Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Climate Progress

limate Progress

Climate Progress


Energy and Global Warming News for August 12th: Lobby groups fund angry protests to oppose climate bill; Coal use to drop 7.9% in 2009 — EIA

Posted: 12 Aug 2009 08:48 AM PDT

Here's a followup to "Coal lobby hires top GOP voter-fraud company to run massive 'grassroots' efforts to undermine climate and clean energy action":

Lobby Groups to Use Town Hall Tactics to Oppose Climate Bill

Taking a cue from angry protests against the Obama Administration's health care restructuring, the oil industry is helping organize anti-climate bill rallies around the nation.

The American Petroleum Institute, along with other organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers opposed to the climate legislation Congress will consider again in the fall, is funding rallies across 20 states over the August recess.

In template fliers for rallies produced by the API-founded alliance, EnergyCitizens, the public is warned that "Climate change legislation being considered in Washington will cause huge economic pain and produce little environmental gain."

U.S. CO2 emissions from fuels seen falling 5 percent in 2009

Annual U.S. emissions of the main greenhouse gas from the burning of coal, natural gas and petroleum should fall 5 percent in 2009 as the recession crimps demand, the government's top energy forecaster said on Tuesday.

"The economic downturn, combined with natural gas displacing some coal as a source of electricity generation, is projected to lead to a 5 percent decline in fossil-fuel based (carbon dioxide) emissions in 2009," the Energy Information Administration said in its monthly forecast….

Fuel switching by electricity generators and declines in industrial use were projected to lead to a 7.9 percent decline in carbon emissions from coal in 2009, EIA said. Emissions from coal were expected to rise 1.1. percent next year….

Petroleum emissions were expected to fall 4 percent in 2009, mostly due to declines in transportation.

July sees big jump in fuel efficiency of new cars

Cars and light trucks sold in July got more miles per gallon than those sold in previous months, say researchers, who credit the Cash for Clunkers program.

The average mileage for new vehicles rose from 21.4 miles per gallon in June to 22.1 mpg in July. That may not sound like much, but it's the highest mileage researchers at the University of Michigan have seen since the Environmental Protection Agency reconfigured mileage estimates in October 2007. It's also the biggest one-month jump.

Study co-author Michael Sivak noted the improvement came even as gas prices fell and unemployment levels shrank somewhat. Normally, those factors lead to the purchase of more gas guzzlers. The higher mileage shows the effect of Cash for Clunkers, Sivak said, and he expects the jump to be even bigger when August figures come out. That's because the trade-in rebate program only got going late in July.

A Record for Wind in Ireland

Wind industry proponents have been celebrating a record set in Ireland on Friday, July 31, when output from the country's turbines peaked at 999 megawatts, which is enough to supply over 650,000 homes.

"Much attention has focused on high wind penetrations in Denmark and Spain, but Ireland is emerging as another real world example showing that very high wind penetrations are achievable," wrote Christine Real de Azua, a spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association, in an e-mail message to Green Inc.

The record-breaking power reached customers across Ireland, ranging from large industries to households, according to Michael Kelly, a spokesman for Eirgrid, the Irish grid operator. "No wind farm which was able to generate had its output reduced," he said in an e-mail message. (Some places with a lot of wind power, like Texas, must shut down some turbines at times of strong winds due to a lack of transmission capacity, among other problems.)

Environmental demands grow for peacekeeping troops

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit today to Goma, a city in the heart of the war ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is meant to draw attention to renewed U.S. support for U.N. peacekeeping and to press thinly stretched troops deployed there to do more to protect innocent civilians.

But how much more can overburdened peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere be expected to do? Increasingly — and controversially — they find themselves busy doing environmental cleanups, climate change mitigation projects and providing relief from natural disasters on top of their security duties.

For example, troops with MONUC — the French acronym assigned to the U.N. Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — have spent time planting trees in their area of operation, a scene repeated at other peacekeeping operations in Africa, East Timor, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Global 2008 CO2 emissions rose 2 percent: German institute

Global carbon dioxide emissions in 2008 rose 1.94 percent year-on-year to 31.5 billion metric tons, German renewable energy industry institute IWR said on Monday, based on official information and its own research.

The private institute, which is based in Muenster and advises German ministries, said climate-harming carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rose for the tenth year in succession, running counter to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol aimed at trying to cut CO2 emissions by 5.2 percent by 2012.

DOE chief, ethanol advocate spar at Las Vegas summit

Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the co-chairman of an ethanol advocacy group sparred at an energy conference here yesterday over the roles of second- and third-generation biofuels.

Chu told the National Clean Energy Summit that such fuels should take precedence over corn ethanol. "I think that by using agricultural waste and crops grown specifically for energy, there will be no competition between food and fuel," he said.

But retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, co-chairman of Midwestern ethanol group Growth Energy, said the need to promote U.S. energy independence calls for a leading role for ethanol.

Iraqis Learn Green Techniques in Oregon

Iraq may have obligations that are more pressing than green building — but that has not stopped 19 of the country's academics from touring Oregon for two weeks of seminars on the subject.

"There is a great interest in bringing sustainable concepts into our daily lives," said Dalshad Ismael, director of engineering projects at the Kurdish Ministry of Higher Education, during a session on buildings of the future at a Portland community center this week.

"People may not understand it as such," he added, "but they know we must protect what resources we have."

China's Incinerators Loom as a Global Hazard

…After surpassing the United States as the world's largest producer of household garbage, China has embarked on a vast program to build incinerators as landfills run out of space. But these incinerators have become a growing source of toxic emissions, from dioxin to mercury, that can damage the body's nervous system.

And these pollutants, particularly long-lasting substances like dioxin and mercury, are dangerous not only in China, a growing body of atmospheric research based on satellite observations suggests. They float on air currents across the Pacific to American shores.

Rich nations offer 15-21 percent CO2 cuts by 2020: U.N.

Industrialized nations excluding the United States are planning cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of between 15 and 21 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 under a new U.N. climate pact, official data showed on Tuesday.

The numbers, issued to delegates at August 10-14 U.N. climate talks in Bonn, fall short of cuts of between 25 and 40 percent outlined by a U.N. panel of scientists to avert the worst of global warming such as heatwaves, floods and rising sea levels.

New Zealand defends climate change targets

The New Zealand government Tuesday denied it had failed to accept its country's share of the burden for tackling climate change after announcing greenhouse gas emission targets.

The government said Monday it would target greenhouse gas emission reductions from 1990 levels of between 10 and 20 percent by 2020.

New Zealand will cut its emissions by 10 percent if other developed nations sign a comprehensive treaty and by 20 percent depending on the form of the final treaty.

Climate change fight seen costing $300 billion a year

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming and adapting to impacts such as droughts and rising sea levels are likely to cost about $300 billion a year, the top U.N. climate change official said.

Yvo de Boer also told Reuters on Tuesday, on the sidelines of August 10-14 U.N. climate talks in Bonn, that cuts in emissions by 2020 so far promised by rich nations were "miles away" from long-term goals set by a Group of Eight summit last month.

"Over time, according to my own analysis, we are going to need $200 billion a year for mitigation and probably in the order of $100 billion a year for adaptation … from 2020 onwards," he said.

India's Groundwater Disappearing at Alarming Rate

Farming is a thirsty business on the Indian subcontinent. But how thirsty, exactly? For the first time, satellite remote sensing of a 2000-kilometer swath running from eastern Pakistan across northern India and into Bangladesh has put a solid number on how quickly the region is depleting its groundwater. The number "is big," says hydrologist James Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine–big as in 54 cubic kilometers of groundwater lost per year from the world's most intensively irrigated region hosting 600 million people. "I don't think anybody knew how quickly it was being depleted over that large an area."

Building Commissioning: The Stealth Energy Efficiency Strategy

Posted: 12 Aug 2009 06:34 AM PDT

The following post is written Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whom I have known for almost two decades.  He recently authored a cost-benefit analysis of energy efficiency measures entitled Building Commissioning: A Golden Opportunity for Reducing Energy Costs and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions.  In the figure below, the overlaid orange "step" is derived from the analysis in the new LBNL report and superimposed for reference over McKinsey's 2007 green carbon "abatement curve."  The full abatement curve indicates the potential emissions savings potential for a set of measures, ranked by the annualized net cost per ton of emissions reductions (y-axis), i.e., the cost of commissioning minus the value of the resulting energy savings over the measure life. The horizontal width of each step is the potential emissions reduction attributed to each measure.

U.S. Abatement Curve - 2035

One particularly potent form of energy efficiency is an emerging practice known as building commissioning. Although commissioning has earned increased respect in recent years it remains an enigmatic practice whose visibility severely lags its potential. Fortunately, a massive database on commissioning experience in the U.S. provides a potent antidote to those who poo-poo the notion that major greenhouse-gas reductions can be had at negative cost.

The aim of commissioning new buildings is to ensure that they deliver, if not exceed, the performance and energy savings promised by their design. When applied to existing buildings, commissioning identifies the almost inevitable "drift" from where things should be and puts the building back on course, often making it perform even better than the original designers intended. (Why do we tune up our cars but not our far more complex buildings?) In both contexts, commissioning is a systematic, forensic approach to quality assurance, rather than a technology per se – CSI for efficiency, if you will. Quality assurance is an essential element of any serious technological endeavor. Energy efficiency is not alone in this regard, and commissioning offers a key solution. (Consider how even more poorly electric power plants would perform if there was no QA in their construction and operation.)

Specific "deficiencies" identified and corrected through the commissioning process include problems like simultaneous heating and cooling (yes, believe it or not, this is common), mis-calibrated or otherwise malfunctioning energy management controls and sensors, defeated efficiency features (e.g., variable speed drives locked at full speed), leaky air-distribution systems, and oversized equipment. Visit our Hall of Shame for more examples. These kinds of problems collectively waste several tens of billions of dollars in energy each year, while compromising occupant comfort, health, and safety. Yes, they should be caught during the original design or corrected by routine operations and maintenance. They rarely are.

Energy-wasting deficiencies are almost always invisible to the casual observer, and unfortunately also to building designers, operators, and owners. Commissioning is not a widgit or "retrofit"; it is an integrated quality-assurance practice. It can reduce the carbon footprint of unremarkable buildings, or ensure the success of ones deliberately designed to be efficient.

Many regard uncertainties about cost and cost-effectiveness as one of the key barriers to the growth of the commissioning industry.

Back in 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy asked my team at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to build a national database of commissioning experience. Last month, we released a major update —sponsored by the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program. We gathered data on 643 buildings, representing 99 million square feet of floor space across 26 states. This meta-analysis of real projects has grown to be the world's largest database of commissioning cost-benefit case studies.

The results are compelling. The median normalized cost to deliver commissioning was $0.30/ft2 for existing buildings and $1.16/ft2 for new construction (or 0.4% of the overall construction cost). Over 10,000 specific deficiencies were identified across the half of our sample for which data were available. Correcting these problems resulted in 16% median whole-building energy savings in existing buildings and 13% in new construction, with payback times of 1.1 years and 4.2 years, respectively. Median benefit-cost ratios of 4.5 and 1.1, and cash-on-cash returns (a common statistic used in the real estate industry) of 91% and 23% were attained. High-tech buildings such as laboratories were particularly cost-effective, and saved higher amounts of energy due to their energy-intensiveness. Projects with a comprehensive approach to commissioning attained nearly twice the overall median level of savings and five-times the savings of the least-thorough projects.

Thanks to energy savings that handily eclipse the cost of the commissioning process, associated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions come at decidedly "negative" cost. Yes, negative costs. In fact, the median cost of conserved carbon is negative— -$110 per tonne for existing buildings and -$25/tonne for new construction. This compares quite well with market prices for carbon trading and offsets in the +$10 to +$30/tonne range.

Further enhancing the value proposition of commissioning, its non-energy benefits surpass those of most other energy-management practices. Significant first-cost savings routinely offset at least a portion of commissioning costs—fully in some cases. When accounting for these benefits, the net median commissioning cost was reduced by 49% on average, while in many cases the non-energy benefits fully exceeded the direct value of the energy savings. An example of this, when applied to new construction, is the capital cost savings resulting from "right-sizing" heating and cooling equipment. Commissioning can also avert premature equipment failures, avoid construction-defects litigation, improve worker comfort, mitigate indoor air quality problems, and increase the competence of in-house staff, to name just some of the other non-energy benefits. Indeed, non-energy benefits are often a more important driver in end user's initial motivation to perform commissioning.

Commissioning is arguably the single-most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions in buildings today. Commissioning maximizes the quality and persistence of savings achieved through other energy-saving technologies and practices. The process ensures that building owners get what they pay for when constructing or retrofitting buildings, provides risk-management and "insurance" for policymakers and program managers enabling their initiatives to actually meet targets, and detects and corrects problems that would eventually surface as far more costly maintenance or safety issues. As such, commissioning is more than "just another pretty energy-saving measure." It is a risk-management strategy that should be integral to any systematic effort to garner and maintain energy savings or emissions reductions.

Applying our median whole-building energy-savings value (certainly far short of best practices) to the U.S. non-residential building stock corresponds to an annual energy-savings potential of $30 billion by the year 2030, which in turn yields greenhouse gas emissions reductions of about 340 megatons of CO2 each year. How do we capture this potential?

The commissioning field is evolving rapidly. The delivery of services must be scaled up radically. The fledgling existing-buildings commissioning industry has reached a size of about $200 million per year in the United States. Based on a goal of treating each U.S. building every five years, the potential size is about $4 billion per year in commissioning services, or 20-times the current number. To achieve the goal of keeping the U.S. building stock commissioned would require an increase in the workforce from about 1,500 to 25,000 full-time-equivalent workers, a realistic number when viewed in the context of the existing workforce of related trades (which includes far more people).

The energy policy community, however, is behind the curve in utilizing commissioning. Few building codes or utility incentive programs include it, and it is omitted or poorly characterized as a strategy in most energy-efficiency potentials studies. There are important trail-blazers, notably the California Commissioning Collaborative, which brings together regulators, utilities, practitioners, and other stakeholders with a collective vision of defining and instituting best practices.

"Commissioning America" in a decade is an ambitious goal, but "do-able" and consistent with this country's aspirations to simultaneously address pressing energy and environmental issues while creating jobs and stimulating economic activity.

Related Post:  Energy efficiency is THE most important climate solution.

The tragic hubris of the climate action delayers

Posted: 11 Aug 2009 05:50 PM PDT

Let's assume we keep listening to the siren song of the deniers and the climate action delayers who insist human-caused global warming is not a dire problem requiring deep reductions in greenhouse gases starting as soon as possible.   So we ruin our  livable climate for our children and grandchildren and countless generations after that.

When they are done cursing our name, our descendents will try to understand how "a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself," as Elizabeth Kolbert put it.  They'll have a long time to do this since, as a major NOAA-led study concluded this year, climate change is "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe — irreversible, that is, if we don't stop it in the first place.

The typical reasons why people and societies have historically made such tragically catastrophic blunders don't apply to a great many opinion makers today.  Sure some are malicious or ignorant, and some, like David Broder, sultan of the status quo, are fatally uninformed about global warming.

But how you explain people who have a fair amount of familiarity with the issue and actually write regularly on the subject — but just get it so wrong again and again?  Many of these are people I've called the climate action delayers (CADs) — the folks who claim to believe in the science of global warming but obviously don't, the folks who substitute their own opinion for an understanding of the actual science.

Their tragic flaw is hubris, which, as Wikipedia notes is:

a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or Nemesis.

A perfect example of modern-day hubris can be seen in the work of one Thomas Fuller, a delayer who writes as an "environmental policy examiner" for the examiner.com named.  He has his own label, as he wrote August 1:

As a global warming 'lukewarmer,' I believe that manmade CO2 will cause about 2 degrees Celsius of warming as concentrations of CO2 double during the course of this century.

That, of course, doesn't make him a lukewarmer.  It just makes him someone who doesn't understand or care about what science actually says.  On our current emissions path, we're going to double CO2 concentrations not "during the course of the century" but almost certainly halfway through it — and we're going to warm more than 4°C by century's end:

It is hubris to blithely assert that one's beliefs supersede the work of thousands of scientists, including hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on which we base our current understanding of the danger posed by unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases.

But that isn't the most hubristic thing Fuller has written.  On August 5, he wrote a column, "The best of times for global warming skeptics":

It seems as if almost every day brings news of information and discoveries that bolster the skeptical opposition to the theory that global warming is dangerous and due to human emissions of CO2.

Wow!

Now that sentence would be quite accurate if we replaced "boster" with, say, "fatally undermine," but as written it might as well be a manifesto for the deniers themselves.  Scratch climate action delayer, and you usually get a climate science denier.

Again, it is hubris, plain and simple, to utterly ignore the information and discoveries that have been occurring almost every day for several years now, which make clear global warming is far more dire than we thought just a short time ago and that human emissions of CO2 are the predominant cause of recent warming (and obviously will become the overwhelming cause of climate change as we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).  You can find summaries of the peer-reviewed literature and observations and discoveries in the 2007 IPCC report — which every member government of the IPCC signed off on word-for-word — and in the recent NOAA-led 13-agency report on US climate impacts (see "Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn't the worst case, it's business as usual!").   You can also find many of the best recent studies here.

Fuller's post claims "our obsession with CO2 has caused us to overlook the other things humans do to affect climate on this planet, such as deforestation…."  Yes, to Fuller, it's those foolish, arrogant, hubristic climate scientists who are so obsessed with CO2 that they totally overlook deforestation — except of course for their urgent warnings to stop said deforestation because as they have told us repeatedly it is responsible for some 20% or more of all human emissions of CO2.  And except for the current desperate efforts by the overwhelming majority of nations in the world to develop a workable strategy to stop deforestation.

I hadn't heard about this guy at all until I got pinged by Google for his latest piece, which attacks me with this astounding statement:

Romm says he wants to spend about 30 minutes on his posts, and it shows.

Huh?

How can something I say I want to do in the future [for maybe 1 or 2 of my 4 to 6 posts a day] "show" anything already — especially to a CAD like Fuller who spends at most 30 minutes on every single one of his once-every-day-or-two opinion pieces?

It just goes to show you that even the most innocuous statement I write can be misrepresented by the CADs.  In fact, as readers know, what I wrote was:

Normally, about 2/3 of my posts take me some 60 to 90 minutes to write and about 1/3 take 90 to 180 minutes.  I've been trying to do more 30-minute posts in the last few days, in case you hadn't noticed, and I expect to continue that for another month.  If it proves successful, I'll keep doing it.

Fact-free Fuller, it won't surprise you, is an acolyte of Roger Pielke, Jr. and The Breakthrough Institute, which is an an organization that is dedicating all of its resources to killing any chance of either a national or international effort to avert catastrophic global warming and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional Democrats, and the environmental movement.

Then again, Fuller writes of "the alarmist website Real Climate."  I mean, if you think Real Climate is an alarmist website, then you really aren't paying any attention whatsoever to what they or anyone else is actually writing on climate science.

I think it pure hubris — and utterly immoral — to regularly write on climate science and policy without having interviewed and/or seen the talks of a few dozen of the leading climate scientists in the world and without having read at least a hundred major climate studies in the past decade.

Since global warming isn't a 3-hour Greek tragedy, this modern day hubris won't result in fatal retribution for the CADs, only for their descendants and ours.  The best we can do today is hold their hubris out for all to see.  Small comfort that will be for those living through Hell and High Water.

Zogby: 71% of likely voters support House climate bill

Posted: 11 Aug 2009 01:01 PM PDT

Zogby read 1005 voters the following statement about the American Clean Energy and Security Act:

"The House of Representatives recently passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would require electric power companies to generate 20 percent of their power from clean, renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, by the year 2020.  Also included is a global warming plan which would reduce greenhouse gases from sources like power plants and factories by 17 percent, and an energy efficiency plan which includes new appliance standards and building codes to conserve energy."

The result:

Favorable views for the bill were high among all age and income groups and even among Republicans, with 45% having a favorable view of the bill. Seventy-three percent of Independents and 89% of Democrats also took a favorable view of the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

This is similar to pretty much every recent poll on the subject:

Zogby even asked voters "Which Statement Best Reflects Your Opinion About What Action the U.S. Senate Should Take?" with one full of standard conservative disinformation:

Statement A: I think the Senate should take action because I believe we need a new energy plan right now that invests in American, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, in order to create clean energy jobs, address global warming and reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

Statement B: I think the Senate should wait on this proposal I believe the House energy bill is a hidden tax that will cost thousands of dollars every year in increased energy prices, weaken our economy further, and cause America to lose jobs to China and other countries.

The result:  "A majority (54%) believe the Senate should now take action, with two-fifths (41%) preferring that the Senate wait. "

And this is also similar to recent polling:  (see"Americans support greenhouse gas regulation even if it could 'substantially' raise energy prices").

As Zogby's website notes:

"Clearly, voters strongly favor the ideas outlined in the bill. Support for action on clean energy and energy efficiency was strong coming out of the election, and it is still strong today.  Even when presented with the concerns some have raised about the potential costs associated with this legislation, most likely voters still want the Senate to act quickly to bring about a new energy plan for America," said Zogby International Research Analyst Sam Rodgers.

Slide 9
Which Statement Best Reflects Your Opinion About What Action the U.S. Senate Should Take?