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- The Audacity of Nope: The GOP obstructs the clean energy bill
- A Proposal for US-China Collaboration on Climate Technology
- Road to Copenhagen, Part 2: Risky Business
- One year after his election, Obama on verge of audaciously fulfilling his promise as the green FDR
- El Niño-driven sea surface temperatures are soaring. Forecast: Hot and then even hotter.
- Energy and Global Warming News for November 3: Yet another coal plant to be replaced by a 'plant' plant! And South Dakota's Big Stone 2 coal plant is dead!
| The Audacity of Nope: The GOP obstructs the clean energy bill Posted: 04 Nov 2009 07:03 AM PST
How lame are the GOP's delaying tactics on the climate bill? Even the Washington Post's editors — no friend of climate action or clean energy — criticized them today in piece titled, "Unhelpful atmosphere," pointing out that "GOP members want the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to perform a series of modeling runs that would be more extensive than those it has done on similar legislation" and "EPA Associate Administrator David McIntosh said Tuesday that the differences [between the House and Senate bill] wouldn't even show up in the agency's computer modeling, leaving little reason to conduct a completely new analysis before committee work commences." The editorial noted, "Draft texts of Kerry-Boxer have been publicly available since the end of September, and a more complete version has been out for more than a week. The GOP should be ready to offer amendments, particularly after Ms. Boxer extended the deadline for their submission to Tuesday evening…. Ms. Boxer brought Mr. McIntosh into the room Tuesday to answer just such questions. It would have been constructive if GOP committee members had been there to question him." Guest blogger Noreen Nielson, director for energy communications at progressive media, shares some further insight on the GOP's delaying tactics. As the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee began meeting for markup yesterday on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, only one Republican member, Sen. George Voinovich, bothered to show. The boycott, carried out by the six other minority members, suggests they are joining in lockstep with the rest of the Party of NO to block any reform that will help rebuild our economy – from clean energy to health care to financial reform.
During this morning's meeting, Sen. Voinovich, speaking on behalf of the minority party, said they "sincerely" wanted to work with Democrats to pass the Clean Energy Jobs Act. Yet past statements indicate otherwise. (Note: All the below statements were made before the Senate bill was even introduced.)
Voinovich then went on to discuss how the inadequate analysis of the Clean Energy Jobs Act was the reason for the blockade – providing nothing more than a straw man excuse. The EPA, the Obama administration and others have consistently said the updated EPA analysis provides an accurate portrait of the Senate bill's projected impacts. According to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's testimony before the Senate Environment Committee, the two bills were so similar that they will likely have the same impact on costs, energy use, and other variables. "Earlier this year, EPA ran the major provisions of the House clean-energy legislation through several economic computer models. When it comes to the specifications that the models can detect, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act is very similar to the House legislation. Nevertheless, EPA has examined the ways in which the Senate bill is different and determined which of the conclusions reached about the House-passed bill can confidently be said to apply to the Senate bill as well." The House-passed bill mentioned above that can "confidently be applied to the Senate bill" received extensive evaluation and scrutiny from a number of government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Congressional Budget Office, and Energy Information Administration. And the Senate Committee held numerous comprehensive legislative hearings on the bill last week which included 54 expert witnesses in nine panels. Moreover as the EPA's David McIntosh stressed during today's meeting, re-running the models every time a bill is amended or tweaked is costly and unnecessary. It costs taxpayers at least $135,000 every time the analysis models are re-run and the models are "not designed to detect fine-grain details," meaning another analysis right now would result in "vanishingly small" differences from the currently available modeling. Sen. Boxer said this morning that Sen. Reid has promised a full five week EPA analysis of the final merged bill before floor consideration.
So the question is: What is the real motivation behind the Republican members blocking clean energy reform? The costs of doing nothing to combat climate change greatly outweigh the costs of acting now. We're spending $1 billion a day on foreign oil, money that could instead be invested here at home to help create 1.7 million new jobs, increase our security and lessen our pollution. Perhaps it has something to do with the $3,507,321the seven minority members of the EPW Committee have received from Big Oil, along with millions more from utilities, mining and the national resource sector. This is in addition to the billions Big Oil has spent on lobbying, astroturfing and smear campaigns. Exxon Mobil alone spent $7.2 million on lobbying in the last quarter – more than the total of the entire alternative energy sector.
*All data accessed today from www.opensecrets.org | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A Proposal for US-China Collaboration on Climate Technology Posted: 04 Nov 2009 06:24 AM PST
This is a repost of a Center for American Progress report by John Podesta, Andrew Light, and Julian L. Wong.
Report: A Roadmap for U.S.-China Collaboration on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (pdf) (Chinese version) Fact sheet: Roadmap summary The United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen is less than 35 days away. Nations will negotiate a framework for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Any successful outcome at Copenhagen will require a commitment from the world's major economies, not least of which are China and the United States, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases and two largest consumers of energy. The Center for American Progress launches today a new report with the Asia Society, "A Roadmap for U.S.-China Collaboration on Carbon Capture and Sequestration," which sets out a detailed plan for how these two countries can mutually benefit from working together to achieve greater emissions reductions than they can alone. Recent history makes clear the importance of these two countries working together. The past decade of unprecedented economic expansion has helped China lift millions out of poverty, but not without consequence to its environment and emissions profile. The past eight years in the United States have been marked by the conspicuous absence of climate policy at the federal level and a lack of participation in any international climate agreement. Both countries are also representative of the antagonism that still dominates much of the current discussion over forging a new U.N. climate treaty. The U.S. Senate has previously expressed its opposition to joining any agreement that does not include major developing countries such as China; China has insisted that Western countries take responsibility for a problem that they caused and provide assistance for developing countries in the form of finance and technology to move them toward a low-carbon pathway. Yet both countries have an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond this impasse. There has been a sea change in Chinese leadership on climate change during the past few years. China is now embarking on some of the world's most aggressive energy efficiency, renewable energy, and forestry projects. The recent change in presidential leadership in the United States has heralded a fundamental shift in climate policy, with President Barack Obama laying the foundation for a domestic transition to a clean energy economy in his initial economic stimulus package. This was quickly followed by passage of the first comprehensive climate and energy legislation in the House of Representatives. Both countries have emerged as active and productive participants in the international negotiating process in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and leaders in smaller rounds of negotiations in the G-8, G-20, and Major Economies Forum. A series of recent developments have raised the prospects of more concrete U.S.-China cooperation on climate change, including U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu's visit to China that resulted in the announcement of a joint U.S.-China clean energy research center, declarations at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate after the last G-8 summit in Italy in July, and a Memorandum of Understanding on energy and climate signed later in the month at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington, D.C. President Obama is preparing to leave next week for the U.S.-China summit in Beijing, and the time has never been more ripe for the launch of a commitment between both countries to embark on a collaboration on clean energy that will not only benefit China and the United States, but also have a galvanizing effect for the rest of the world to move towards a successful outcome in Copenhagen. The July Memorandum of Understanding from the Strategic and Economic Dialogue identifies 10 specific areas for cooperation between the United States and China on low-carbon technology and climate change, including energy efficiency, electric cars, and carbon capture and sequestration. General declarations of goodwill are a necessary step for cooperation, but the upcoming summit must put meat on these bones and focus on specific proposals for collaboration. Our aim in this new report is to provide just such a proposal for discussion and as the basis for action. All of the areas for low-carbon and clean-energy cooperation identified in the July U.S.-China MOU must be pursued. Nothing in our report should be interpreted as suggesting that any one of these is more important than any other. There is a compelling argument, however, that neither country can achieve the emissions reductions it needs to make without addressing its heavy reliance on coal. For this reason, Secretary Chu issued on October 12 a "call to action" on CCS, advocating widespread, affordable deployment of this technology. CCS is a process that separates and captures carbon dioxide from large point sources such as coal power plants and stores it away from the atmosphere by several means, including underground sequestration in geological formations. Our proposal for U.S.-China collaboration on CCS technology answers this call by helping to prove, or not, the feasibility of this technology as part of the solution to climate change. We identify three areas of collaboration for the United States and China in the development of CCS technologies in the short, medium, and long-term, navigating potential political, technological, financial, and regulatory hurdles. 1. Cooperation on sequestration pure CO2 streams from existing Chinese industrial plants. There are now approximately 100 facilities throughout China producing pure streams of CO2 for various industrial purposes. This climate pollution is vented unabated into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming. China also has a large documented geological storage capacity, consisting mostly of deep saline formations. A first step to mitigate these emissions can be to jointly fund five geological sequestration projects that can easily capture this source of carbon and store 2 million to 3 million tons of CO2 per year. Each project would cost $50 million to 100 million, with of the United States contributing $20 million to 40 million. Together these sites could sequester 10 million to 15 million tons of CO2 per year, equivalent to taking 1.7 million to 2.5 million cars off the road. 2. Invest in research and development for retrofitting existing power plants. Much attention has been placed in both countries on producing a new generation of integrated coal-fired electricity plants which combine power production, capture of CO2 and sequestration. But both countries will have to maintain huge fleets of traditional plants in the short- to medium-term that will have to be retrofitted later for capture and sequestration. China and the United States should therefore develop a strategy for research, development and deployment of a series of pilot facilities for CCS retrofits for existing coal power plants under the auspices of the already planned U.S.-China joint clean energy research center. 3. Catalyze markets for CCS. China and the United States will have to mobilize private capital to fund the plants envisioned in step two by investing public funds and stimulating public-private partnerships. This focuses on developing financial incentives for companies to invest in cooperation initially through government-backed public finance structures that serve as a bridge to market mechanisms such as a carbon offset regime that includes proven CCS facilities and the creation of a global market for carbon abatement. Cooperation in these three areas could accelerate CCS deployment in the United States by five to 10 years. This would deliver immense gains for U.S. job creation and consumer savings and more than compensate for American investment in this roadmap. Under a business-as-usual scenario, a proven CCS sector would create 127,000 jobs in the United States by 2022, including jobs in equipment manufacturing and infrastructure construction. A five-year acceleration of CCS deployment as a result of U.S.-China collaboration increases that figure to 430,000. A 10-year acceleration in deployment could create as many as 940,000 new U.S. jobs by 2022. Collaboration will also quickly help lower the cost of CSS, and such savings will be passed along to electricity consumers. A five-year acceleration of CCS deployment in the United States would lead to $5 billion in savings, and a 10-year acceleration would lead to $18 billion in savings. Cooperation between the United States and China on this roadmap would also serve as an example of a specific bilateral step that the two countries could take together on climate change for mutual benefit. Our hope is that the recommendations contained here have the potential to contribute to—in the words of Presidents Hu and Obama—a "positive, cooperative and comprehensive" Sino-American relationship for the 21st century. Such a relationship could become the cornerstone for a new era of greater cooperation between developed and developing countries overall on finding solutions to climate change by setting an example that could be emulated and duplicated many times over. Report: A Roadmap for U.S.-China Collaboration on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (pdf) (Chinese version) Fact sheet: Roadmap summary | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Road to Copenhagen, Part 2: Risky Business Posted: 04 Nov 2009 06:00 AM PST
The evidence is irrefutable: Climate change poses enormous risks to economic stability, public health, ecosystem services, and national security, as well as to the environment. How should we manage those risks? The first step is to acknowledge them. The second is to start listening to the experts who manage risks for a living. Over the past two months, I've attended several meetings of military and civilian experts in security, intelligence and risk assessment. They were unanimous in concluding that
One meeting of security and risk experts was organized by Nick Mabey, a former advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair and now the leader of E3G, a nonprofit organization based in Europe to promote sustainable development. Our mission was to explore how the science of risk assessment and management should be applied to climate change. In a Whitehall Paper written last year, Mabey explained:
While scientists and environmentalists have been sounding warnings for years, an open discussion of the security risks of climate change started only a couple of years ago. In November 2007, the Center for Strategic and International Security and the Center for a New American Security issued "The Age of Consequences"; in June 2008, a blue-ribbon panel of high-level former military leaders, convened by the Center for Naval Analysis, concluded that global warming is a "threat multiplier" that will destabilize some of the world's most volatile regions. That finding was confirmed a year later by the National Intelligence Council in its first-ever assessment of climate change. It was confirmed again recently by the CIA's creation of a new Center on Climate Change and National Security to centralize its expertise on "the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic, and social stability overseas." On Oct. 28, retired U.S. military officers warned the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about the risks that climate change and fossil energy pose to national security. "Our economic, energy and climate change challenges are all inextricably linked," retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn testified. "If we don't address these challenges in a bold way and timely way, fragile governments have great potential to become failed states ….a virile breathing ground for extremism." A day later in Washington, D.C., the same message was delivered in a joint statement issued by active and retired military leaders from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin American and the United States. In addition to calling on all governments to work for an "ambitious and equitable" international agreement at Copenhagen, the officers urged governments to make sure the security implications of climate change are integrated into their military strategies. Mabey notes that climate risks – including drought and famine, loss of fisheries, coastal inundation, invasive migrations of climate refugees, natural disasters and water shortages – could go two ways. They could motivate nations to collaborate more on conflict prevention, contingency planning, economic development and disaster prevention and response; or, they could cause more tensions within and between count r ies, leading to conflict. An example of collaboration are the Oslo Guidelines on the use of the military and civil defense agencies in disaster relief operations. An example of tension is the fence India has built along its 2,500 miles border with Bangladesh, in part to keep out illegal immigrants – a problem that may reach crisis proportions as residents of Bangladesh flee extreme weather, flooding and sea-level rise. As many as 30 million residents of Bangladesh could become "climate refugees" by mid-century, forced from their homes by sea-level rise, according to one government official there. Public officials tend to be risk-averse in matters with potential political consequences; now they must become risk-savvy. Here are 10 ideas on how to make that happen:
We are rapidly approaching a time when the nations most threatened by climate change will regard coal-burning as an act of aggression and when nations will conflict over who gets dwindling supplies of finite resources. That makes solar collectors and wind turbines as important as conventional weapons in our national defense arsenal. As I've written before, our biggest risk is that we'll fail to close the gap between what scientists tell us is necessary and what politicians believe is possible. We won't be able to narrow that gap until elected officials worldwide accept that the security risk of failing to act on climate change is far greater than the political risks of bold preventive action. – Bill Becker Suffering begun: http://www.economist.com/ world/ international/ displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171 Climate Solutions 2: http://www.wwf.de/ fileadmin/ fm-wwf/ pdf_neu/ climate_solutions_2___executive_summary.pdf Mabey paper: http://www.rusi.org/ publication/ whitehall/ ref:I480E2C638B3BC/ CIA climate office: https://www.cia.gov/ news-information/ press-releases-statements/ center-on-climate-change-and-national-security.html Oslo guidelines on disaster response: http://www.reliefweb.int/ rw/ lib.nsf/ db900sid/ AMMF-6VXJVG/ $file/ OCHA-Nov2006.pdf?openelement IES statement: http://www.envirosecurity.org/news/single.php?id=148 CNA: http://securityandclimate.cna.org/ Oslo guidelines: ochaonline.un.org/OchaLinkClick.aspx?link=ocha&docId | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| One year after his election, Obama on verge of audaciously fulfilling his promise as the green FDR Posted: 03 Nov 2009 03:16 PM PST
Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn't stop catastrophic climate change — Hell and High Water — then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so. In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in the year since he was elected is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives. Three game-changing accomplishments stand out:
You can see more details on these here — "Sure Obama ended the Bush depression, cut taxes for 98% of working families, and jumpstarted the shift to a clean energy economy with a $100 billion in stimulus funds — but what has the green FDR done lately?" All that remains for Obama to claim the title as the green FDR is getting 60 votes or more for Senate passage of a climate and clean energy bill. That now appears likely thanks to the breakthrough Senate climate partnership between Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kerry (D-MA). Indeed, E&E News's latest analysis shows, "At least 67 senators are in play" on climate bill. And Graham and Kerry are set to meet "with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, as well as with Obama's top climate adviser, Carol M. Browner, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to discuss a possible compromise." If these White House negotiations succeed, then I also think an international climate deal is likely, with the framework be laid out in the Copenhagen meeting this December, and details finalized next year after Obama signs a domestic bill. All this together won't guarantee that we preserve a livable climate, but it will give future Presidents — working in concert with other countries — a fighting chance to do so. That said, conservative denial and obstructionism remains strong, and a climate bill could still fail if team Obama does not remain vigilant. Obama is fulfilling his promise in the climate and clean energy arena, but much hard work remains. One final point — to those (including me!) who wished that Obama would have taken a more aggressive and public role in shaping and lobbying for a climate and clean energy bill, I have only three words: health care reform. If you think a significantly stronger climate bill could be had in this political atmosphere, I'd just ask you to review the final House vote (and the state of play of the Senate bill). Remember, on the most transparently dire issue in the past few years — the need for an economic stimulus on the brink of the Bush-Cheney depression — Obama got ZERO House GOP votes and 3 Senate GOP votes (one of whom is now a Democrat), votes that in fact required Obama to water down the stimulus. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| El Niño-driven sea surface temperatures are soaring. Forecast: Hot and then even hotter. Posted: 03 Nov 2009 02:26 PM PST Last week I noted that the weak El Niño appears to be strengthening, as expected, so record temperatures will continue.
After languishing for months, Nino 3.4 SSTs finally took off, as many models had been predicting. Last week, the anomaly was 1.1°C. This week it was 1.5°C. This SST data is from the NOAA's October 26 weekly update on the El Niño/Southern oscillation, "ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions": If these values are maintained for any length of time, this would be a moderate to strong El Niño, as this historical graph of the 3-month running mean SST departures in Nino 3.4 region show:
NOAA's National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center will be issuing its monthly ENSO analysis in a few days based on this surge in SSTs. Last month it concluded, "El Niño is expected to strengthen and last through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-2010." For now, we have NOAA's own CFS (Climate Forecast System) issued on Sunday:
NOAA is extending its prediction through the spring. So this is increasingly looking like a pretty significant El Niño. While some here (and elsewhere) have been dissing NOAA's ENSO forecast models and even suggesting they call into question the climate models, which are in any case utterly different, it now looks like the ENSO models got it mostly right. And it bears repeating that 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." It still seems likely. And that will be on top of the hottest decade in recorded history by far. Related Post:
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| Posted: 03 Nov 2009 11:22 AM PST
PSCW Approves Application for Largest Biomass Plant in Midwest
See also "An intro to biomass cofiring." MDU, others will not build SD Big Stone 2 coal plant
Governor Rendell Says PA's Solar Capacity Doubles Under Sunshine Solar Rebate Program
Africans protest low emissions targets at UN talks
Maldives says carbon neutral goal ahead of schedule
China urged to adopt tougher C02 target
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Arianna Huffington posted "
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