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- Energy and Global Warming News for October 14: Cap and trade is best approach for economy — Exelon CEO; Developed nation oil demand peaked in 2005; China could cheaply control coal emissions — PNNL
- Brazil's President: "I foresee that by 2020 we will be able to reduce deforestation by 80 percent; in other words, we will emit some 4.8 billion fewer tons of carbon dioxide gas."
- Teabaggers try to "flush" Graham out of GOP, calling him "traitor" and "RINO" and "wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy"; Graham responds, "We're not going to be the party of angry white guys."
- The BBC asks "What happened to global warming?" during the hottest decade in recorded history!
- Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): "We must reduce greenhouse gas emissions…. Congress … must take the lead."
- NASA reports hottest June to September on record*; NOAA says "weak" El Niño "expected to strengthen and last through" winter
| Posted: 14 Oct 2009 09:17 AM PDT Exelon CEO: Cap and trade is best approach for economy Exelon Chairman and CEO John W. Rowe said yesterday that cap-and-trade is the best approach for addressing global warming while sustaining an economic recovery. In a keynote address at the PennFuture Southeast Global Warming Conference in Penn Valley, Pa., Rowe said reducing carbon emissions will cost money, but the alternatives to cap-and-trade will cost more. "The best way to address the climate problem and protect our nation's fragile economic recovery is through cap-and-trade, which is the least expensive solution," Rowe said. "Prices will go up, just not as much as with cruder tools. Plus, the legislation has provisions that will help reduce the impact to consumers." Rowe said that options like new nuclear plants, wind and solar, while appealing to many, actually cost much more than commonplace solutions like energy efficiency. "Choosing more expensive options over cheaper ones adds costs that are passed through to businesses and consumers," Rowe said. "That`s why we need a climate bill that takes advantage of the power of appropriately regulated and monitored markets, which will drive competition, innovation and low-cost solutions." In the wake of Exelon`s decision to withdraw from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce due to a disagreement on the urgency of addressing global warming, Rowe urged the nation's business community to come together in support of climate legislation. "Companies and business groups must recognize the need for strong action-or they will be left behind," said Rowe. "We have faith in the ability of American business to come together to develop innovative and cost-effective solutions to the climate challenge." Exelon is not waiting for climate legislation to undertake its own effort to address climate change through Exelon 2020, an environmental and business strategy to reduce, offset or displace more than 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year by 2020. In April 2009, Exelon announced that it had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 35 percent from 2001 to 2008. Rowe is the electricity industry`s longest-serving chief executive, with nearly 26 years as a utility CEO. Rowe was among the first CEOs in the industry to focus on climate change, first testifying before Congress on the potential effects of carbon emissions in 1992. He currently serves as co-chair of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, and previously chaired the Edison Electric Institute and the Nuclear Energy Institute. Demand peaked in developed nations – never to return Demand for oil in developed nations peaked in 2005, and changing demographics and improved motor-vehicle efficiency guarantee that it won't hit those heights again, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates says in a new report. Reduced petroleum demand in developed nations could make their economic growth less vulnerable to oil price shocks, the report states. Nonetheless, global oil demand is still expected to grow, overall, driven by China and other developing nations as the world economy recovers. But demand for oil that has fallen in recent years in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, nations won't be made up, the analysts say. "The economic downturn has been masking a larger trend in the oil demand of developed countries," said Daniel Yergin, the company's chairman. "The fact is that OECD oil demand has been falling since late 2005, well before the Great Recession began." The biggest reason, the group says, is that oil demand in the transportation sector — which is the United States' dominant use of oil and accounts for 60 percent of OECD petroleum demand — is flattening. The trend has been noticed elsewhere, as well. Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson said this month that U.S. gasoline demand peaked in 2007. The Cambridge Energy Research Associates, or CERA, analysis cites several reasons why demand in developed nations — which accounts for slightly more than half the world's total — won't recover. Among them: Car ownership rates have reached "saturation," while populations are aging and population growth ranges from low to negative. Also, OECD governments, driven by global warming and energy security worries, have tightened fuel efficiency standards, while high prices in recent years have also pushed consumers away from gas guzzlers. In the United States, the Obama administration plans to implement rules that push corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards to a fleetwide average of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years ahead of the schedule Congress laid out in a 2007 energy law. Use of alternative fuels like ethanol has also grown. "New technologies such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and next-generation biofuels could also have a greater impact in the future," the report states. Global demand will nonetheless grow, fueled mostly by developing nations, CERA finds. The company forecasts world demand to increase from 83.8 million barrels per day this year to 89.1 mbd in 2014. "Just 900,000 bpd [barrels per day] of growth is expected to come from OECD countries, just a fraction of the 3.7 million bpd of demand lost over the course of 2005 to 2009," the report states. But CERA cautions that developed nations will hardly be through with oil anytime soon. The demand reduction in OECD countries between the 2005 peak and 2030 is expected to be "fairly modest," it states. Report: China could cheaply control coal emissions Getting China's coal-plant emissions out of the atmosphere so they don't worsen global warming may be cheaper, easier and longer-lasting than expected, a federal energy lab report finds. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory report, set for release today in London, says there are vast underground reserves in China that can be used for "carbon sequestration," a carbon dioxide-trapping technology considered vital to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. "Conventional thinking had been that China did not have a lot of storage for carbon. But it turns out China does," says the lab's Robert Dahowski, the report's lead author. "Enough for many decades, perhaps hundreds of years." Carbon sequestration, which today is used only in a few oil fields and experimental projects, works by capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks, compressing it and pumping it underground into deep saltwater reservoirs capped by layers of impermeable stone. The report finds that the cost of transporting, injecting and monitoring carbon dioxide from China's 1,623 largest sources — coal, cement, ammonia plants and factories — would average $5 to $7 a ton, about half of estimated costs in the USA. Further, China's deep geology features rock layers that are perfect for pumping carbon dioxide underground. The report maps at least 2,300 billion metric tons of potential underground storage for carbon in China, Dahowski says. China's major plants emit about 3.8 billion metric tons a year. Bush era document on climate change released The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday released a long-suppressed report by George W. Bush administration officials who had concluded — based on science — that the government should begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions because global warming posed serious risks to the country. The report, known as an "endangerment finding," was done in 2007. The Bush White House refused to make it public because it opposed new government efforts to regulate the gases most scientists see as the major cause of global warming. The existence of the finding — and the refusal of the Bush administration to make it public — were already known. But no copy of the document had been released until Tuesday. The document "demonstrates that in 2007 the science was as clear as it is today," said Adora Andy, EPA spokeswoman. "The conclusions reached then by EPA scientists should have been made public and should have been considered." The Bush administration EPA draft was released in response to a public records request under the Freedom of Information Act by the environmental trade publication Greenwire. A finding that greenhouse gases and global warming pose serious risks to the nation is a necessary step in instituting government regulation. President Obama and congressional Democrats are seeking major climate legislation, but the administration has indicated that if Congress fails to act, it might use an EPA finding to move toward regulation on its own. In April, the administration released its proposal for an endangerment finding. The newly released document from the Bush EPA shows that much of the Obama document embraces the earlier, suppressed finding word for word. "Both reach the same conclusion — that the public is endangered and regulation is required," said Jason Burnett, a former associate deputy administrator who resigned from the EPA in June 2008 amid frustration over the Bush administration's inaction on climate change. "Science and the law transcend politics." The 2007 draft offers an unequivocal endorsement of the prevailing views among climate scientists. It includes a declaration that the "U.S. and the rest of the world are experiencing the effects of climate change now" and warns that in the U.S., those effects could lead to drought, more frequent hurricanes and other extreme weather events, increased respiratory disease and a rise in heat-related deaths. The Obama version of the finding has gone through the necessary hearings and public comments. A final EPA version is expected to be released soon. A major Senate climate change bill is written and ready to be debated before the Environment and Public Works committee, the chairwoman of the panel said Tuesday. Sen. Barbara Boxer's legislation would distribution of tens of billions of dollars of pollution allowances to power plants, manufacturing, and other industries. It will mirror cap and trade legislation passed by the House in late June with, she noted, "a few tweaks." The legislation has been sent to the Environmental Protection Agency for analysis, which should be completed by the end of the month. Boxer's move is another piece of good news for climate advocates. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham co-authored an op-ed with Sen. John Kerry pushing for a climate bill – a signal, said environmentalist, that Democrats may attract bipartisan support for a carefully crafted bill. "It's happening," said Boxer. "We're making progress." Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, however, also plans to draft legislation dealing with the pollution allowances. "My position is that's great, he should do that as well," said Boxer. "At the end of the day this should be a collaborative process." Boxer is planning three days of hearings, kicking-off on October 27, with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar all expected to testify. Boxer expects to mark-up the legislation in early November. A final bill will then be complied by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with input from five other committees. "Our bill will reflect the priorities of our committee," said Boxer. "Once it gets out of the committee it will be taken up by the whole body and people will be speaking to Senator Reid for what they want." DOE earmarks $5 million for smart grid Last week the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that ComEd could receive up to $5 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding for the utility's Smart Grid solar pilot. This one-year project would examine customer responses to pricing signals, the impact of renewable distributed energy system, and how they can best be integrated into a future Smart Grid system. ComEd's solar pilot would include approximately 200 customers, most of whom would be among the first 140,000 ComEd customers to receive a new smart meter through ComEd's proposed Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) pilot, which currently is under consideration by the Illinois Commerce Commission. A smart meter is a digital electric meter that collects usage information every 30 minutes and sends that information to ComEd through a secure telecommunications connection. A group of customers in the pilot would receive solar photovoltaic systems, some with energy storage capability, and be placed on a real-time electricity price and net metering program which lets customers get credit for excess electricity generated by their solar energy systems that goes back to ComEd's grid. Other customers in the pilot will receive only an energy monitoring display. "ComEd's solar pilot will be a sophisticated study of how renewable distributed energy systems can be integrated into the power grid," said Anne Pramaggiore, president and chief operating officer, ComEd. "We are proud to be a pioneer in leveraging groundbreaking technologies and identifying ways to provide our customers a smarter and greener electric delivery system." IEA: World needs big drive for carbon capture The world needs to build 100 major projects for capturing and burying greenhouse gases by 2020 and thousands more by 2050 to help combat climate change, International Energy Agency chief Nobuo Tanaka said on Tuesday. Energy ministers meeting in London said the world must start building by next year at least 20 commercial-scale pilot projects to test a technology which U.S. energy secretary Steven Chu said could solve "20 percent of the problem" to curb carbon. The drive, mostly to capture emissions from coal-fired power stations, would cost $56 billion by 2020 alone, said Tanaka. Carbon capture funding could be a key part of a new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. "We will need 100 large scale projects by 2020, 850 by 2030 and 3,400 in 2050," Tanaka told the ministers at a carbon capture and storage (CCS) conference, adding that the rich world must take the lead but most projects must be in non-OECD countries by 2050. A few industrial-scale projects are in operation, including in Norway, Canada and Algeria, but none tests all parts of the capture process. Heat-trapping carbon dioxide can be taken from the exhausts of a coal-fired power plant, for instance, then piped underground into porous rocks. The IEA estimates that after the $56 billion investment in CCS globally from 2010-2020, a further $646 billion will be needed from 2021 to 2030, Tanaka told the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum. U.N. studies have indicated that CCS could do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions this century than a shift to renewable energies such as wind or solar power. CCS has been limited by high costs. A tale of two ways to save electricity Recent developments in efficiency policies are playing out in two different stories about how the low-hanging fruit gets picked: with business's blessing or its opposition. In one story, there's been a truce. Manufacturers have agreed to new standards making air conditioners more efficient in hot regions and making heaters more efficient in cold ones. In the other, there's a standoff. California state regulators will vote next month on a plan to drastically improve efficiency in energy-hungry televisions, but TV makers are protesting the policy as burdensome and unnecessary. Both industries face a rising tide as more states begin to consider energy efficiency policies. States seek more than the direct benefits — reduced emissions and energy bills — they also want to prepare for federal legislation that could push efficiency even further. The Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, which represents the main producers of furnaces and air conditioning systems, agreed to the deal after months of talks with pro-efficiency groups, including the Alliance to Save Energy and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The regulatory stage had been set: The Obama administration is about to review a furnace standard set by the George W. Bush administration, and air conditioners are about to face new efficiency guidelines. Upcoming talks for the Montreal Protocol will likely bring new controls on hydrofluorocarbons, a main refrigerant and potent greenhouse gas. For decades, manufacturers preferred a system that made mass production easy: Washington would set the efficiency standards, and states couldn't go above them. That gave manufacturers a large, uniform market. |
| Posted: 14 Oct 2009 08:10 AM PDT
This is really the first year since the launch in 2006 that the blog seems appropriately named! AFP reports:
The world appears to be coming together to finally address deforestation, one of the biggest single contributor to climate change:
This is going to cost money, of course, and the developing countries quite naturally expect the rich countries — which grew rich generating the overwhelming majority of cumulative GHG emissions and cutting down their own forests — and oftentimes directly or indirectly financing the deforestation of poorer countries:
But, the good news is that stopping deforestation is one of the most cost-effective, near-term strategies for addressing climate change: Another good piece of news is that the House climate and clean energy bill allocates a great deal of money to this international effort: The key will be to ensure that the Senate bill — and the final bill that gets to Obama's desk next year — keeps these provisions. Kudos to Brazil for putting this strong commitment on the table. |
| Posted: 14 Oct 2009 06:51 AM PDT As predicted, far-right-wingers are going after Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his breakthrough partnership with John Kerry (D-MA). The two Senators asserted Sunday that they have developed "a framework for climate legislation to pass Congress and the blueprint for a clean-energy future that will revitalize our economy, protect current jobs and create new ones, safeguard our national security and reduce pollution." Some are even labeling Graham a RINO (Republican In Name Only), even though the American Conservative Union rates him an ACU "Senate Standout," among the 20 most conservative U.S. Senators in 2008! Think Progress and Wonk Room have the gory details, which I excerpt below. After voting to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and expressing a willingness to build a compromise approach to clean energy legislation, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) appears to be the new target of tea party activists. At a Graham town hall in Greenville yesterday, activist Harry Kimball of "RINO HUNT" protested by constructing a display that depicted Graham, as well as moderates like Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), being flushed down a toilet:
One attendee of the event asked the senator, "when are you going to announce that you are switching parties?" The question drew loud applause from the crowd. Graham defended himself, and denounced the influence of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) on the Republican party:
Angry attendees in the crowd interrupted Graham with cries of, "You're a country club Republican," "Sotomayor!," and "You lie." Outside the event, right-wing activist Julliet Kozak picketed the town hall with a sign decrying all "Unconstitutional Anti-Christ Socialist Federal Deficit Spending Programs." She explained that she opposes what Graham is "doing in our Congress, what he's doing to our country." Graham's fellow South Carolina senator Jim DeMint (R) was an outspoken proponent of ejecting Specter from the Republican Party. DeMint told a conservative blogger Specter "cut our knees from under us." He added that conservatives in the Senate need to aggressively "go after" Specter and other GOP moderates. According to the newspaper The State, Graham repeatedly responded to those who accused him of being a "traitor" to "chill out." One man told Graham he had "betrayed" conservatism and made a "pact with the devil" by working with Democrats. "We're not going to be the party of angry white guys," Graham said to even more shouts. Some people walked out during Graham's speech after he told them, "if you don't like it, you can leave." Brad Johnson rounds up the conservative blogosphere's reaction to Graham below: This unhinged response is reflected in the conservative blogosphere, where Graham has been called a "fake Republican," "RINO" (Republican in name only), a "traitor," "disgrace," "asshat," "democrat in drag," and a "wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy":
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| The BBC asks "What happened to global warming?" during the hottest decade in recorded history! Posted: 13 Oct 2009 03:42 PM PDT
Existential question of the day: How can Paul Hudson's byline be "Climate correspondent, BBC News" when his 'reporting' doesn't correspond to the climate, which continues to warm? It is tiresome debunking yet another poor researched article by a media outlet that has historically had a great deal of credibility [see "NYT's Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"]. The BBC headline inanely asks "What happened to global warming?" Answer — it keeps on keepin' on:
And those posts were just projections from December 2008, before factoring in the record warming we're seeing this year (see "NASA reports hottest June to September on record"). The figure above is from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The solid red line is the five-year mean, which is obviously a better view of the climate picture, as opposed to the highly variable annual data. NASA used the "January-September (9 months) mean" for the 2009 data point. The hottest year on record is 2005, and 2009 is likely to be close to the second hottest years of 2007 and 1998. But Hudson is a Brit, so he (sort of) uses the data from the Met Office aka Hadley Center in his lede:
Yes, the headline was a surprise since you're supposed to be the climate correspondent, but the headline fails to correspond to the climate, which continues to warm — as even your own friggin' Met Office explained a few weeks ago in this online analysis:
So the BBC doesn't even know what it's own lead climate data and analysis center has concluded, even though it (selectively) makes use of that center's data. And I'll repeat for the umpteenth time, the NASA GISS data is almost certainly superior to the data from the Met Office (see "What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?"). Remember, "there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest," as New Scientist explained (see here and here). "The UK's Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations." Thus it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK's Hadley Center says.
Figure. The animated graph shows the temperature difference between the two 5-year periods 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. The largest warming has occurred over the Arctic in the past decade and is missing in the Hadley data. And then we have this utterly backwards piece of nonsense from Hudson:
The only problem is that everything Easterbrook and Hudson just said is bunk. First, the PDO is a "long-term fluctuation of the Pacific Ocean that waxes and wanes between cool and warm phases approximately every 5 to 20 years" — it has no net impact on the long-term warming trend. Moreover, contrary to Easterbrook's and Hudson's un-fact-checked assertion, the oceans have continued to warm, as the peer-reviewed literature makes clear (see "Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It's the oceans, stupid!"). A September JGR article, "Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003–2008" (subs. req'd, draft here) details an analysis of "monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth based on Argo measurements." Background on Argo here. Their findings are summed up in this figure:
Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 108 Jm-2. Still warming, after all these years! And just where you'd expect it — the oceans, which is where more than 90% of the warming was projected to end up. I would also add that Hudson and Easterbrook also seem painfully unaware of the recent sea surface temperature data (see "Second warmest August on record and warmest June-July-August for the oceans"). And what error-riddled article on nonexistent global cooling would be complete without some confusion about the work of the admittedly confusing Mojib Latif:
Ah, the unintentional irony — "To confuse the issue even further." Hudson obviously missed my October 1 memo to media (see "Exclusive interview with Dr. Mojib Latif, the man who confused the NY Times and New Scientist"):
With apologies to regular CP for the repetition, I mostly deciphered Latif's work on this blog in 2008 (see "Nature article on 'cooling' confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming"). Latif's Nature study is consistent with the following statements:
Here is his Nature "forecast" in green ("Each point represents a ten-year centred mean" — more discussion at the end): Now, with the caveat that Latif claims no "skill" in any forecast after 2015 — a caveat the media and deniers never print — as you can see, their model suggests we'll see pretty damn rapid warming in the coming decade, just as the Hadley Center did in a 2007 Science piece and just as the US Naval Research Lab and NASA recently predicted (see "Another major study predicts rapid warming over next few years — nearly 0.3°F by 2014"). Hudson ends:
The science was in years ago. Hudson should try reading the literature or at least the summary of the literature in the 2007 IPCC report, "the largest and most detailed summary of the climate change situation ever undertaken, involving thousands of authors from dozens of countries," which found
The "debate" over what is causing global warming has been ginned up by clever deniers and spun to the public by lazy or easily duped journalists. Stop the madness, already, status quo media. Either read the damn literature and talk to dozens of serious climate scientists or write about something else. |
| Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): "We must reduce greenhouse gas emissions…. Congress … must take the lead." Posted: 13 Oct 2009 01:43 PM PDT
Huh. The breakthrough Graham-Kerry op-ed says we aren't a "long ways" away from a bill:
For Murkowski, the response to potential EPA action is to try to block it for a year. For Graham, the response is to work hard now to pass a bill that "can empower our negotiators to sit down at the table in Copenhagen in December." In her defense, she wrote that piece before Graham and Kerry published theirs — and she would appear to be outside of the loop. Still, now that a bipartisan climate deal seems likely in the Senate, particularly one that has a title to promote oil drilling, these various statements mostly serve to box herself into a corner whereby opposition to a bipartisan bill would get harder and harder to explain. Nate Silver's "Probability of Yes" vote for Murkowski is 2.37%, putting her in the "Republican Hail Mary's & No-Shots." But based on this op-ed, and her earlier statements, I'm going to put her at 50%. Assuming Graham and Kerry come up with a compromise that, say, McCain can support, how exactly will Murkowski oppose it? On grounds that it was not a "good faith" effort to address climate change? Related Posts:
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| Posted: 13 Oct 2009 10:39 AM PDT Fast on the heels of the second warmest August on record and warmest June-July-August for the oceans, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that this was the second hottest September on record. Unlike NOAA, which will announce its September global analysis in a few days, NASA just quietly updates its data set (here). So you have to do a little math to see that for the June through September period, 2009 now tops both 2005 and 1998. I put the asterisk in the headline since these four months in 2009 are only slightly warmer than those in 1998. I'm not cherry-picking these last four months, but rather ENSO-picking them. The reason 1998 was so anomalously warm even beyond the human-caused trend was the uber-El Niño. Back in January, NASA had predicted: "Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance." Then, back in early June NOAA put out "El Niño Watch," which I noted meant that "record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record." So here we are. What makes these record temps especially impressive is that we're at "the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century," according to NASA. It's just hard to stop the march of anthropogenic global warming, well, other than by reducing GHG emissions, that is. Another thing that makes these record temps impressive is that we're only in a "weak El Niño," according to the latest monthly "El Niño/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion" of the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA's National Weather Service:
What is particularly interesting to me is the prediction that, while his is not going to be a blockbuster El Niño in terms of amplitude, as we saw in 1997-1998, it may turn out to be a pretty long one. If it lasts through June 2010, then that year seems poised to be the hottest on record. Related Post: |
Those quotes are from a recent op-ed, "
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