Climate Progress

The Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR) predicts “a 59 percent chance the annual minimum sea ice record will be broken this fall for the third time in five years.” Pretty amazing prediction when you consider we supposedly had record refreezing of Arctic ice last fall and are only now coming out of a month-long Ice Age.

According to the researchers, “63 percent of the Arctic ice cover is younger than average, and only 2 percent is older than average“:

“Based on the current sea ice conditions, aerospace engineering Research Professor Jim Maslanik said the Northern Sea Route — the shipping lane from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean along the Russian coastline — might also open up this summer. “It also is quite possible that extensive ice-free conditions could develop at or near the North Pole,” said Maslanik.

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[UPDATE: MSNBC may be around 4:20 pm.]

… corn ethanol and offsets respectively.

Marketplace is local times — and everybody knows they are NOT NPR.

MSNBC is, I think, between 4 and 4:30.

Yes, I know. It’s too late to set your DVR’s. [Note to self: As if.]

Both of these were last minute.

The Marketplace story was triggered by this:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry asked the government to cut “skyrocketing” food prices by waiving half of the renewable fuel standard for ethanol made from grain.

What a great idea! Who ever said all Texas Governors were dumb!

Okay, I didn’t make their Top 50 Eco Blogs post, but in honour of Earth Day, they created “an extra helping of eco blogs — this time compiled from your suggestions on Green Central.” So thank all of you who wrote in for me!

The new list is here. Climate Progress is under “The big picture”:

Climate Progress - Former energy advisor to the Clinton administration Joseph Romm’s blog; tool up on insider eco knowledge.

Here are the other nine:

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The “Car of the Future,” starring the “Car Talk” guys, is tonight. More info and links to my clips are here.

I was shocked when I read the news about my friend and colleague:

Alexander E. Farrell, an associate professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked closely with state government over the past year to chart a course to reduce California’s carbon emissions, died earlier this week at his home in San Francisco. He was 46.

You can read the full obituary here. You can watch a video of him discussing the California low carbon fuel standard (LCFS), which he helped develop, here. He was director of the UC Berkley Transportation Sustainability Research Center, and, as you can see, he was both passionate and analytical, eloquent and scientific.

I was doubly shocked when I found out that he “had taken his life,” as one of his recent coauthors, Michael O’Hare, blogged –

Yesterday everyone associated with the Energy and Resources Group gathered to try to make sense of it and we failed completely. The afternoon before he died he was emailing people about plug-in hybrid batteries. No-one saw it coming, no-one remembered a conversation or a hint that he was in despair or depressed about anything.

I certainly did not see it coming. Sure, this can be a tough field to work in — coming to grips with humanity’s apparent disregard for the health and well-being of future generations. But I mostly heard a lot of optimism from him, since he was a leader on analyzing solutions and providing serious policies in the one state in this country that is taking climate as seriously as it deserves.

I have known Alex for many years, since June 2003, in fact, when he coauthored an article for Science, “Rethinking Hydrogen Cars,” (subs. req’d), and I emailed him, since I was researching a book at the time. He was superb at quantifying the difficult to quantify, and I cited him in my 2004 book as follows:

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Kudos to U.S. New and World Report for publishing multiple stories on energy efficiency — “Can America Use Less Energy?” — even if all of my interview ended up on the cutting room floor, something that used to bug me a lot before I got this blog. The editors, and stories’ chief reporter Marianne Lavelle, deserve much credit for focusing on a subject that is not sexy by any journalistic definition of the term:

It’s deceptively comforting, the warm glow of the suburbs after nightfall. But a fiend lurks where the light pours from the windows of too-often-empty rooms. The monster within is America’s voracious demand for power; despite the threat to bank account and planet, we keep using more. The steps to tame electricity in the home are known but hard to manage in our technology-rich world. Workplace energy waste does nothing to bolster the economy, although creative ideas abound for battling the beast. A key move may be to give power companies rewards for efficiency. Leadership will be essential, but the politics of sacrifice doesn’t play well. Individuals must take the first steps; a starting place is unnecessary consumption by computers. And if you must have new gadgets, look at those that help monitor energy use, curb it, and even generate clean power.

The stories, with links, are:

Three Ways Businesses Can Save on Power
Factories and offices often waste energy needlessly [Be sure to read the stuff on cogen–I’ll be blogging more on that later this week.]

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On Tuesday, Nova will be broadcasting their “Car of the Future,” episode. You can read all about it here. And while I didn’t make the preview, they have posted online 30 (!) clips they have of me talking about climate change and cars, especially plug-in hybrids.

Here is the program description:

Tom Magliozzi has a problem. The wacky cohost of NPR’s Car Talk needs to replace his beloved 1952 MG roadster. But in today’s car market, where should he turn? Is new technology about to transform the way we drive? Tom and his brother Ray hit the road in this program for a lighthearted but shrewd take on America’s four-wheeled future.

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… will be the focus of next week’s posts, which seems appropriate for Earth Day week. [Note to self: Write a post explaining why that is a lousy name for a “Day” — it really should be called “Self-preservation Day.”]

If you are a visiting here for the first time because of Time magazine, then the first thing you should do is read the “Most Popular Posts,” on the sidebar, which should tell you whether or not this is the website for you. Read the comments on those posts, to give you an idea of the vibrant community we have here. I hope you’ll join in.

You might also read some of the posts under the “Humor” Category — I try to inject as much humor and snarkiness into the blog as possible, since otherwise the self-destruction of human civilization as we know it can be a somewhat downbeat subject, I’ve been told.

And you are in luck, because next week I am going to lay out the solution to global warming — yes, there really is only one. I was going to do it this week but McCain’s lame gas tax holiday (see here) and Bush’s lamer climate speech (see here) sucked up too much of my time. I did, however, discuss “Concentrated solar thermal power — a core climate solution,” and that is worth reading since I think CSP maybe the single biggest provider of new carbon-free electricity this century, certainly bigger than coal with carbon capture and storage.

Thanks for stopping by!

Turns out the latest green issue of Time (online) has a list of the top 15 Green Websites selected by its editors. Climate Progress is on it (click here) — one of the few websites devoted to global warming on the list. Here is what Time says (and I do think they start out with my best headline ever, on the IPCC Synthesis Report):

“Debate over. Further delay fatal. Action not costly.” This headline pretty much sums up Joe Romm’s message. Romm is a one-man anti-disinformation clearinghouse. His Climate Progress blog, a project of the liberal Center for American Progress, counters bad science and inane rhetoric with original analysis delivered sharply, usually with either humor or incredulity or both. Romm occupies the intersection of climate science, economics and policy. Resist temptation to lump him in with knee-jerk enviros. On his blog and in his most recent book, Hell and High Water, you can find some of the most cogent, memorable, and deployable arguments for immediate and overwhelming action to confront global warming (with infrequent guest bloggers — present company included).

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I now seem to be on some media distribution list to gin up early PR. Green publicists of the world — Bring it on!

Here are links to key stories (plus some summaries, from Time):

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