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

Geothermal energy is a core climate solution (as discussed here).  The U.S. currently has 3 gigaWatts (3000 megaWatts) of geothermal, one third of the world’s capacity, generating $1.8 billion electricity sales.  The US Geological Survey estimates the US could generate 150,000 megawatts of geothermal.  A major 2007 study by MIT on Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) found that it could be a provider of substantial baseload (24/7) power.  MIT’s panel concluded that “with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period” — “less than the cost of a single, new-generation, clean-coal power plant” — “EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale that would produce more than 100,000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050.”

The Philippines has almost 2,000 MW of geothermal and are looking to harness another 620 MW.   Above is a view of the National Power Corp.’s Makiling-Banahaw Geothermal plant in Laguna province south of the capital Manila.

Philippines targets $2.5 billion geothermal development

The Philippine government aims to approve contracts to explore and develop the country’s massive geothermal energy resources, which could attract more than $2.5 billion in private investment, an official said.

The Philippines, the world’s second-largest developer of geothermal energy, plans to approve 19 deals in the next five months to allow foreign and domestic companies access to geothermal projects, the division chief for geothermal energy at the Philippine Energy Department, Alejandro Oanes, told Reuters.

Philippine power producer Energy Development Corp and Envent, a unit of Geysir Green Energy, one of Iceland’s biggest geothermal energy companies, were among groups vying for contracts to tap the country’s geothermal resources, he said.

“Incentives for renewable projects are giving (the country’s) geothermal development a much needed boost,” said Oanes in a telephone interview from Manila.

Tax holidays and tariff exemptions for renewable energy projects are boosting investment in clean energy in the Philippines, with the government recently awarding 87 contracts to develop alternative energy sources.

Geothermal power accounted for 17 percent of the country’s total power mix at the end of 2008, with installed capacity close to 2,000 megawatts, energy department data showed.

The government was issuing tenders for the development of 10 geothermal sites and negotiating nine more deals directly with various companies, Oanes said. Combined, the deals could harness more than 620 megawatts of geothermal energy.

Geothermal sites covered in the deals include Mount Isarog, in Camarines Sur province, where about 70 MW of geothermal power could be developed. The government is also looking at resources in Mount Labo, Camarines Norte with a potential capacity of 65 MW.

(more…)

As we approach the climate conference in Copenhagen, politicians are balking and diplomats are burning the midnight oil, deprived of sleep. But we can take heart. Some unlikely new heroes may come to the rescue.

One prospective hero is The Citizen-Consumer.  Consumers are not the first group that pops to my mind when I think about environmental leadership. Unbridled consumption without regard for consequences has much to do with the mess we’re in.

Then came a poll by Time magazine over the summer. It found that nearly four of every 10 American consumers over age 18 regularly and deliberately choose products made by “socially responsible” companies.  If conspicuous consumption got us into this mess, can it be that conscionable consumption will get us out? Maybe. Based on its poll and several other factors, TIME concludes:

(more…)

China Sets Its Sights on Green Cars

The parent of SAIC Motor, the biggest automaker in China, plans to invest 6 billion yuan to develop and manufacture clean-energy vehicles over the next couple of years, Xinhua, the official news agency, has reported.

Of the investment, which will be equivalent to about $880 million, one-third will go to research and development of green cars and the rest will be invested equally in green vehicle and component manufacturing, Xinhua quoted Hu Maoyuan, the SAIC chairman, as saying late on Tuesday.

SAIC, the Chinese partner of General Motors and Volkswagen, will introduce its self-developed hybrid Roewe sedans next year and electric cars by 2012, the state-run Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday, quoting an unidentified company executive.

The automaker, which is based in Shanghai, may outsource batteries for its green cars and is in discussion with potential partners including BYD, the newspaper said.

BYD, a Chinese automaker 10 percent owned by a unit of Berkshire Hathaway, rolled out its plug-in hybrid car, F3DM, in China late last year. Chery Automobile, another Chinese automaker, rolled out its first electric car, S18, in February.

Beijing announced a plan earlier this year to subsidize the purchase of clean-energy vehicles for public transportation fleets in 13 cities to help its automobile industry develop green technology. The plan is to promote the use of electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles by public transport operators, taxi companies and postal and sanitary services in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Subsidies will be based on the gap in prices between energy-efficient vehicles and those with traditional engines, with subsidies running as high as 600,000 yuan for a large commercial bus powered by a fuel cell.

New business group backs climate-change bill

(more…)

Survey: Economists see threat in climate change

Researchers who deal in cold numbers rather than warming climates believe the “significant benefits from curbing greenhouse-gas emissions would justify the costs of action,” a new survey finds.

In fact, the survey of economists finds 94% believe the U.S. should join climate agreements to limit global warming.

The survey results to be released today come as debate over the economics of global warming moves center stage in Washington, D.C. Republican senators boycotted a hearing Tuesday over an Environmental Protection Agency analysis about the costs of a clean-energy bill. In addition, the United States and European Union are preparing for a December meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a climate treaty.

“An economist tree hugger is an imaginary creature,” says Michael Livermore of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which conducted the survey. “But we found that economists really see climate change poses a lot of risk to the economy.”

The survey approached the 289 economists who had published climate-related studies in the top 25 economics journals in the past 15 years. About half, 144, responded, and 75% agreed or strongly agreed on the “value” of greenhouse-gas controls.

In the survey of economists:

•91.6% wanted a tax or “cap and trade” system, where polluters buy and sell emission permits, instead of regulation, to cut greenhouse gases.

•84% agreed the effects of global warming “create significant risks” to the economy, particularly to agriculture, fishing, insurance and health.

•Of the 94.3% who favor the U.S. joining climate agreements to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, 57% say greenhouse-gas cuts should come “regardless of the actions of other countries.”

This shouldn’t be a total surprise, since most major independent economic analyses show even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.

(more…)

Coal plants are being converted to biomass as fast as … “fast-growing, bio-engineered cottonwood trees” (see “Another coal plant to be replaced by a ‘plant’ plant!” and “Southern Company embraces the only practical and affordable way to ‘capture’ emissions at a coal plant today — run it on biomass“).  Another one bites the dust:

PSCW Approves Application for Largest Biomass Plant in Midwest

The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSCW) has unanimously approved Xcel Energy’ss application to install biomass gasification technology at its Bay Front Power Plant in Ashland, Wis. When completed, the project will convert the plant’s remaining coal-fired unit to biomass gasification technology, allowing it to use 100 percent biomass in all three boilers and making it the largest biomass plant in the Midwest. Currently, two of the three operating units at Bay Front use biomass as their primary fuel to generate electricity.

The project, estimated at $58.1 million, will require additional biomass receiving and handling facilities at the plant, an external gasifier, minor modifications to the plant`s remaining coal-fired boiler and an enhanced air quality control system. The total generation output of the plant is not expected to change significantly as a result of the project.

(more…)

… anti-green WattsUpWithThat.com is #2!  By this categorization, why isn’t the Drudge Report the #1 Green website?

I regularly use Technorati to check who is linking to CP, and stumbled across the fact that last month they totally redesigned their “Technorati Authority” and added a topical ranking by category.

As you can see here, I am (for now) the top-ranked website among Green blogs and news sites.  Of course, people who follow this space closely will wonder why they omitted TreeHugger, which would beat everybody (although my rank is currently 994 out of a possible 1000, so they couldn’t beat me by that much, I suppose).

Technorati has been known for a fairly objective and slow-changing measure of influence — links from other sites over the past 6 months.  But I suppose in a desire to be more timely (and, no doubt purely incidentally, boost their own traffic), they have jazzed up this ranking system, and then added a breakdown by category:

(more…)

Concentrated solar thermal power from Sahara a step closer

A $400bn (£240bn) plan to provide Europe with solar power from the Sahara moved a step closer to reality today with the formation of a consortium of 12 companies to carry out the work.

The Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII) aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across the desert and Mediterranean sea.

The German-led consortium was brought together by Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, and consists of some of country’s biggest engineering and power companies, including Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank.

It now believes the DII can deliver solar power to Europe as early as 2015.

“We have now passed a real milestone as the company has been founded and there is definitely a profitable business there,” said Professor Peter Höppe, Munich Re’s head of climate change.

“We see this as a big step towards solving the two main problems facing the world in the coming years – climate change and energy security,” said Höppe.

The solar technology involved is known as concentrated solar power (CSP) which uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a fluid container. The super-heated liquid then drives turbines to generate electricity. The advantage over solar photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, is that if sufficient hot fluid is stored in containers, the generators can run all night.

For more on CSP, see “Concentrated solar thermal power Solar Baseload — a core climate solution” and “World’s largest solar plant with thermal storage to be built in Arizona — total of 8500 MW of this core climate solution planned for 2014 in U.S. alone” and “The secret to low-water-use, high-efficiency concentrating solar power”

For more on Desertec, read the study, “Desert Power: The Economics of Solar Thermal Electricity for Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.”  More from the story:

(more…)

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday.  If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference.  Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice:  A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions.Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”. Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

I was at one of the Solutions Summit, as long-time readers know (see “My Al Gore story“).   I was interviewed by Newsweek about that Summit for their cover story:

(more…)

My publisher and I still haven’t come up with a title that works.  The problem is that there are a great many books on climate and/or clean energy solutions coming out right now many with similar sounding titles.

I do think this collection of blog posts accomplishes what I try to do on my blog — save readers time, cut through the crap and focus on what’s important in climate science, solution, and politics (with a hefty dose of old-media critiques).  The trick is it making that all clear in a few, catchy words.

I prefer figures of speech — The Hype About Hydrogen is my best-selling book.  And don’t worry too much about the subtitle — it will explain what the book covers, and I have a pretty good idea for that, but don’t want to thwart any of your creativity by putting out any ideas right now.

If we end up choosing your suggestion (or something very similar), you’ll get free copy of the book (woo-hoo) and you can write a guest blog post!  For similar sounding suggestions, the earliest entry wins.  You can build on someone else’s idea — in fact, that’s usually how the best title is ultimately found.

Enter as many suggestions as you want.  Do use Google to check whether the title is sufficiently original.

Coal industry knew of fraudulent letters

A coal industry association waited until several weeks after a major House vote on climate legislation to let lawmakers know that letters sent to them opposing the bill were fraudulent, according to a congressional investigation.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal knew before the June cap and trade vote that these letters — purported to be from minority and senior citizen groups concerned about the legislation — were fraudulent. The letters were sent to several politically vulnerable House lawmakers in the days before the vote. The bill barely passed the House in late June, approved by just a seven vote margin.

But the association and its contractor, The Hawthorn Group, did not inform lawmakers that the letters were fake until weeks later, according to an investigation by the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

“Some here today will claim these letters can be attributed to a temporary employee, when, in fact, this fraud chiefly resulted form a systemic lack of oversight and quality control, mixed with a substantial disregard for the facts,” said Chairman Ed Markey, select committee, in a Thursday hearing about the letters.

The letters were sent out by Bonner & Associates, a subcontractor hired by Hawthorn for their expertise in grassroots campaigns.

The coal association spent nearly $10 million over the past 18 months on lobbying efforts supervised by Hawthorn and Bonner. In the three months before the vote, ACCCE paid Hawthorn $975,000 for activities related to the climate bill.

Critics say the campaign is a classic example of astroturfing, or using fake grassroots campaigns to influence policymakers, in this case pushing them to modify or kill the legislation.

Officials at the coal association say they never communicated with Bonner & Associates directly. But, the senior account official at Hawthorn charged with managing grassroots advocacy efforts for the coal group is married to Paul Bailey, the senior vice president for federal affairs at ACCCE.

Bailey joined the association in February and was given a “specific directive” to assure that he “he would not have authority to authorize or evaluate Hawthorn’s activities,” according to the documents.

Jack Bonner, the president of Bonner and Associates, said the letters were the result of “one rogue temporary employee” who acted without the knowledge of anyone at the firm. The employee worked at the firm for seven and a half business days, said Bonner, and was immediately fired upon discovery of the forged letters.

“While we take full responsibility for what happened and recognize that there were quality control and human resources improvements that needed to be made, we have learned that it is difficult to defend against a person bent on committing fraud,” said Bonner.

(more…)

Report slams low-carbon tar sand “myth”

Capturing and storing some of the carbon that would be released in the processing of Canada’s tar sands may not clean the industry up. To turn the vast but dirty resource into useable oil, Canada will have to spew vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

That’s the conclusion of a new study on the potential of so-called carbon capture and storage technology to reduce carbon emissions from tar sands operations.

The Athabasca tar sands of north-eastern Alberta, Canada, hold more than 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil, second only to Saudi Arabia’s reserves. However, the oil is in the form of tarry bitumen that requires a great deal of energy to extract and turn into usable oil – some three to five times as much as conventional crude. The greenhouse gases released during the processing of tar sands make it an environmentally disastrous proposition.

No wonder, then, that the government of Alberta is putting much emphasis, and billions of research and development dollars, into carbon-capture technologies that aim to remove carbon dioxide released by the tar sands industry and store it safely underground.

But a new analysis (PDF) published this week by a UK consumer cooperative and the UK branch of environmental group WWF suggests that carbon capture will be too little, too late. Using the oil industry’s own best-case estimate – that 30 per cent of carbon emissions could be captured by 2030 and 50 per cent by 2050 – the analysts note that this falls far short of the reduction needed to make tar sands oil compare favourably with conventional crude.

Kudos to New Scientist for calling the “biggest global warming crime ever seen” by their real name, “tar sands” — see Memo to Obama: CCS won’t make tar sands clean. Memo to all: They ain’t “oil sands”.  See also Canadian bishop challenges the “moral legitimacy” of tar sands production.  For more on the report, see here.

(more…)

The error-riddled book Superfreakonomics got the economics dead wrong, too, as Nobelist Krugman and others have noted.  Now Harvard Business Review weighs in on how they got the business side wrong.  I’m reposting an HBR piece by Andrew Winston, co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of the new book Green Recovery.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics has certainly gotten a lot of people worked up. The point of contention is a chapter about global warming which makes the case that Al Gore and others are getting us way too worked up about the climate problem because the only way to solve it is to convince people to “put aside their self interest and do the right thing even if it’s personally costly.”

The authors go on to explain their solution — geoengineering — which purportedly isn’t going to require us to cut back on our energy use or rethink the way we do business. But what they have completely failed to address — and what the (ahem) lively discussions on the topic have missed as well — is what the benefits of tackling climate change might be, instead of just the costs.

The authors have missed a major economic issue: the process of shifting our economy to a low-carbon one has enormous upsides completely aside from the benefits to climate balance.

(more…)

Solar Industry Takes on Coal and Oil Lobbies

A solar industry leader smacked down the oil and coal industries on Tuesday, calling for renewable energy proponents to open their wallets to level the playing field in Washington.

“The full promise of solar power is being restrained by the tyranny of policies that protect our competitors, subsidize wealthy polluters and disadvantage green entrepreneurs,” said Rhone Resch, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, according to prepared remarks for a speech he is to give at the opening of the Solar Power International conference.

The event, being held in Anaheim, Calif., is the solar industry’s biggest annual get-together in the United States, and is usually a celebration of the industry’s breakneck growth of recent years.

But Mr. Resch said that with the fossil fuel industry devoting tens of millions of dollars to defeat climate change legislation now before Congress, the solar industry needs to start throwing its weight around Washington.

“How our country proceeds on climate change will permanently shape the market for solar,” he said in his remarks.

Oil and coal interests “are spending millions of dollars on lobbying, P.R. and advertising, and much of it is financing a deliberate effort to discredit our industry,” Mr. Resch added. “At the end of the day in Washington, good intentions won’t stand a chance against millions of dollars and intense political pressure. We have relied on good will long enough, and if that’s the only arrow in our quiver, we will lose.”

Actually, the solar industry is coming off quite a successful year in Washington, winning a slew of tax breaks, incentives and loan guarantees for solar energy development.

But Mr. Resch said fossil fuel industries received $72 billion in federal subsidies between 2002 and 2008 while the solar industry scored less than $1 billion. “Taxpayers are forced to subsidize companies like ExxonMobil, companies that are the richest in the history of the world,” he said.

His solution: Start playing the influence game, raising big money for politicians and mobilizing constituents to pressure Congress to support the solar agenda. “In 2008, the oil industry contributed $22 million to political candidates, the utility industry $21 million,” said Mr. Resch. “The solar industry: $138,000. We cannot compete with the entrenched energy interests unless we step up our game.”

In an interview Monday evening, Mr. Resch said the new aggressiveness reflects the solar industry’s continued growth, even in a deep recession. He noted that attendance at the Solar Power International conference has doubled since 2007, with 25,000 people expected in Anaheim this week.

“We need to take a different role in our advocacy, in our relationships in Washington and our ability to influence directions that affect the outcome of our economy,” he said.

White House steps up climate efforts

(more…)

Ailing planet seen as bad for human health

Climate change will make Americans more vulnerable to diseases, disasters and heat waves, but governments have done little to plan for the added burden on the health system, according to a new study by a nonprofit group.

The study, released Monday by the Trust for America’s Health, an advocacy group focused on disease prevention, examines the public-health implications of climate change. In addition to pushing up sea levels and shrinking Arctic ice, the report says, a warming planet is likely to leave more people sick, short of breath or underfed.

Experts involved with the study said that these threats might be reduced if the federal government adopts a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. But no legislation could stop them altogether, they said. Emissions already in the atmosphere are expected to increase warming — and the problems that come with it — for years to come.

“That [a cap on greenhouse gases] really is not enough,” said Phyllis Cuttino of the Pew Environment Group, which funded the study. “We can see all these problems coming, but as a country, we haven’t done enough to prepare for them.”

The idea that climate change will be bad for people as well as polar bears is not new: It was explained in detail by a United Nations panel that won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on climate in 2007.

For more on the health impacts of climate change, see

• NRC: Burning fossil fuels costs the U.S. $120 billion a year — not counting mercury or climate impacts!
• Global Warming Is A Medical Emergency”: Hellish heatwaves to harm health of millions
• The Lancet’s landmark Health Commission: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”
• Climate change helps spread dengue fever in 28 states

(more…)

E&E News (subs. req’d) reports this morning:

International attention on the Senate’s progress on the issue is heightened given the major U.N. climate summit to be held this December in Copenhagen, Denmark. Underscoring that point, Reid yesterday took a call from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“The secretary general emphasized the urgency of trying to have some movement in the Senate” before the Copenhagen meeting, Kerry said. “I think we’re going to deliver some movement because we’re working in the EPW Committee to try to get the Kerry-Boxer bill and the chairman’s mark out.”

Meanwhile, Kerry also downplayed the prospect of floor debate on the climate bill this year, signaling instead that committee action is about as far as he expects the Senate can go before the two-week Copenhagen negotiations begin on Dec. 7.

“Bottom line, we’re going to keep working this as hard as we can,” Kerry said. “We’re going to keep moving forward. I’m confident we’ll have some kind of effort, whether it’s out of committee, or out of all the committees, or the working group or whatever, before we go to Copenhagen. We’re going to try to do as much as we can.”

Not a big surprise, given how slow the overall legislative process has been moving in EPW and the molasses pace of health care reform.  Indeed, it bears repeating that back in early February, Greenwire reported (see “Breaking: Sen. Boxer makes clear U.S. won’t pass a climate bill this year“):

(more…)

Markey expands “clean coal” forged letter investigation

A House committee is investigating whether the coal industry’s largest influence group failed to accurately report its lobbying spending to Congress.

The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has expanded its investigation into forged letters sent to lawmakers and their ties to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, according to documents viewed by E&E.

In an Oct. 21 letter, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked ACCCE whether its lobbying disclosure for 2008 and the first half of 2009 should have included work conducted by the Hawthorn Group, a public relations firm hired in part to coordinate efforts to fight the House climate bill.

Markey directed ACCCE to detail how much of the $10 million it paid Hawthorn Group during that 18-month period went toward work aimed at influencing U.S. climate legislation. ACCCE paid Hawthorn Group more than $7 million in 2008 and nearly $3 million in the first half of 2009, according to documents it gave the committee.

“It does raise some questions,” said Markey spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder. “What are these activities? They’re to influence a member of Congress to vote a certain way.”

The committee will hold a hearing Thursday on forged letters that came from ACCCE subcontractor Bonner & Associates. The hearing also could delve into the issue of ACCCE’s lobbying spending. ACCCE was told to answer Markey’s questions by Thursday.

Lawmakers received at least 199 letters and more than 4,000 phone calls on the House climate bill because of work by Bonner & Associates and fellow Hawthorn Group subcontractor Lincoln Strategies LLC, according to documents ACCCE gave the committee. Some of those letters urged House members to vote against the bill crafted by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Markey.

At least 12 of those letters were fraudulent, purporting to be from groups opposed to the bill. ACCCE has blamed that on one Bonner & Associates employee. The committee’s letter also seeks more information surrounding the fraudulent letters.

An alliance of coal companies, utilities and railroads that ship coal, ACCCE is one of the best-funded trade groups in the energy sector.

For more background, see “Dirty coal group’s 14th forgery impersonated American veterans” and “ACCCE takes on water: Alstom quits scandal-ridden coal industry front group, joining Duke and Alcoa — time for GE and Caterpillar to jump ship, too.”  The story continues:

(more…)

New survey finds US and 37 others demand more aggressive climate action

The first-ever deliberative global survey of citizen opinion, World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) has found that people from diverse backgrounds in the US and worldwide overwhelmingly want faster action, deeper GHG emissions cuts and stronger enforcement than either US climate legislation proposals or Copenhagen treaty conference preparations are currently contemplating. Among the survey’s findings:

• 90% of U. S. participants say it is urgent to reach a tough, new  agreement at the  UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December and not punt to  subsequent meetings;
• 89% said by 2020 emissions should be cut 25-40% below 1990 levels (the  Kerry Boxer Senate bill would cut US emissions 20% below 2005 levels);
• 71% want nations that fail to meet their obligations under a new agreement to be  penalized severely or significantly;
• 69% believe the price of fossil fuels should be increased.

These views were echoed across 37 other countries on six continents. Global results showed participants wanted more aggressive action than their delegates to Copenhagen envision, including:

(more…)

Southeast U.S. exposed to climate change impact: Oxfam

Poverty and climate hazards make the southeast United States the country’s most vulnerable area to climate change impact, Oxfam America said on Wednesday.

A report released by the relief organization identified high-risk “hotspots” across 13 southeast states from Arkansas to Virginia where poverty factors combined with high risk of drought, flooding, hurricanes and sea-level rise.

“Social factors like income and race do not determine who will be hit by a natural disaster, but they do determine a population’s ability to prepare, respond, and recover when disaster does strike,” Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser said in a statement accompanying the report.

“As climate change increases and intensifies floods, storms, and heat waves, many of the world’s poorest communities, from Biloxi (Mississippi) to Bangladesh, will experience unprecedented stress,” Offenheiser added.

Oxfam said the study, using a method developed by experts from the University of South Carolina’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, for the first time overlaid risk of climate hazards with social variables….

The Oxfam report, available at www.oxfamamerica.org/adapt, includes layered maps that depict different levels of social and climate change-related hazard vulnerability in the U.S. southeast, which accounts for roughly 80 percent of all U.S. counties that experience persistent poverty….

For example, one identified high-risk area was Iberia Parish in Louisiana, which had some of the highest hazard exposures — 76.8 percent of land in a flood zone, 78.9 percent in the extreme drought zone, 56 percent in a sea-level rise zone, and all within a hurricane wind zone.

It also had some of the highest social vulnerability scores, due to its growing Latino population with young children, racial inequalities, and employment dependencies on industries like fishing, oil, and gas….

Poor families were among the worst affected when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in Louisiana in 2005.

Miami-Dade County in Florida — a state viewed by many as a playground for the rich — was also qualified by the report as a high-risk area,

Thinking solar power? It’s never been cheaper

(more…)

I just realized that a combination of a computer glitch and human error (mine) accidentally tightened the spam filter for about two days.  A couple dozen comments were caught.  I just went through and released them.

I hope I found them all amidst the staggering amount of real spam (e.g. “buy xanax cheap” — not that such offers wouldn’t come in handy somedays).

My apologies to new and old readers alike if you tried to post and failed.  Please keep those comments coming!

Developing nations join West in deforestation fight

Six developing countries will join five western nations, including the United States and Britain, to combat climate change by better managing forestry resources, the World Bank said Tuesday.

The Forest Investment Program (FIP) will meet for the first time on October 29 in Washington to kickstart the program and discuss the criteria for selecting countries or regions of the world that could benefit most from the effort. Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Morocco, Nepal, and Romania will join donor nations Australia, Denmark, Norway, Britain and the United States, who have jointly pledged some 350 million dollars to fund the project.

The FIP is among the first of a new generation of partnerships between developing and developed countries working to combat the threat of climate change through forest management, the World Bank said.

“This new program will provide much-needed upfront investment to developing countries and forest-dependent communities to help them prepare for and benefit from financial flows for the sustainable management of forests,” said Eduardo Saboia, who represented Brazil in earlier meetings aimed at designing the FIP.

Global deforestation, which is advancing at a rate of five percent per decade, is responsible for 20 percent of all the annual carbon dioxide emissions. The 20 percent figure is roughly equivalent to the total annual emissions of either the United States or China, and surpasses the total yearly emissions from every car, truck, plane, ship and train on Earth, according to estimates provided by the United Nations.

(more…)