Environment Forum

Muddled up in climate politics

Asher Miller is executive director of think tank Post Carbon Institute. Any opinion expressed here is his own.

For those of us hoping for substantive climate or energy legislation in the near future, Tuesday’s election was a mixed bag at best.

And that’s after having lowered our expectations following Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) decision to pull the plug on advancing the American Power Act back in July.

If Democrats couldn’t muster the votes or political capital with majorities in both houses of Congress, there was little chance following a mid-term election that was sure to weaken their hold.

Tuesday’s bright spot came out of California, where the state’s 2006 landmark climate legislation (CA AB32) was upheld by voters who either didn’t buy the argument made by Proposition 23 proponents that AB32 would hurt the economy or didn’t take well to out-of-state oil companies telling them what to do. Yet even this “victory” is a mixed bag.

Sure, it’s a relief to see Prop 23 defeated and climate hawks Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom elected as Governor and Lieutenant Governor, respectively.

The quest to put solar power back on the White House

Bill McKibben, founder of the green group 350.org, is on a quest to convince President Barack Obama to put solar panels back on the roof of the White House.

He’s at the end of a journey to Washington from Maine in a van fired by biodiesel carrying one of the 32 panels Jimmy Carter unveiled in 1979 during the first press conference on the White House roof.

Also in the van are students from Unity College, which got the the panels some time after President Ronald Reagan, no fan of alternative energy, had workers remove the panels during “roof repairs” in 1986.

McKibben had hoped to meet with somebody high up in the Obama administration such as Carol Browner, Obama’s top energy and climate aide. He’s been talking all week with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) on the plan.

“They keep saying it’s complicated and difficult, but compared with the other tasks they face, we think this one is relatively simple and it would be a great statement,” McKibben said via cell phone from the van.

The White House tells him the administration is greening federal government buildings across the country, which he agrees is a good effort.

Clean energy conference shows efficiency means savings

-Eileen Claussen is President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The views expressed are her own.-

While policymakers in Washington debate the best path forward for dealing with climate change, a growing number of U.S. businesses have discovered a simple technique that can lower costs, increase productivity, and slash greenhouse gas emissions.  What’s more, it can work for any business no matter what they make – whether it’s potato chips or computer chips.

It’s called energy efficiency, and a growing number of U.S. businesses are starting to get it.

What does it mean to be efficient? Seven habits of highly efficient companies as identified in the Pew Center’s new 176-page report From Shop Floor to Top Floor: Best Business Practices in Energy Efficiency, lists designating full-time staff to be accountable for energy performance, communicating externally the company’s successes in reducing energy costs and emissions and – perhaps most importantly – integrating sustainability as a core part of corporate strategic planning and risk assessment.

The results of this two-year study, featured this week at our Corporate Energy Efficiency Conference in Chicago attended by 260 representatives from 120 companies and universities, speak for themselves.

from Summit Notebook:

Awaiting the alternative energy sukuk: Innovation vs conservatism

MANAMA, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Dubai’s debt fiasco and real estate bubble bust pushes investors to look out for alternative assets underlying Islamic finance products – could renewable energy provide a way-out?

Predominantly, Islamic finance and investment products have been backed by infrastructure or commodities assets. But executives at the 2010 Reuters Islamic Banking and Finance Summit said product diversification was needed to cut the over-reliance on real estate in the Gulf.

“Sharia scholars are eager to support the renewable energy initiative, but the Islamic banking industry (in the Gulf) does not seem to be overly interested in this area although I am aware of a couple of deals involving acquisitions of clean tech companies in the U.S. and wind farms in the UK," said Ayman Khaleq, partner at the Vinson & Elkins law firm in Dubai.

“The big banks have teams that focus on renewable energy as an asset class. However, the problem is that Islamic banks are not big enough to be able to cover specific sectors such as alternative energy,” he added.

In order to launch an alternative energy sukuk, the Gulf's small local banks would need to team up with bigger international players such as Deutsche Bank, Barclays, or BNP Paribas, which have been active on the renewable horizon.

But some experts have warned more originality in the Islamic finance industry could alienate investors, who are reluctant to take on fresh risk in the wake of Dubai’s debt crisis and recent sukuk defaults in the region.

WAITING FOR THE GREEN PUSH

Goldilocks and the three fuels

– Richard Heinberg is the author of eight books, including “Peak Everything”, “Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis” and “The Party’s Over”. He is also a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute. The views expressed are his own. –

Recent shale gas projects, including those involving the massive Marcellus Shale in several northeastern states, have been yielding significant quantities of fuel. Reserves of the stuff are enormous. But drilling costs and per-well decline rates are high, so producers can make a profit only if gas prices are near historic highs.

Where are oil prices headed in 2010? Forecasts for the year are all over the map, from more than $100 a barrel to under $50.

The difference hinges mostly on assumptions about whether the economy will recover or relapse. Yet it may be that price volatility has become an inherent feature of the oil market—and fossil fuel markets in general—for reasons that can perhaps best be explained with the help of a little history and an old children’s story.

Once upon a time (about a dozen years past), oil sold for $12 a barrel and a lot of people thought it would get even cheaper because the market was glutted.

But instead the price rose: many big oilfields were aging and yielding less, and it was getting harder to find new ones—especially in places easy and cheap to drill.

Bring on the green energy investment

By Professor Danny Harvey

- Danny Harvey is a geography professor and energy policy expert at the University of Toronto. He is author of A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District Energy Systems: Fundamentals, Techniques and Examples, and  the forthcoming Energy and the New Reality, Volume 2: C-free Energy, now available in preprint form here.

The world is facing the prospect of massive climatic change during the coming decades, and we’re already seeing the beginnings of this all around us and much faster than predicted – dramatic melting of sea ice, thawing of permafrost, increased loss of ice from Greenland, and drier conditions in many parts of the world.

Climate scientists are nearly unanimous in saying that dramatic and strong action is needed to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy as rapidly as possible.

Small, gradual changes are not good enough. We need large, transformational change – and it will occur sooner or later, and throughout the world.

Thursday it was announced that C$7 billion will be invested to build 2000 MW of new wind turbines and 500 MW of solar PV panels by a consortium headed by Samsung C&T Corp. The total new capacity is about 8 percent of the existing power capacity in the Canadian province of Ontario.

from Summit Notebook:

60-hour work weeks, all in the name of climate change

Some politicians may be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to dealing with climate change, but you can't say members of the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism's executive board aren't clocking in the hours.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol worth $33 billion last year according to the World Bank, allows companies and countries to outsource their greenhouse gas reduction efforts by investing in clean energy projects in emerging countries like China and India, where making emissions cuts costs less.

Projects are submitted to the CDM for registration and a staff of over 100 examine and scrutinize each one to ensure environmental integrity.

The whole scheme is supervised by a 20-member executive board, chaired by Lex de Jonge of the Netherlands' environment ministry.

"The members are all employed by governments and assigned to the board. They don't get a salary from the UN but they receive a daily subsistence allowance to pay for meals, hotel and travel costs," de Jonge said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

"As chair of the board, I spend 75% of my time on CDM issues and 25% on domestic issues relating to my actual job," he added.

The CDM's executive board holds some 7 to 8 week-long meetings a year, up from 5 meetings in 2005, the year international emissions trading really began to take shape.

from Summit Notebook:

Enviro-boxer Britain needs to spend more on climate cure

Scientists may face an uphill battle in trying to warn the world about the looming perils of global warming, but one of Britain's top academics wouldn't trade places with the politicians tasked with negotiating a new global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"Although the science (of climate change) is difficult and still uncertain, it's a doddle compared to the politics," said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain's science academy.

Thousands of international delegates will convene at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December. All early indications suggest those talks, seen as critical to agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012, will be anything but a cake walk.

That said, Rees thinks UK policymakers have done a good job so far.

"We must give (the UK) government credit for its leadership in this area, going back to the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 when climate change was pushed up the agenda," Rees said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this week.

"The UK punches above its weight in the debate on climate change even though we only produce 2% of the world's emissions," said Rees, likening Britain to some sort of environmental boxer.

Rees thinks that because the UK has the high-tech know-how, it should strive to provide more than 2% of the solution to the climate problem by upping investment technologies to help replace fossil fuel burning.

from Summit Notebook:

Silver Spring Networks shows grid smarts

Scott Lang, the Chief Executive of Silver Spring Networks, sat down at Reuters' Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about building and expanding within green tech sector.

Here Lang discusses how his company's technology for reporting power consumption to utilities also finds problems quickly.

(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)

from Summit Notebook:

BrightSource CEO talks about building carbon-free future

John Woolard, the chief executive of solar thermal energy company BrightSource, sat down at Reuters' Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about energy efficiency, project financing and the future  of carbon-free power.

His advice: build fast!

(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)