empire State Building’s energy consumption by 38 per cent, and save its tenants $4.4 million per year in avoided energy costs.

This could be a major flagship project that helps energy efficiency earn its spot next to renewable energy as well-recognized tonic to our environmental and economic ailments (electricity efficiency alone makes up 3 out the 14 stabilization wedges in the full global warming solution).

Of the over 60 efficiency projects that were modeled for the building using cost-benefit curves, the partners identified eight economically viable upgrades:

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I will post the correction “It’s Getting Hot In Here” published:

It saddens me to post a correction here — the AP stories and hundreds of news stories were overstating the victory against mountaintop removal yesterday. And they still are this morning, actually. What really happened is the EPA took action to put on hold two valley fill permits and indicated that hundreds of other pending applications would come under much more strict review.

That’s right, “review” not “moratorium.”

The confusion is so big the EPA put out this grumpy little press release–here’s a depressing clip for you:

EPA will take a close look at other permits that have been held back because of the 4th Circuit litigation. We fully anticipate that the bulk of these pending permit applications will not raise environmental concerns.

You can still call the White House and leave a message thanking President Obama for taking this important first step and then ask for a real moratorium on these permits. 202-456-1111

Even worse, Greenwire reports today:

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I just watched one of the most charming, funny, and educational climate videos ever.

Lanny Smith, an award winning, earthman suit wearing, hip hop rhyming climate change educator combines music, video, and visual arts with excellent web design to explain the complexities of climate change with surprisingly clarity — all without dropping a beat. He manages to take even some of the more complex aspects of climate science (like how melting sea ice creates feedback loops by decreasing the average albedo of the earth’s surface, thus accelerating warming), and makes them accessible through rhyme at the middle school level.

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News from the front: Accompanying Pelosi’s and Reid’s announcement that the Capitol Power Plant will switch to natural gas, more coal plants around the country are on the chopping block due to lawsuits and power companies’ getting wise.

Behind enemy lines, however, the industry-funded front group ACCCE (American Coalition for Clean Coal Euphemisms?) is regrouping and recruiting new allies.

In Tulsa Oklahoma, a proposal to build a second coal-fired generation plant was abandoned last week.

The decision came directly from the project developer (global power giant AES), without litigation, but AES spokesmen were murky about the exact reasons for their decision to pull out, saying only:

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[Sean's post-mortems on coal plants would almost make for a new "Law & Order" series. Every week, another victim bites the dust and another suspect is uncovered, but the motive is always the same -- self-defense. See also the NYT story, "Is America Ready to Quit Coal?"]

I’ve been following coal plant cancellations for the past couple weeks (see my previous two posts on the topic to get caught up), but it has been hard to keep up with the dizzying pace with which municipalities, states, and universities are nixing plans to build new conventional generating capacity.

Now, three more coal plants are on the chopping block in Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin.

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[I am pleased to introduce a new CP blogger: Sean Pool. He is Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. Sean graduated Yale in December 2008 with a double major in environmental engineering and international studies.]

Developers at Southern Montana Electric announced Monday that they are scrapping plans to build a 250-megawatt coal plant. Instead, SME has announced that they will seek financing for 120-megawatts of natural gas-fired generation and six megawatts of wind power.

Earthjustice, a top non-profit environmental law firm, succeeded in convincing the Montana courts that the Department of Environmental Quality should have to take into account the 2.1 million tons of annual carbon dioxide that the plant would emit before giving it the green light.

In addition to the lawsuits, the capital costs of the project had ballooned (in fact, since 2004, the project’s projected cost has doubled from initial estimates of $456 million to nearly $900 million), to a point where the project manager for the facility declared on KBLG radio in Billings, MT that the project “just simply cannot be accomplished.” He went on to cite the “aura of uncertainty” surrounding coal fired power as a leading factor in the decision to switch to gas and wind.

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