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

Today’s guest blogger is Dr. George M. Woodwell, founder, Director Emeritus and Senior Scientist at the The Woods Hole Research Center.  He has published more than 300 papers in ecology.   His “research has been on the structure and function of natural communities and their role as segments of the biosphere….  For many years he has studied the biotic interactions associated with the warming of the earth.”

The most recent caper by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound has been to enlist two tribes of the Wampanoag Indians to claim that Nantucket Sound is “traditional cultural property” and must be protected as a whole from the 130 wind turbines of the Cape Wind Project.  The claim, coming only now after more than eight years of  discussion, two extensive environmental impact reviews, a comprehensive book by local authors, and scores of news reports and editorials, is outrageous, simply silly, and should be dismissed out of hand.

After more than a century of accelerating reliance on fossil fuels as the principal source of energy to drive a rapidly expanding technological society, the world is beset by a global environmental emergency.  We have poisoned our global habitat and must move rapidly to correct the trend. The Cape Wind project is a powerful and appropriate step, a model for the world.

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Concentrated solar thermal with storage (aka solar baseload) remains “The technology that will save humanity.”  And we are seeing more and more plants in various phases of construction (see “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“).

The easiest way to deal with the intermittency of the sun is cheap storage — and thermal storage is much cheaper and has a much higher round-trip efficiency than electric storage.  The ability to provide power reliably throughout the day and evening in key locations around the world (including China and India) is why CSP delivers 3 of the 12 – 14 wedges needed for “the full global warming solution.”

Now “A Santa Monica, Calif., company called SolarReserve has taken a step toward making that a reality, filing an application with California regulators to build a 150-megawatt solar farm that will store seven hours’ worth of the sun’s energy in the form of molten salt,” as the NYT’s Green Inc. reports today.  “Heat from the salt can be released when it’s cloudy or at night to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.”  And SolarReserve has a big-time Fortune 50 clean energy partner:

United Technologies has licensed the technology to SolarReserve and will guarantee its performance — a crucial advantage for the startup when it seeks financing from skittish bankers to build the Rice solar farm.

Below is an artist’s rendering of such a plant that focuses thousands of mirrors on millions of gallons of liquefied salt:

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CP’s newest guest blogger is Jennifer Kaplan, founder of Greenhance LLC, which offers small businesses environmentally friendly marketing and graphic design.  She also teaches marketing at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. Her new book from Prentice Hall, “Greening Your Small Business: How to Improve Your Bottom Line, Grow Your Brand, Satisfy Your Customers—and Save the Planet,” comes out this month.

There’s a revolution going on in the American marketplace. Businesses across the country are changing the way they operate by incorporating green practices, products, and objectives into their business models.  And some savvy entrepreneurs are getting in on the ground floor.  At the same time, others are still wondering where small businesses fit into this new paradigm.

If you are wondering where small business fits into the green revolution let’s start with the recognition that 27 million small businesses can have a big impact. There are many business owners, however, who are doubtful and wonder whether small business has a role to play in managing climate change. Surely, they think, most small business’ individual impacts are minuscule, possibly immeasurably small. But the reality is that, in aggregate, the total climate-related impact of small businesses adds up. Without question every business, no matter the size, has an indirect impact on climate; the electricity, heating, cooling, transportation, and other services they use all translate into CO₂ output with global warming impact. Then there’s the law of large numbers—a small action multiplied by 27 million has a significant impact.

Take the example of green information technology.

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A diverse coalition of nearly 200 business, labor, civil rights, and environmental groups have sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) urging her to support an important energy-efficiency provision that would:

• Generate $100 billion in electric efficiency investments;
• Create more than 900,000 new construction, energy service, and building maintenance and operations jobs by 2020, and many more additional jobs at plants that supply these sectors (based on analysis by Green Economy, 2009), and;
• Reduce consumers’ energy bills by $300 billion.

What is this magical provision?  As the letter explains:

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The guest blogger today is the Nobel prize-winning Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, by way of HuffPost.  As you’ll see, he’s the mirror image of Bush’s Energy Secretary (see “Bodman as Orwell: DOE erases ‘most successful’ weatherization program from website“).

I’ve always been a bit of an energy efficiency nut.

I’ve made it my mission to cut the utility bills at every home we’ve owned. Long before I learned about the risks of climate change, I was fanatical about energy efficiency because I’m cheap.

Whenever my wife and I move into a new home, I check the attic for adequate insulation. I look for leaks around doors and windows and install a programmable thermostat if needed. In our latest home, I’ve also insulated our water pipes with inexpensive foam from our local hardware store and painted mastic sealant on the seams of the air ducts. When our hot water heater needed replacement, we installed a tank-less water heater which decreased our summer-time gas use by 50%. In the summer, we found that setting the thermostat at 77 – 78 degrees and a gentle breeze from a fan was all that is required to be comfortable.

So far, we are on track to cut our utility bills by about half compared to the previous owner, but we are doing more. Our home has two large skylights that funnel too much heat out in the winter and let too much heat in the summer. We intend to replace these older windows with modern widows with five times the efficiency.

Taking these steps is called “weatherization.” I would rather call it “saving money by saving energy.” Over the next several years, we want to help millions of American families seize the same opportunity to cut their utility bills by making their homes and appliances more energy efficient while increasing comfort.

We are making a major down payment on this effort through the President’s economic recovery plan.

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One of the very first new nuclear power plants proposed to be built in the U.S. in over 30 years just hit a brick wall.  It’s the same brick wall — absurdly high cost — being hit around the world (see “Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid” and “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour“).

The San Antonio Express News reports today:

The estimated cost of two new nuclear reactors proposed by CPS Energy has gone up as much as $4 billion, prompting the City Council to postpone Thursday’s vote on the project’s financing until January.

CPS officials and Mayor Julián Castro, flanked by every council member except David Medina, held a hastily arranged news conference Tuesday afternoon announcing the delay.

CPS interim General Manager Steve Bartley said the utility’s main contractor on the project, Toshiba Inc., informed officials that the cost of the reactors would be “substantially greater” than CPS’ estimate of $13 billion, which includes financing.

The San Antonio Current notes that “After what can only be considered a sustained Certified Sales Event by CPS Energy matched by Mammoth Media Buildup,” the City Council was set to vote for the $400 Million bond issue this Thursday, which would have put the city “on an irreversible date with” the Toshiba nuke.

Occasional guest CP blogger Craig Severance not only tipped me off to this, but in fact predicted this price rise last month in a post, “San Antonio: New Economy Leader or Nuclear Guinea Pig?” that offers some saner and cheaper clean energy alternatives, which I’ll reprint below.

If you want to see an especially painful press conference from a Mayor who had been putting his foot on the nuclear accelerator, watch this:

Even before the latest jump price jump, the city was planning “a 9.5 percent base rate increase to cover the nuclear expansion and the utility’s other capital projects.”  Such preemptive rate increases years before the plant would even deliver a single kilowatt hour are inevitable when you pursue nuclear power these days, as Florida has painfully found out (see “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases….”).

New nuclear plants are so expensive they are likely to provide electricity at some 15 cents per kilowatt hour (see “Nuclear power, Part 2: The price is not right“) — or possibly more than 20 cents/kWh (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“).  The precise answer — 50% higher than average U.S. electricity prices or more than 100% higher — is hard to know since it is all but impossible to find a utility willing to stand behind a firm price in a rate hearing.

Some city Council members are now rethinking their commitment to the nuke:

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There’s a whole website GreenHalloween.org.  And everybody’s favorite green website, Treehugger, has a bunch of ideas (reprinted below).

But first, when you see kids out trick-or-treating tonight … please consider these lines from the nation’s top climate scientist:

… the most serious effects will be visited upon the young and the unborn, the generations that bear no responsibility for the problem. The most important effects, I believe, will be those that are irreversible for all practical purposes, specifically (1) extermination of species, and (2) ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise. If we continue business-as-usual energy policy, using more and more fossil fuels, it is likely that we will have:  (1) rapid climate change that will combine with other pressures on species to cause the rate of extinction of plants and animals to increase markedly, leading in some cases to ecosystem collapse, snowballing extinctions, and a more desolate planet for future generations.  (2) meter-scale sea level rise this century, and ice sheets in a state of disintegration that guarantees future sea level rise in the 10-meter-scale, with a continual reworking of future global coastlines out of humanity’s control.

I would add that the planetary desolation our continued inaction would leave our children includes the loss of the inland glaciers that provide fresh water for a billion people, irreversible ocean acidification and Dust-Bowlification across one third of the habited land mass (see “Hell and High Water “).

That should give a double incentive for a greener Halloween … “in ways you may not have thought of“:

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Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) is continuing his effort to limit the scope and spending of a solar technology bill headed to the House floor today with an amendment that would limit the length of the program and cut its funding levels.

Broun has proposed a new amendment to H.R. 3585 that would provide $750 million to the program over three years rather than $2.5 billion over five.

Today’s story by E&E News (subs. req’d) underscores precisely why so many clean energy technologies are “Invented here, sold there” as Tom Friedman put it.

The United States created the solar cell industry and literally launched it into space 50 years ago.   And, yes, solar PV is going to be one of the largest job-creating industries of the century, projected to grow “from a $20 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017.”

Back in the June debate over the climate bill, Broun received applause on the House floor for calling global warming a ‘hoax’, asserting:

Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus.

That is, of course, nonsense, as yesterday’s letter to Senators by 18 leading scientific organizations makes clear.

But while conservatives work hard to kill the clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill that is America’s only real hope of remaining globally competitive, the rest of the world eats our lunch, a lunch we were kind enough to cook for them using on our own no-longer-secret recipe (see “China begins transition to a clean-energy economy” and “Why other countries kick our butt on clean energy: A primer“).

Sadly, whenever conservatives have the presidency or control of Congress, they have gutted or blocked funding for clean energy:

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The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) released its third quarter (Q3) market report today.  Their news release noted:

Since the early July announcement of rules to implement the stimulus bill, the wind industry has seen over 1,600 MW (enough to serve the equivalent of 480,000 average households) of completed projects, and over 1,700 MW of construction starts. These projects equate to about $6.5 billion in new investment….

The total wind power capacity now operating in the U.S. is over 31,000 MW, generating enough electricity to power the equivalent of nearly 9 million homes, avoiding the emissions of 57 million tons of carbon annually and reducing expected carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 2.5%.

Thank you President Obama and Congressional Democrats (see “EIA projects wind at 5% of U.S. electricity in 2012, all renewables at 14%, thanks to Obama stimulus!”

Here are some more factoids from the release:

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This is a Roll Call op-ed by Lincoln Chafee, former Republican Senator from Rhode Island, and John Podesta, former White House chief of staff and CEO of the Center for American Progress.  The source of the graphic is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

It is imperative that the United States find effective and economically viable solutions to the climate crisis. Our elected officials and business leaders ask how we can afford the global transition to a low-carbon economy. Around the globe, developing nations ask how they can afford to reduce their emissions without sacrificing their hopes for a better life. There is no single answer, but there is one unexpected solution that offers hope on both fronts.

To date, the climate debate has focused on reducing fossil fuel emissions and ramping up crucial clean energy alternatives. Far too little attention has been paid to the role tropical deforestation has in warming the planet. It accounts for 17 percent of global emissions — more than all the world’s cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined. This is a serious oversight; if left unaddressed, deforestation will undermine all our efforts to solve the climate crisis.

The good news is that protecting “climate forests” is a major global warming solution that can be implemented immediately and affordably. Many developing nations, including Brazil and Indonesia, which together account for 50 percent of global deforestation, are eager to partner with the United States to protect their climate forests. Indeed, Brazil has established a goal of reducing emissions from the Amazon by 80 percent by 2020 and is already making impressive progress in that direction, including robust monitoring and verification systems. Indonesia is moving in a similar direction. These efforts could be focused, honed and replicated globally.

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You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science.

“The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland,” said the paper’s lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

“Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth’s history,” she said.

Yes, pumping more and more CO2 into the air is a very bad idea, as this news release from UCLA on a major new study makes clear.  The study itself, “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years,” (subs. req’d) was released by Science earlier this month.

The study notes importantly, “This work may support a relatively high climate sensitivity to pCO2” [the partial pressure of CO2], which is the same conclusion that a number of major studies looking at paleoclimate data have come to:
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A new report from the New Rules Project finds that over 60% of all U.S. states have the renewable energy resources to be “energy self-reliant.” (“Energy self-reliance,” as defined in the report, is a measure of how self-sufficient in energy generation a state could be if it relied entirely on its own renewable resources). The New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, released its findings last week.

The report, “Energy Self-Reliant States: Second and Expanded Edition” describes how 31 states have the capacity to independently meet their states’ electricity demands by using wholly renewable energy sources, already at their disposal. Several states, the report notes, could use their renewable energy resources to produce electricity that meets over ten times their statewide demands. An additional ten states could generate enough electricity to meet well over half of their annual demands—again, solely from renewable sources.

The report’s analysis and projections only incorporates renewable energy resources that are currently commercially deployable:

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Notwithstanding the Superfreaks, a lot of good books on global warming and its solutions are coming out right now (see “The Invention of Lying about Climate Change“).  One of the best is Lester Brown’s “Plan B 4.0:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization.”  In his book, Brown lays out the too-little-discussed but devastating impacts unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will have on agriculture, expanding on his Scientific American piece “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”

He also lays out one of the most comprehensive set of solutions you can find in one place, including important subjects and strategies that don’t get enough attention, with a full chapter on “Eradicating Poverty and Stabilizing Population,” another one on “Restoring the Earth,” which focuses on regenerating forests, soils, and fisheries, and, of course, “Feeding Eight [!] Billion People Well” — the exclamation point is mine.

I had lunch with him recently, an eye-opener even for someone who follows these issues closely.  I asked him to submit some blog posts.  What follows is his first, about his new book, which was just released September 29.

In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted.

In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis would then import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people.

The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation.  But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

Water Shortages Undermining Food Security

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Global warming, left unchecked, will have a huge impact on most sports, since a great many are played outdoors during the summer (for now) — or rely on cold weather and snow during the winter.  As this CAP post suggests, some sports teams are trying to green up the game.  The picture is a view from home plate at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium, Major League Baseball’s first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified ballpark.

Major League Baseball’s postseason playoffs began this week with Wednesday’s match up between the Phillies and Rockies. But regardless of who wins the whole league has managed to come together for the environment’s sake.

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Part 1 was an intro to the Solar Decathalon, a contest for innovative, high-tech, high-efficiency, solar-powered homes, which is open to the public in DC from October 9-13 and 15-18.  In this reposting, guest blogger A. Siegel focuses on one finalist.  For in-depth discussion of all the others, go to his website Get Energy Smart!  NOW!!!

No, we’re not speaking about Cold Fusion, but Penn State’s entry into the DOE Solar Decathlon, which opens Friday on the Mall in Washington, DC. Let’s take a look at some of Natural Fusion’s features from its website, which is dynamic, enabling rapid connection of concepts and approaches with the home’s physical layout.

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This guest post on the Solar Decathalon is excerpted from The Dirt, the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).  The Solar Decathalon homes are open to the public from October 9-13 and 15-18.  Future posts will feature other finalists.

Solar Decathalon 2009 kicked off on the National Mall Wednesday. After receiving more than 40 student-generated proposals from universities in the U.S. and worldwide, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) narrowed the field down to 20 finalists that offered the most innovative, high-tech, high-efficiency, solar-powered homes. More than 800 students are competing this year. This is the fourth time the DOE has sponsored the biennial competition.

Each of the 20 student teams received $100,000 from the DOE but still had to raise some $400,000-500,000 to pay for the 800-square feet homes. The DOE spokesman said that by teaming up with a range of companies, the students were learning “real world experience” that will make them the “energy leaders of tomorrow.” Now in its fourth-generation, the Solar Decathalon is “pushing innovation and systems engineering.” Some homes include microgrids that can be run through an iPhone.

The homes will be judged by a team of architects, engineers, systems engineers, lighting specialists, and communications specialists on the overall architecture, engineering, comfort, marketability, appliances, lighting, and other aspects. The DOE said that not only must the homes be aesthetically appealing, but “they must also work.” Using only solar power, the homes must heat 15 gallons of water to 150 degrees twice a day; run all appliances; heat and cool the homes; and maintain temperatures of 72-76 degrees with 40-60 percent relative humidity. The judges have also added a home entertainment component. TVs, powered by solar energy, must be able to run for six hours per day. Additionally, six team members must live, eat, work within the homes from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM every day during the competition.

The homes are being wired by local D.C. energy provider, Pepco, which has connected the homes to the central energy grid. Zero net homes will get 100 points at the end of 10 days but will receive an extra 50 bonus points if they return surplus to the grid, creating an additional incentive for energy-efficiency. The DOE says, “Solar is here to stay, and these homes prove that it works.” What the contest will prove is what technologies work best.

A number of student homes included integrated systems with landscape elements at their core:

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Once upon a time, some serious people used to believe that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) might have a snowball’s chance in hell of being a practical and affordable climate strategy in our lifetime.  Those very sincere people were used by some of the car companies and Bush Administration as part of a strategy to oppose or delay the introduction of more viable alternative fuel strategies, in particular electric cars — see, for instance, the movie “Who killed the electric car?”

That isn’t to say pure EVs were slam dunks as successful mass-market consumer vehicles, particularly with the technology of the 1980s and even 1990s.  HFCVs, however, required multiple technological (and other) miracles to succeed and every plausible competitor, including EVs, to fail first (see “Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective“ and “The car of the perpetual future” — The Economist agrees with Climate Progress on hydrogen“).  That is but one reason the absurdly expensive infrastructure will never be built — nor has any independent group ever proposed a plausible scenario under which the infrastructure would be built.  And that’s the fundamental hydrogen cars will not be practical or a cost-effective climate strategy in your lifetime.

Under the leadership of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California briefly flirted with a serious investment in hydrogen cars and infrastructure — the Hydrogen Highway.  A driving force for that alliterative but ill-fated effort was Terry Tamminen, who “headed California’s Environmental Protection Agency and was Cabinet Secretary and Chief Policy Advisor” to Schwarzenegger, who is now “the Cullman Senior Fellow for Climate Change and Director of the Climate Policy Program at the New America Foundation” and author of a recent but outdated attack, “The Myth of Battery Cars” debunked below.

The California legislature in particular sped away from the Hydrogen Highway effort once it became clear that both the fueling station and the cars were insanely expensive and not terribly practical (see “California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.“)

Today, with rapidly advancing battery and related technology, we know that pure EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are a core climate solution since electric drives are more efficient, easily powered by carbon-free energy and indeed far cheaper to operate per mile than gasoline (or hydrogen), even when running on renewable power. And they are the key alt-fuel strategy needed to deal with the energy/economic security threat of rising dependence on imported oil and the inevitably grim impacts of peak oil (see “Why electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence“).  That is why pretty much every car company in the world will be introducing one or more models of PHEVs or EVs in the next 2 to 4 years, but we still don’t have a single commercial HFCV anywhere near production (see L.A. Times: “Hydrogen fuel-cell technology won’t work in cars.” Duh.).

In particular, a renewable-energy-based hydrogen fueling system capable of handling even half the cars and light trucks on the road would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars.  And it would have a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today.  Also, the total well-to-wheels efficiency with which a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle might utilize renewable electricity is roughly 20% (although that number could rise to 25% or a little higher with the kind of multiple technology breakthroughs required to enable a hydrogen economy).  The well-to-wheels efficiency of charging an onboard battery and then discharging it to run an electric motor in a PHEV or EV, however, is 80% (and could be higher in the future)—four times more efficient than current hydrogen fuel cell vehicle pathways.

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