“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund
The U.S. Green Building Council is having its huge annual conference now — you can watch live streams and archived videos of the leading experts on clean energy and energy efficiency here. And they just released a major new “Green Jobs Study” done by Booz Allen, which concluded:
This is a guest post by Chelsea Sexton, my friend and costar of the 2006 documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?“ At a young age, Chelsea began working for GM marketing their ill-fated electric car, the EV1. She even married an EV1 service technician! Now she serves as the Executive Director of Plug In America (full bio here). Her first guest post was, “So what is it like to actually drive the Chevy Volt plug in hybrid electric car?“). This post was first published on her blog. The picture is of Fisker Karma’s artificial sound-emitting bumper speakers.
For the most part, the electric vehicle world is palpably buzzing with excitement of cars to come — and after some seriously dark years, there is much to look forward to. The collective conversation has finally shifted from “if” to “how”, but even on easier “how” points, we can’t seem to get out of our own way — which really doesn’t bode well for the hard stuff.
Case in point is a newly-emerging issue over the silence of hybrids and electric cars. In the EV generation of the 1990’s, their comparative lack of noise was a selling point. Now, according to some, it’s a threat to life itself.
Montgomery County redefined the way it will grow in the next two decades when lawmakers endorsed a plan Tuesday that encourages development where residents can easily live a car-free lifestyle.
The County Council, after weeks of intense debate over the county’s growth policy, unanimously agreed to give developers discounts to build dense developments near transit stations as long as they also construct bike paths and walkways, put shops and other amenities nearby, and use environmentally friendly construction methods.
I don’t do a lot of local area reporting, but this front page (!) Washington Post story, “Montgomery draws a car-free blueprint for growth,” seemed newsworthy. The picture above is of the Rockville Pike corridor, and anyone who has driven around Rockville knows it is as car-centric as anywhere in America.
The county is working to change that:
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.
We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of the power of a positive vision of an abundant future…
Rob Hopkins, “The Transition Handbook”
During his 10 months in office, President Barack Obama and his team have assembled an impressive list of accomplishments on energy and climate policy. Some might conclude the President has done about all he can do with the powers of his office.
One would be wrong. What energy and climate security require — what the future of the American Dream demands — is audacious big-picture ideas that capture the imagination, stir the emotions, speak to the souls, rally the support and win the involvement of the American people. That’s been lacking so far in the President’s climate leadership.
I suspect there is a sizeable segment of the American people waiting to be engaged, waiting to have their imaginations triggered, waiting to understand what a new energy economy looks like and what they can do to build it. I’m not saying that citizens can’t act without top-down leadership. Indeed, as President Obama hinted recently in his “Grab a Mop” speech, there’s fundamental unfairness, guaranteed stasis and more than a little buck-passing when we citizens stand on the sidelines, some expecting the White House to do everything, others protesting it is doing far too much.
I always thought it was conservatives who accused progressives of being driven by their heart and not their brain. A painfully uninformed David Frum wades into the debate over nuclear power with a post headlined, “Conservatives Heart Nuke Power“:
First Brad Plumer in the New Republic, then Matt Yglesias on his site have marveled at the supposedly strange enthusiasm of conservatives for nuclear power. What’s strange about it? It’s pure cold economic rationality. If you wish to move away from carbon-emitting electricity sources, nuclear is far and away the cheapest choice. If we’re not going to rely more on nuclear power, then the reduction in carbon emissions will have to imply some dramatic reductions in standards of living.
Not.
Former Presidential speechwriter Frum is best known for helping to originating the “axis of evil” metaphor (his first phrase, “axis of hatred,” was changed to “axis of evil” by Michael Gerson, Bush’s chief speechwriter, who wanted to use more “theological language,” as Frum explains in his book on page 238). He apparently hails from the Bizarro World, whose Code states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness!”
New nuclear power plants are currently far and away the most expensive form of carbon free power you can (try to) buy — assuming you could find a nuclear vendor today that was actually willing to guarantee a price for their product in a Public Utility Commission hearing, which you can’t.
Indeed, the French government-owned nuclear giant, Areva threatened work stoppage in late summer at the Finnish nuke they were building over who would pay for cost overruns. Areva had made clear in May it wasn’t going to keep swallowing the price escalation risk — see “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.”
The most detailed independent cost estimate of nuclear power published this year — here on Climate Progress by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“) — puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!
And that was just one week after Time magazine noted that nuclear plants’ capital costs are “out of control,” concluding:
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.
In case we need more evidence that an urgent economic transformation is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, it can be found in a new study commissioned by World Wildlife Fund International.
Conducted by Climate Risk Pty. Ltd. of Great Britain and Australia, the study concludes:
Runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialization over the next five years [emphasis added]… World governments have a window that will close between now and 2014. In that time they must establish fully operational, low-carbon industrial architecture. This must drive a low-carbon re-industrialization that will be faster than any previous economic and industry transformation…Today, only three out of 20 industries are moving sufficiently fast enough.
By “low carbon re-industrialization”, the authors mean energy efficiency and clean generation technologies, low-carbon agriculture, and sustainable forestry. They have identified 24 critical resources and industries the world will need to develop quickly to avoid climate catastrophe. Among their conclusions:
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:
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.
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:
What is this magical provision? As the letter explains:
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.
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:
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“:
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:
In an ambitious draft proposal, the official planning agency for the four Pacific Northwest states said last week that energy efficiency measures could meet at least 85 percent of new electricity demand over the next 20 years, with renewable generation and a limited amount of gas-fired power plants meeting the rest.
As Energy Daily (subs. req’s) reported recently, efficiency investments are the focal point for a detailed new plan drafted by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
The Council, with members from Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, is responsible for developing long-term (20 year) electric power plans and revising those plans every five years. Here’s a snippet from their press release for this plan, the sixth in a series:
“Energy efficiency is the keystone of the power plan,” said Chair Bill Booth, an Idaho member of the Council. “The Council has identified an impressive amount of low-cost energy efficiency, and we’re looking forward to hearing comments about our analysis of that potential.”
Sounds pretty good. An economically attractive, environmentally sensitive approach to meeting energy demand through increased efficiency investments. But c’mon, that wouldn’t be the first time efficiency has been touted in this blog. So what’s newsworthy about the introduction of this plan, especially as it originates from the granola crunching part of the Western U.S.?
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:
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.
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:
(more…)
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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