Climate Progress

Climate Progress

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• Sen. Cantwell (D-WA): U.S.-China climate deal likely at Obama visit, Senate has "50-50 chance" of passing climate bill this year
• Nobelist Krugman eviscerates macroeconomics
• Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, "seminal" study finds
• Energy and Global Warming News for September 3: U.N. chief pushes for rapid progress on climate talks; Climate change's role in wildfires
• Harvard Business Review and Yale e360 hype space solar. Why?

Sen. Cantwell (D-WA): U.S.-China climate deal likely at Obama visit, Senate has "50-50 chance" of passing climate bill this year Posted: 04 Sep 2009 07:21 AM PDT The United States and China are likely to sign a new bilateral agreement to combat climate change during President Barack Obama's visit to Beijing in November, Washington senator Maria Cantwell said on Friday. Cantwell, who is in Beijing to discuss clean energy and intellectual property issues with Chinese officials, said a deal between the world's two biggest CO2 polluters would also help build global confidence in the efforts to curb global warming. "If you are producing 40 percent of emissions — which is what China and the United States are together — what a legacy, and what a great relationship you could create by saying that's what these two great countries stepped up to do," she told reporters at a briefing. While not a surprise to CP readers (see "Exclusive: Have China and the U.S. been holding secret talks aimed at a climate deal this fall?"), this Reuters story is another important sign that the Obama's mid-November visit to China may be a critical milestone in achieving a national and global climate deal.  Indeed, if this agreement has real substance, as I expect it will, then it will boost the chances for Senate passage of the climate and clean energy bill.  And that means a Senate vote should not occur beforehand. If Obama is serious about solving the climate problem — and will put political muscle behind getting 60 votes to block the inevitable, immoral conservative filibuster — then he should use the momentum of any China agreement to get a Senate vote in early December before the big international climate negotiations: A month later, leaders gather in the Danish capital of Copenhagen to thrash out the details of a new global climate change compact, but Cantwell said a wide-ranging bilateral agreement between China and the United States would be easier to achieve. "I'd place higher odds on the ability of the United States and China to reach an agreement than I would on us passing legislation or on having Copenhagen agreed," she told reporters in a briefing. She also said there was a "50-50 chance" that the U.S. Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, would be passed by the end of the year, but said the legislation needed to be "streamlined" and simplified. China is concerned that the bill, which has already been passed by the lower house of Congress, will give future U.S. administrations the authority to levy "carbon tariffs" on countries deemed not to have made equivalent efforts to reduce their greenhouse gases. Cantwell said she was opposed to tariffs, but said however the final bill looked, the crucial part would be "putting a price on carbon" in a way that would create massive economic opportunities for both China and the United States. She also said she thought China had underestimated the resolve of the United States to "make the transition" to a low-carbon economy. A 50-50 change is what I've been saying, but again, Obama — and only Obama — can increase those odds.  As for the resolve of this country to make the transition to a low-carbon economy, we will find out in the next few months just how resolved we are. Ironically, this country's only hope of stopping China from becoming the clean energy giant of the 21st century — leading the world in jobs and exports in low carbon technologies, many of which were invented in this country — is passing the climate and clean energy bill. Related Posts: Peaking Duck: Beijing's Growing Appetite for Climate Action China softens climate rhetoric, commits to emissions peak (again), shows flexibility on Western reductions.

Nobelist Krugman eviscerates macroeconomics Posted: 04 Sep 2009 06:12 AM PDT Here's the conclusion of "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?" a long, brilliant piece in the forthcoming NYT magazine by the leading progressive economist: VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES So here's what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they'll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics. Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong." When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won't be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right. Read the whole damn indictment.  Any politician, journalist or opinion maker who worships at the feet of the false gods of neo-classical economics is no better than Bernie Madoff (see "Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?"). Some of my friends would have liked a more searing indictment of all of economics, including microeconomics.  As a humorist once said, "Microeconomists are people who are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general." This piece doesn't get into the necessary disemboweling of the entire global Ponzi scheme.  And, of course, we have the catastrophic failure of the economics community in modeling catastrophic climate impacts (see "Harvard economist: Climate cost-benefit analyses are "unusually misleading," warns colleagues "we may be deluding ourselves and others"). But Krugman can't be faulted for not taking on everything all at once, especially since he has been doing some great work on climate: Nobelist Krugman attacks "junk economics": Climate action "now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump" by giving "businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities" Nobelist Krugman takes on the "fantasists" of the "burn-baby-burn crowd" for opposing climate action that costs Americans 18 cents a day Nobelist Krugman calls climate science denial by House conservatives "a form of treason — treason against the planet" Nobelist Krugman slams Reaganite Feldstein on global warming economics Nobelist Krugman: Fear of carbon markets and speculation is "99% wrong and bad for the planet" Nobelist Krugman strongly endorses Waxman-Markey: "The claim that carbon taxes are better than cap and trade is, in my view, just wrong." One final amusing note — the cartoon above comes by way of Greg Mankiw, who likes Krugman's piece.

Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, "seminal" study finds Posted: 03 Sep 2009 03:18 PM PDT A Hockey Stick in Melting Ice Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns. So reports the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which coauthored the study to be published in Science Friday.  [I'll put the link up when it's posted.]  The Washington Post story notes: The analysis, based on more than a dozen lake sediment cores as well as glacier ice and tree ring records from the Arctic, provides one of the broadest pictures to date of how industrial emissions have shifted the Arctic's long-standing natural climate patterns. Coupled with a separate report on the region issued Wednesday by the World Wildlife Fund, the studies suggest human-induced changes could transform not only the Arctic but climate conditions across the globe. "It's basically saying the greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelming the system," said David Schneider, a visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the Science article's co-authors. The same could be said about the entire planetary ecosystem — on our current path, we're going to overwhelm the whole system (see "Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water ").  Indeed, in some sense we already have, as a number of climate scientists have pointed out.  The NYT's Andy Revkin interviewed Thomas Crowley, a climate specialist at the University of Edinburgh: "I would say that this is another piece of evidence that strengthens the argument that humans are now capable of preventing the onset of a future ice age," he told me. Another scientist holding this view is James E. Hansen of NASA, whom I interviewed about the timing of the next ice age in 2003. The NCAR graph appears to provide yet more support for the original, much-maligned "hockey stick," which has been confirmed by recent analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (see "Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years"): The new study suggests (again) that the Medieval warm period was limited to only a part of the Northern Hemisphere, and that recent human-caused warming is quite outside the boundary of the last two millennia: Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University, the lead author and head of the synthesis project, says the results indicate that recent warming is more anomalous than previously documented. "Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was preceded by a long-term cooling trend," says Kaufman. "But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before." This new study made use of the "natural archives of Arctic climate": To reconstruct Arctic temperatures over the last 2,000 years, the study team incorporated three types of field-based data, each of which captured the response of a different component of the Arctic's climate system to changes in temperature. These data included temperature reconstructions published by the study team earlier this year. The reconstructions were based on evidence provided by sediments from Arctic lakes, which yielded two kinds of clues: changes in the abundance of silica remnants left behind by algae, which reflect the length of the growing season, and the thickness of annually deposited sediment layers, which increases during warmer summers as deposits from glacial meltwater increase. The research also incorporated previously published data from glacial ice and tree rings that were calibrated against the instrumental temperature record. The scientists compared the temperatures inferred from the field-based data with simulations run with the Community Climate System Model, a computer model of global climate based at NCAR. The model's estimate of the reduction of seasonal sunlight in the Arctic and the resulting cooling was consistent with the analysis of the lake sediments and other natural archives. These results give scientists more confidence in computer projections of future Arctic temperatures. Some of our leading climate scientists say this is especially important paper, as the WP piece notes: Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the study was significant because it helps confirm scientists' current understanding of how the earth's climate has changed over millennia. "It's not that we don't know how the climate works, it just we didn't have anyone at that time measuring the climate forcing then," referring to 2,000 years ago. "Climate doesn't change all by itself for no good reason. Something has to force it." Precisely. Robert Correll, who chairs the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said the paper in Science will likely "in the long haul become a seminal piece in the scientific literature" because it allows other climate researchers "to set their work in a long time scale." And Revkin's print piece underscores the danger: Jonathan T. Overpeck, a study author and climate specialist at the University of Arizona, said the rising concentration of long-lived greenhouse gases guaranteed warming at a pace that could stress ecosystems and cause rapid melting of Greenland's great ice sheet. "The fast rate of recent warming is the scary part," Dr. Overpeck said. "It means that major impacts on Arctic ecosystems and global sea level might not be that far off unless we act fast to slow global warming." So now we know the answer to the question Robert Frost famously posed: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. Fire it is — humanity's burning of fossil fuels (and forests) trumps the natural ice age cycle. Related Posts: Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: "Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier." Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003, rate of Greenland summer ice loss triples 2007 record http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 09/ 03/ humans-may-have-ended-long-arctic-chill/

Energy and Global Warming News for September 3: U.N. chief pushes for rapid progress on climate talks; Climate change's role in wildfires Posted: 03 Sep 2009 01:36 PM PDT Heidi Cullen had a terrific piece last night on the Newshour, "Scientists See More Risk of Wildfires with Forest Changes" (click here for transcript and video).  Reuters even wrote a story on it: The Dramatic Rise in Western Forest Fires: Is Climate Change to Blame? Blaming a specific forest fire on the impact of climate change could be asking for trouble; but so too is ignoring obvious trends. That was clear last night from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS when Climate Central, an emerging authority on global warming, explored the dramatic increase in forest fires in Washington State over the past few decades. Correspondent Dr. Heidi Cullen, Climate Central's Senior Research Scientist, interviewed forest ecologists who see evidence that ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest's once vibrant forests are under duress because of global warming. Some observers believe that fire management practices by the U.S. Forest Service may help account for the increase in fires. Climate Central, in keeping with its mission to provide objective information on climate change, went deeper. Dr. Cullen reported that in Washington State, "Average spring temperatures have risen nearly three degrees since 1950. Natural variability makes some years cooler or hotter. But records show an overall warming trend." Click here for CP's take on the climate-wildfire link. UN chief: rapid progress needed in climate talks U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told a meeting of some 150 governments on Thursday that time is running out for a new climate deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Copenhagen talks in December are looming and little real negotiating time is left "to resolve some of the most complex issues," the U.N. secretary general told the World Climate Conference. "We need rapid progress." Only limited progress in the climate talks has been made for the meeting to hammer out a new accord to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on reducing the gases blamed for global warming. Meanwhile, climate change is advancing. "Our foot is stuck on the accelerator and we are heading towards an abyss," said Ban, warning that climate change could spell widespread economic disaster. Feds: Plan needed to spur clean-energy jobs A comprehensive federal plan to limit carbon emissions is the key to creating clean-energy jobs, federal officials said Wednesday. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Ed Montgomery, head of the Obama administration's effort to help struggling auto communities, used the Regional Clean Energy Economy Forum here to urge Congress to develop and approve a plan that will encourage companies to invest in the clean-energy sector, and generate demand for their products. That could create millions of jobs and boost the nation's economy, but only if there is a market for the products they create, Locke said. "If we don't provide these incentives for American companies to do it," he said, "other countries will do it." The forum at the Dow Event Center was hosted by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who is pushing to make renewable energy a cornerstone of diversifying Michigan's auto-centric economy. Last month, Michigan and Detroit's Big Three automakers won more than $1.3 billion in federal grants to support the next generation of batteries and electric vehicles. "We intend … to lead the nation, and hopefully the globe, in the clean-energy sector," Granholm said. Michigan's effort got a boost earlier Wednesday when the state House passed, 90-17, $100 million in tax credits for the redevelopment of Ford Motor Co.'s abandoned Wixom plant into a clean-energy manufacturing hub. Xtreme Power of Austin, Texas, and Clairvoyant Energy of Santa Barbara, Calif., are hoping to win federal loans and state tax breaks to refurbish the 318-acre property. New Ambassador in China Says Energy, Climate Obama's Priorities President Obama has offered plenty of lip service about the need to engage China on climate change, as has Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Apparently those are the marching orders for the new U.S. ambassador in Beijing. In his "first sit-down interview with Western media" since arriving in China in August, Jon Hunstman, Jr. told our own Ian Johnson that President Obama gave him a very clear—and green—remit: "Before setting out for China, Mr. Huntsman said, Mr. Obama told him to focus on a few big-picture issues: global economy, energy and climate change." So the energy and climate puzzle has zoomed to the top of the U.S.-Chinese relationship, ahead of niggling matters such as North Korea. To be sure, Ambassador Huntsman did talk up human rights as well. But the ambassador's priorities clearly reflect the tenor of President Obama's July speech in front of Chinese leaders, when he warned that the U.S. and China must cooperate to avoid the "ravages" of climate change. Of course, the multi-billion dollar question is just what shape that cooperation takes, beyond a few token clean-energy demonstration projects and the like. China wants to grow first and curb emissions later; the West wants China to curb emissions now and join in the clean-tech revolution (as long as it doesn't take the lead). Top Brazilian Organizations Unite in Alliance to Fight Climate Change Fourteen major Brazilian organizations representing the agribusiness, planted forests and bioenergy sectors announced today the creation of the Brazilian Climate Alliance, with the goal of contributing with solid proposals for the negotiations related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.The main focus is the agenda that the Brazilian government has been defending in global negotiations, culminating with the 15th U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP 15), next December in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Alliance's Position Paper highlights the global nature of the challenges linked to climate change as a key factor for organizations to unite behind a single effort. The document also points to the need for coordinated and urgent steps that prioritize available technologies that are economically viable and ensure short-term impact. "In the Alliance's view, the position paper is a work in progress that will evolve as negotiations and other initiatives along the same lines progress," explains the President of the Brazilian Agribusiness Association (ABAG), Carlo Lovatelli. The strong contribution made by the sectors that form the Alliance to climate change mitigation is emphasized, especially because they are sources of renewable energy, such as ethanol, biodiesel, planted forests, wood charcoal and other forms of biomass capable of substituting fossil and highly polluting fuels. Together, the products from the sectors represented in the Alliance account for over 20% of the entire Brazilian energy matrix. Moreover, the potential to capture, maintain and increase carbon stocks among the sectors represented in the Alliance is significant. China Tries to Calm Unease Over Rare Earths Curbs A Chinese official tried to calm unease about curbs on exports of rare earths used in clean energy products and superconductors, saying Thursday that sales will continue but must be limited to reduce damage to China's environment. China produces nearly all the rare earths used in batteries for hybrid cars, mobile phones, superconductors, lightweight magnets and other high-tech products. Reports of a plan to reduce exports sparked concern about the impact on industry abroad. Beijing will encourage sales of finished rare earths products but will limit exports of semi-finished goods, said Wang Caifeng, deputy director-general of the materials department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Exports of raw ores already is banned, and said that will continue, Wang said at an industry conference. Wang refused to confirm Chinese news reports that this year's exports will be cut to about 8 percent below 2008 levels and future exports will be capped at similar levels. She said a plan will be be issued later this year. "China, as a responsible big country, will not go back and will not take the road of closing the door," Wang said.

Harvard Business Review and Yale e360 hype space solar. Why? Posted: 03 Sep 2009 11:00 AM PDT Harvard Business Review touts space solar in its September piece, "On the Horizon: Six Sources of Limitless Energy?" (subs. req'd)  Of course, they also tout nuclear fusion as one of the six (see HBR figure above), so perhaps that tells you their time horizon is … 50 years from now (or maybe never), long after the climate is destroyed. More puzzling is Yale e360, which has a long piece on space solar, with the hype "Now, a host of technological advances, coupled with interest from the U.S. military, may be bringing that vision close to reality." Aside from discussing the military's interest, which may not be totally benign and in any case is largely irrelevant to the question of commercial viability, the piece discusses the deal Solaren Corporation has with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) "to provide 200 megawatts of power — about half the output of an average coal-fired power plant — by 2016 by launching solar arrays into space." As I blogged here, the physicist Marty Hoffert sent an email to the media in the spring on this (which I reprint in full below) that begins: The PG&E deal is a scam. Pure and simple. We don't need to study it in detail any more than one needed to study Bernie Madoff's investment scams. Since space solar is getting hyped again, let me start with my original discussion (here). Not many people I know think space solar is a low-cost, scalable solution. Certainly it is worth pursuing any genuine low-carbon baseload power source if it can be practical and scalable — and affordable, which I would put at $0.15 a kilowatt hour or less for. The problem with space solar is that, like hydrogen fuel cell cars, there is little chance it could be affordable until it is massively scaled up — and no guarantee that it would be practical and affordable even then. That's one reason major utilities have been unwilling to take the risk on it. Until now. Apparently at least one serious utility that has invested in "wind, geothermal, biomass, wave and tidal, and at least a half dozen types of solar thermal and photovoltaic power" is looking in to it. Jonathan Marshall, Chief, External Communications, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., sends me a link to his posting on NEXT100.com, "a blog supported by PG&E that explores the intersection of the clean energy business and the environment": PG&E is seeking approval from state regulators for a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp., a Southern California company that has contracted to deliver 200 megawatts of clean, renewable power over a 15 year period. Solaren says it plans to generate the power using solar panels in earth orbit, then convert it to radio frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in Fresno County. From there, the energy will be converted to electricity and fed into PG&E's power grid. (See interview with Solaren CEO Gary Spirnak.) Why would anyone choose so challenging a locale to generate electricity? For one, the solar energy available in space is eight-to-ten times greater than on earth. There's no atmospheric or cloud interference, no loss of sun at night, and no seasons. That means space solar can be a baseload resource, not an intermittent source of power. In addition, real estate in space is still free (if hard to reach). Solaren needs to acquire land only for an energy receiving station. It can locate the station near existing transmission lines, greatly reducing delays that face some renewable power projects sited far from existing facilities. Yeah, well good luck PG&E! Wikipedia has a good entry on SBSP here. Scale and cost are probably the biggest problems. You probably need more than a factor of 10 more drop in launch costs. The space community has been promising such a drop was just around the corner for decades, now. It seems all but inconceivable that you could get the cost to drop that sharply without economies of scale and a learning curve driven by a massive number of regular launches. But who is going to pay for all those incredibly expensive space-based solar systems before the cost drops? This is a classic chicken and egg problem, compounded by the fact that there is no guarantee you will actually get the cost drops even with large-scale deployment, so all of your money is at grave risk. The risk is even greater because land-based solar baseload (or load following or dispatchable solar) — aka Concentrated solar thermal power — is practical and scalable now, and certain to be much cheaper. And land-based PV is poised to drop in cost sharply, and will ultimately have access to tremendous land-based storage through plug-in hybrid and electric cars. On the even more skeptical side, here is the full email from Hoffert: The PG&E deal is a scam. Pure and simple. We don't need to study it in detail any more than one needed to study Bernie Madoff's investment scams. There's no way to do this any more than there is a way to get 12% return on investment consistently regardless of the economy. Didn't stop investment in Madoff and it may not stop investment in this harebrained scheme. There's no way to get 200 Megawatts from orbit with microwave beaming by 2016 from private sector investment. The infrastructure to do it efficiently with microwaves requires huge structures in orbit and in-space assembly by robots. This is very far from existing technology. Microwaves are the wrong way to start a space solar power business. What we can do in a few hundred kilowatts with laser beaming to PV modules on Earth in a five year time frame because there's no in-space assembly needed and single-launch vehicles could likely do it.  This could realistically lead to a buildup of a viable orbital and power industry. Even so, we will need major up-front money to test the idea from the feds. The promoters of the PG&E deal idea say they'll provide a thousand times more power and do it all from the private sector. Might as well say we're ready to go to the Moon or Mars with private sector financing.   The physics of this is very well understood by the research-active SBSP community. Too bad, because when it all unravels it will be a major setback for space solar power.  Ken [Caldeira], this is very much like your experience with the company that wants to get rid of CO2 in seawater by a proprietary process that violates basic chemistry. Their CEO says he has special insider knowledge to do this, and so does the company pushing this space solar power deal.  His defense it that he took many companies public. These ideas get as far as they do most because people making business decisions about alternate energy are often scientific illiterates. There are real technological and scientific hurdles, showstoppers, that is;  and there are often potential effective technical and scientific approaches around them. The problem is not knowing the difference. It's a much a disaster to overestimate the prospects for near-term profit based on flawed physics as to underestimate the longer-term potential of a new technology based on the opportunities that physics does provide.  As Richard Feynman sagaciously observed, "You can't fool Mother Nature."  If only we didn't have to deal with those idiotic Homo sapiens primates inhabiting this planet. All very depressing because I'm a strong advocate space solar power technology. Marty Hoffert Professor Emeritus of Physics New York University And then there's this amazing story in Wired, "Hurricane-Killing, Space-Based Power Plant" based on Solaren's 2006 patent for "altering weather using space-born energy" (see inset figure from patent below, click to enlarge). Many readers of the original post were concerned the device could be used as a weapon.  Not so far-fetched an idea now — at least no more far-fetched than Solaren's plan to weaken or alter hurricanes from space. This is a self-inflicted wound by Solaren on its own credibility. Then we have the life-cycle emissions issue. It takes a massive amount of rocket fuel to put stuff in orbit. Solaren CEO Gary Spirnak glosses over this entire issue in his interview with Marshall on the web (here): Q: Is the renewable energy generated from this project completely carbon-free? A: Yes. Solaren's SSP energy conversion process is completely carbon-free. Q: How will this project impact the environment? A: The construction and operations of Solaren's SSP plant will have minimal impacts to the environment. The construction of the SSP ground receive station will have no more environmental impact than the construction of a similarly sized terrestrial photovoltaic (PV) solar power plant. Space launch vehicles will place the SSP satellites into their proper orbit. These space launch vehicles primarily use natural fuels (H2, O2) and have an emissions profile similar to a fuel cell. When in operation, the Solaren SSP plant has a zero carbon, mercury or sulfur footprint. In addition, the high efficiency conversion of RF energy to electricity at the SSP Ground Receive Station does not require water for thermal cooling or power generation, unlike other sources of baseload power (nuclear, coal, hydro). Uhh, not quite. The solar energy is carbon free (other then the manufacturing of the cells which is typically recovered in one or two years of operation). But I'd hardly call H2 — hydrogen– a "natural fuel." Today, NASA gets its hydrogen from natural gas in a process that generates large amounts of carbon dioxide. And then it uses a huge amount more energy to get the hydrogen into the Space Shuttle. As I discuss in my book, The Hype about Hydrogen: At atmospheric pressure, hydrogen becomes a liquid only at the ultra-frigid temperature of -253 °C (-423 °F or 20 K), just a few degrees above absolute zero. It can be stored only in a super-insulated tank, known as cryogenic storage. NASA uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel for the space shuttle, along with liquid oxygen. Some 100 tons or nearly 400,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen are stored in the shuttle's giant external tank. To fuel each shuttle launch, 50 tanker trucks drive several hundred miles from New Orleans to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We have a great deal of experience shipping liquid hydrogen: Since 1965, NASA has trucked more than 100,000 tons of liquid hydrogen to Kennedy and Cape Canaveral…. The process of liquefying hydrogen requires expensive equipment and is very energy-intensive. Refrigeration processes have inherent efficiency limitations, and hydrogen liquefaction requires multiple stages of compression and cooling. Some 40% of the energy of the hydrogen is required to liquefy it for storage…. A major challenge facing liquefied hydrogen is evaporation. Hydrogen stored as a liquid can boil off and escape from the tank over time. NASA faces this in the extreme: The agency loses almost 100,000 pounds of hydrogen each time it fuels up the shuttle, requiring NASA to truck in far more hydrogen than the 227,000 pounds needed by the main tank.… From a global warming perspective, even with large, centralized liquefaction units, the electricity consumed would be quite high. According to Raymond Drnevich of Praxair, a leading supplier of liquefied hydrogen in North America, the typical power consumption is 12.5 to 15 kWh per kg of hydrogen liquefied. Since that electricity would come from the U.S. electric grid, liquefying 1 kg of hydrogen would by itself release some 17.5 to 21 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future. Burning one gallon of gasoline, which has roughly the same energy content as 1 kg of hydrogen, releases about the same amount–20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So even allowing for the greater efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, if liquefaction is a major part of the hydrogen infrastructure, it would be exceedingly difficult for hydrogen-fueled vehicles to have a net greenhouse gas benefit until the electric grid is far greener than today (that is, has far lower carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour). Yes, you could make the hydrogen from renewable sources — and liquefy it with renewable sources. But there is no prospect that can be done for anything less than an exorbitant cost, which would drive up the price of each launch enormously. Yet consider the email response I got from the company in response to my question "Does somebody have a lifecycle CO2 or GHG emissions calculation per kWh given the fuel needed to launch this stuff?"  Cal Boerman, Director Energy Services for Solaren, replied: Solaren plans to use launch vehicles (Atlas V/Delta IV Heavy Class) that primarily use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for fuels. The resulting emissions are water. These fuels are formed via electrolysis. The Wikipedia definition is: Electrolysis of water is the decomposition of water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen gas (H2) due to an electric current being passed through the water. Solaren assumes the electricity used for this process was generated from clean resources. Therefore the lifecycle environmental impact per kW-hr is negligible. Also, we do not use solid rocket motors so there is no added pollution from them. Hope this Helps Well, It helps me understand how little Solaren has thought about this important issue.  Electrolysis is good for generating pure hydrogen, but it is incredibly electricity intensive (duh) as is making liquid hydrogen for transport.  Presumably a lot of this is done at night when electricity is cheap — if someone can find information on who exactly makes hydrogen for NASA, I'd love to see it.  All I could find is this 2002 article that says it is done near New Orleans using " technology that releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."  Plus they lose a lot of hydrogen through evaporation from the trucking.  And of course the trucking uses a lot of fossil fuels. Making hydrogen from renewable-based electrolysis would probably triple the cost of the fuel.  And if Solaren really thinks it can cut launch costs by the factor of 10 or more needed to make this entire effort viable, then it can't be tripling the cost of the fuel. PG&E concludes From PG&E's perspective, as a supporter of new renewable energy technology, this project is a first-of-a-kind step worth taking. If Solaren succeeds, the world of clean energy will never be the same. I don't think space-based solar should be considered among the plausible climate solutions until and unless someone publishes a realistic cost estimate based on plausible launch costs a full lifecycle analysis of CO2 per kiloWatt-hour using existing launch vehicle emissions.

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