Climate Progress

Suppose the leaders of this country were wise enough to put a moratorium on traditional coal (the most urgent climate policy needed, as discussed in Part 4)? How will we meet our steadily growing demand for carbon-free power over the next decade? And to get on the 450 ppm path, we don’t just need to stop U.S. emissions from rising — we should return to 1990 levels (or lower) by 2020.

NUCLEAR: Nuclear is an obvious possibility, beloved of conservative Francophiles like McCain and Gingrich, but energy realists understand that it is very unlikely new nuclear plants could deliver many kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2018, let alone affordable kWhs. Indeed, back in August, Tulsa World reported (here):

American Electric Power Co. isn’t planning to build any new nuclear power plants because delays will push operational starts to 2020, CEO Michael Morris said Tuesday….

Builders would also have to queue for certain parts and face “realistic” costs of about $4,000 a kilowatt, he said….

“I’m not convinced we’ll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,” Morris said.

And that in spite of the amazing subsidies and huge loan guarantees for nuclear power in the 2005 energy bill (see here).

As for the $4,000 a kw capital cost — and the related electricity price of about 10 cents per kwh — mid-2007 has already turned into the “good old days” for nukes. Utilities are now telling regulators that nukes will cost 50% to 100% more than the AEP estimate, as I’ll report in a couple of weeks.

One very good source of apples-to-apples comparisons of different types of low- and zero-carbon electricity generation is the modeling work done for the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) on how to comply with the AB32 law (California’s Global Warming Solutions Act), online here. AB32 requires a reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The most valuable document is probably the “Generation Costs,” although the slides for the recent May 6th presentation are fascinating.

The research for the CPUC puts the cost of power from new nuclear plants at 15.2 cents per kWh. It also puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at 16.9 cents per kWh. In any case, given its immature state and the mismanaged federal effort (see “In seeming flipflop, Bush drops mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project“), coal with CCS won’t be providing much power by 2020. At this point, it would even be pure speculation to say that coal with CCS will be one of the low-cost options in the 2020s.

So what do we do in the near term to meet the projected 1% annual increase in demand over the next decade while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? There are only three plausible options, and we’ll need them all:

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The fading hopes for the Lieberman-Warner climate bill have all but ended (see E&E News, “Sponsors lower expectations for Lieberman-Warner bill,” subs. req’d, reprinted below).

Serious climate legislation had been in critical condition for some months (see “Boucher lets conservatives block House climate bill” and “Don’t hold your breath on Lieberman-Warner passing in 2008.”). Doctors and family members finally pulled the plug this week, and the patient appeared to lose all vital signs. The coroner listed the cause of death as “apathy.”

The only hope for revival now rests in the faint possibility that Lieberman-Warner turns out to be either an immortal cop, a vampire private detective or possibly a relentless, indestructible killing machine from the future that had taken on the guise of so-so climate legislation in an effort to fulfill its mission of ruining life on this planet for homo “sapiens.” [Note to self: That was a bit harsh.]

More seriously, too many Senators simply wanted to do too much watering down of L-W, plus we have the little-known provision of the Constitution that says all pieces of legislation aimed at sparing billions of people from unimaginable misery must receive 60 votes. The messy details are below:

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The Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) recently completed the first of four polls it has commissioned from Harris Interactive to track public opinion about the presidential candidates and global climate change.

The results so far (here): Nearly half of the people likely to vote in the presidential election aren’t sure which of the candidates has the strongest policy. Twenty-two percent think it’s Obama; 21 percent think it’s Clinton; and 8 percent think it’s McCain. Forty-nine percent have no idea.

In other words, a big part of the voting population is waiting to be impressed. Their votes are a prize waiting to be won.

It’s not that the “don’t knows” are indifferent to the issue. The poll found that 63 percent of likely voters believe it’s important for the next president to address climate change soon after taking office. Forty-one percent believe that presidential action is “extremely” or “very” important.
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For the rest of their lives, high school students in Greensburg, KS will remember two things about this last year of their life. Most memorable will be the date 5-4-07, when a 205-mph, F-5 tornado tore through their community and changed everything about their lives. And it will be pretty hard to forget that in remembrance, the President of the United States handed them their diploma at graduation.

For a wider eco-conscious community in this country, the aftermath will be remembered as the first time a U.S. town has been built (or rebuilt) entirely green, and done under national attention. From the wreckage, Greensburg is emerging as a pioneer in community-scale green building and eco-development, symbolizing in sorts a better hope for tomorrow. Greensburg has become, metaphorically, the ultimate Green Town.

Last week CBS’s Early Morning Show ran a special series on the recovery effort, and you can also track the town on its Kiowa County-Greensburg (KS) Recovery blog, where you’ll encounter an overwhelming sense of community, enduring spirit, determination and pride in the green reconstruction.

So, Greensburg, Kansas One Year Post-Disaster? Going green and going strong.

Related posts:

• Greening Greensburg, KS: A Closer Look, Part I
• Greening Greensburg, KS: A Closer Look, Part II

The fact that our country has a National Environmental Policy Act means we should have a national environmental policy, and any national environmental policy is bound to take into consideration global warming, right?

Wrong. On two counts.

The U.S. is sorely lacking an updated environmental policy. It’s been over a decade and counting. With the EPA as example, and based on its condition as of late (see here, here and here), the climate’s looking grim.

As for a cohesive national policy that takes into account global warming’s causes and impacts? Think again. States have been infinitely more active than our federal government (and we thank them).

Presented with this gaping problem, Christopher Pyke and Kit Batten co-authored and released a paper yesterday entitled “Full Disclosure,” calling for an Executive Order by the next president to require consideration of global warming into federal policy decisions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They argue the government has this ability and is already authorized under NEPA to exercise it. Read the rest of this entry »

For nearly 2 months now, Senator Clinton has been outperforming the closing polls in primary state after primary state. And no one can possibly say that Senator Obama had a good past three weeks, with the reemergence of Reverend Wright. Yet this time he outperformed the recent polls in both states.

This suggests that in the only other big issue to rise in the last week of the campaign — the gas tax holiday — Obama did not lose votes taking the principled position. As I (and many, many others) have blogged, a gas tax holiday would most likely benefit the oil companies more than the the average consumer. Also, it sends a terrible message about future climate policies (namely that some weak-kneed president might roll back carbon prices the first time the economy hit a rough patch after a cap-and-trade system was passed) — see “Gas tax holiday, Part 3: It is cynical and indefensible no matter who proposes it.”

Clinton proposed the gas tax holiday Monday April 28, eight days before the two primaries. So what happened among late-deciding voters? Here is the answer, based on CBS’s exit poll numbers (overview here, Indiana here, North Carolina here):

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First John McCain and now Newt Gingrich turn out to love the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Better start checking them both for U.S. flag lapel pins!

On the Hugh Hewitt show (see here), Gingrich dissed the new ad he made with Speaker Pelosi on climate and offered “real solutions:”

HH: Now can I ping you a little bit, Mr. Speaker? You made the ad with Nancy Pelosi, and I think that campaign is asking Americans to suspend critical thinking, not that I’m on one side or the other.

NG: Well…

HH: I just think thirty second ads on something that complicated asks…it’s not the way to debate this, because it almost makes it impregnable to debate. Did you consider the downside of doing the ad with her?

NG: Yeah, we spent six weeks thinking about that decision, and I do a newsletter every week. You can go to xxx.xxxx.xxx [sorry, for some reason, my PC just refused to copy that link], my first name, and sign up for it. It comes out for free. Over 700,000 people get it. And next week will be on energy policy and environmental policy. And I’m going to outline a stunningly different view than Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. But my message to conservatives is you’ve got to get on the stage and debate. You can’t stand off-stage and scream no. And I’m perfectly happy, if you’ll look at the ad carefully, we said this was a topic we disagree on a lot of issue. But we agree we should try to solve this. And I’m perfectly happy to offer real solutions, and I’ll give you one example.

HH: Go ahead.

NG: If the United States produced the same percent of electricity from nuclear power as France, we would take two billion, two hundred million tons of carbon a year out of the atmosphere. And by that one step, we would be 15% better than the Kyoto goals.

Now, we’ve already seen that if we did what France does — and yes, it boggles the mind that two leading Freedom-fry eating conservatives are publicly advocating doing just that — we’d need, say 600 to 700 nukes by 2050, depending on whether we embrace electricity as a transportation fuel [See “McCain calls for 700+ new nuclear plants (and seven Yucca mountains) costing $4 trillion“].

But Gingrich’s final statement suggests

1. He wants to build 1400 nukes and shut down every last coal plant, every gas plant, and every refinery or (more likely)
2. He wants 400 nukes, he wants to shut down every coal plant, and he made a classic climate error and a classic energy mistake.

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Goldman Sachs’ Arjun N. Murti said in a May 5 report:

The possibility of $150-$200 per barrel seems increasingly likely over the next six-24 months, though predicting the ultimate peak in oil prices as well as the remaining duration of the upcycle remains a major uncertainty.

That would mean gasoline prices of $5 to $6 a gallon. Unless of course we permanently suspend the gasoline tax, in which case gasoline prices would only be $5 to $6 a gallon.

Why should we listen to Murti? Well, back in 2005, when prices averaged under $60 a barrel, he was one of the few Wall Street analysts who predicted oil could soon hit $105 a barrel — or higher if we don’t take the right actions quickly:

There will be a peak in production earlier than expected, and that post-peak decline will be more dramatic than currently assumed unless there is a sustained increase in investment in oil and gas production, greater consumer efficiency and alternative energy.

That may all seem obvious, but it has come as a big shock to Detroit, DC policymakers, truckers, and apparently most of the American public. Certainly the fundamentals of oil supply and demand have changed, probably forever, as I have repeatedly written (see below). And as Bloomberg reports, Murti is not alone

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So here is the unbelievable full post yesterday from the National Review’s anti-climate-action website, Planet Gore:

The Nuclear Option [Drew Thornley]
In his Sunday interview on Meet the Press, host Tim Russert asked Sen. Barack Obama about his position on nuclear energy:

Russert: In terms of climate change, global warming, you’ve talked about wind and solar and biofuels. What about nuclear? All — in all realistic assessment, don’t we need more nuclear power in order to wean ourselves off of those same fuels that are contaminating the world?

Obama: I think we do have to look at nuclear, and what we’ve got to figure out is can we store the material properly? Can we make sure that they’re secure? Can we deal with the expense? Because the problem is, is that a lot of our nuclear industry, it reinvents the wheel. Each nuclear power plant that is proposed has a new design, has — it, it has all kinds of changes, there are all sorts of cost overruns. So it has not been an effective option. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be an effective option, but we’re going to have to figure out storage and safety issues. And my attitude when it comes to energy is there’s no silver bullet. We’ve got to be — we’ve, we’ve got to look at every possible option.

Hmm . . . So does Obama feel every energy option is on the table (like, say, extracting known but currently off-limits domestic oil reserves) or just non-fossil fuel options?

First off, Obama’s comments on nukes are exceedingly well-informed, unlike, say, John McCain’s (See “McCain calls for 700+ new nuclear plants (and seven Yucca mountains) costing $4 trillion.”).

Second, what closing comment by Planet Gore could possibly be more inane?

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The oil industry has borrowed the (laughable) tagline of presidential candidate John McCain? As FoxBusiness reported on Friday:

The American Petroleum Institute took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and other major media were tapped this week to provide “straight talk on earnings.” The earnings that need “straight talk” : ExxonMobil’s $11 billion quarterly profit, and Chevron’s $5.2 billion quarterly profit.

[Note to big oil: When Fox doesn’t give your spin favorable coverage, you’ve definitely become the Britney Spears of industries.]

Apparently the oil companies think that people will ignore their bloated profits once they see a chart showing earnings in “cents per dollar of sales,” claiming

In fact, first quarter 2006 earnings for oil and natural gas companies were slightly less than the average for other U.S. industries.

[Cue the violins, cut to a small starving child in Nigeria shedding a tear for the below-average earnings of the world’s fattest fat cats.]

Well, I suppose you can fool some of the people all the time. After all, straight talker McCain denies his cap & trade system is “mandatory.” And he claims his gas tax holiday will actually benefit consumers — presumably because oil companies will generously lower their prices rather than, say, simply charging people the pre-holiday price because they know people will pay that price. Yeah, that’s the ticket. And you have millions of dollars waiting for you in the Central Bank of Nigeria…

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