from Environment Forum:
Stern, in center of climate pessimism, hopeful about U.S.
Nicholas Stern, the British economist who warned five years ago that global warming could cost the world's GDP as much as 20 percent a year by 2050, hasn’t given up on the United States taking action on climate even though he’s down on Washington for not passing a bill that would do just that.
“If you look around the world, of all places to sit and wonder where (climate policy is) going, this is probably the most pessimistic place -- this city,” he told a small gathering of reporters at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. late this week.
But all one has to do is travel out of the U.S. capital to see enormous potential for taking action, he said. Stern is optimistic about U.S. companies in Silicon Valley and Boston and other places developing low-carbon technologies such as batteries for electric cars, or new biofuels that aren’t made out of food crops.
“There are so many technological ideas on the table that you don’t need all of them to work, just some,” he said.
He also takes heart in state level mandates for renewable energy and the reelection of Jerry Brown, the pro-solar governor of California, who wants to set the bar even higher for renewable energy.
Be that as it may, Stern is even more deeply concerned about the risks of climate change.
He thinks he underestimated the risk in the Stern Review issued five years ago. But now he doesn’t describe the risks in terms of percentage points of lost GDP. He believes hundreds of millions of people could be forced to migrate in coming decades because of global warming, resulting in conflicts, or even wars.
from Environment Forum:
As if 2007 never happened?
If four years is a lifetime in politics, it's an eternity in climate change politics. Events in Washington this week might make climate policy watchers wonder if 2007 really happened.
At issue is the decision by American Electric Power to put its plans for carbon capture and storage on hold, due to the weak economy and the lack of a U.S. plan to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide. Read the Reuters story about it here.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS for short, has been promoted as a way to make electricity from domestic coal without unduly raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead of sending the carbon dioxide that results from burning coal up a smokestack and into the air, the plan was to bury it underground. But that costs money and requires regulatory guarantees, and neither are imminent in the United States. Legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions bogged down on Capitol Hill a year ago and has not been re-introduced.
Sarah Forbes of World Resources Institute called AEP's decision "a surprise, but not a shock."
"Given that U.S. climate legislation stalled last summer, companies have less incentive to move forward with CCS, which has proven difficult to advance at scale," Forbes said in a statement.
Compare that to what happened in 2007. Senators Barbara Boxer, John Warner and Joe Lieberman joined forces that year to focus attention on climate change and were able to shepherd a carbon-limiting bill to the Senate floor the next year, the farthest any such measure has gotten in the United States. Al Gore, the former vice president and perennial climate campaigner, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations' Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for bringing climate change to public attention.
On Groundhog Day of that year (why did they pick February 2?) the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment report on what was likely to happen in a warming world. The report forecast more severe weather, worse heat waves, dramatic droughts, wildfires and floods, rising seas and melting glaciers. It also famously said, with 90 percent certainty, that climate change was under way and that human activities contribute to it.
Why does no one talk about the fly ash slurry (water and coal ash waste)containment field that failed and flooded the town of Kingston, Tn.? The facts have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act.
Forty-some other coal fired power plants through out the U.S. are at risk for similar failure. Power plant and coal mine operators are concerned about their investments and would like to continue to mine and burn coal. However, to address the problems of excess CO2 and ignore the dangers of waste that is created is myopic at best and more likely a willful omission by government officials who stand to benefit financially from the preservation of these industries.
The nuclear power industry presents the same problem, what to do with the waste. Solutions that only address half of the problem are not solutions at all. They are an attempt to dupe the public into spending a lot of money for infrastructure that would in the short run allow the coal and nuclear industries to proliferate. In the end we will have ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Kingston all around the globe.
from Environment Forum:
Cows, climate change and the high court
If you took all the cows in the United States and figured out how much greenhouse gas they emit, would you be able to sue all the farmers who own them?
That interesting legal question came from Justice Antonin Scalia during Supreme Court oral arguments about whether an environmental case against five big U.S. power companies can go forward.
At issue is whether six states can sue the country's biggest coal-fired electric utilities to make them cut down on the climate-warming carbon dioxide they emit. One lower court said they couldn't, an appeals court said they could and now the high court will consider where the case will go next. A ruling should come by the end of June.
For now, though, the question was cows.
Attorney Barbara Underwood argued that the five power companies were the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, making up 10 percent of U.S. emissions. No other company comes close, she said.
Scalia then leaped into the fray.
"You're lumping them all together," he said of the five big power companies. "Suppose you lump together all the cows in the country. Would that allow you to sue all those farmers? I mean, don't you have to do it defendant by defendant? ... Cow by cow or at least farm by farm?"
The only load is the garbage coming out of Justice Scalia’s mouth. It would be interesting to see our Supreme court Justice’s investment portfolios. Cows and humans are living beings, power plants are not. Burning fossil fuels are not the only way to generate power.
JDoddsGW, you have hit on the truth of the matter. Greenhouse gases absorb and retain light(radiation) from the Sun. The Earth’s atmosphere can only absorb so much light energy(photons)in any given time period. At some point available light energy for photosynthesis diminishes as agriculture and greenhouse gases increase in the biosphere. The result is climate change/ global warming.
An increase in human population means an increase in livestock production and power generation. As most power generation comes from burning fossil fuels it becomes clear that we are producing a double whammy. More livestock generates more methane and CO2. More gas and coal fired electric generators more CO2.
from Environment Forum:
John Kerry has had it up to HERE with “The Flat Earth Caucus”
You remember John Kerry, right? Tall, silver-haired, urbane enough to be accused of being French. But there's a feisty side to the senior senator from Massachusetts, and it was on display at a forum on energy and economic growth, where Kerry teed off on congressional Republicans and others who doubt the seriousness of the challenge of climate change.
"After a while you get exasperated and jaded and frustrated about it all," Kerry told The New Republic forum at the National Press Club. "I've had it just about up to here with America's indifference to the realities of this crisis ... the United States is like an ostrich putting its head in the sand."
How do you feel about the U.S. political establishment, Senator Kerry? "I don't know what's happened to us in the body politic of this country where facts and science seem to be so easily shunted aside and disposed of in favor of simple sloganeering, pure ideology and little bromides of politics that are offered up, that offer no solution to anything but might get you through an election."
Your Republican colleagues in Congress? "In the Republican party ... about half the class that came in (to Congress) this year doubts that humans have anything to do with climate change or that climate change is happening ... The Flat Earth Caucus is growing."
How about the billionaire Koch brothers? "The Koch brothers are funding a lot of efforts to prevent us from doing anything (about climate change). They funded this climate doubters Berkeley study in the hopes that one study out of thousands would ... show that all the rest of this stuff is fabricated ideological bunk from the left." (As it turned out, and as Kerry noted, the Berkeley Earth Science Project agreed with most other studies that climate change is occurring and human activities fuel it.)
Kerry said he was troubled that China is now "winning the clean energy race," with Germany second and the United States slipping to third.
"I think America's greatness, America's capacity to lead, is really on the line," he said. "And I see it and feel it as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the many conversations I have with leaders in various parts of the world ... I just see them and feel them doubting our resolve, doubting our capacity, doubting whether we'll really be there in almost anything ... whether our political system will let it happen."
Donjr, do you think the Supreme Court in it’s present pro business form would have ever appointed a Republican or for that matter rule against business?
As a condition of accepting a life time to the Court, Justices should be required to divest themselves of all stock investment and similar vehicles by law so that there rulings might be less tainted by financial self interest. They can pay off debt or acquire annuities with the proceeds of their holdings.
Cicero and Tacitus both stated “One can tell how corrupt a society is by how many laws they have”. Clearly the Nation is suffering from a crisis of character.
No more Mr. Nice Guy, Republican sets sights on Obama’s energy czar
Michigan Republican Fred Upton is known as a moderate who disappointed many conservatives by voting with the Democratic majority on some major issues including the taxpayer bailout of U.S. automobile manufacturers.
But expect no more Mr. Nice Guy if Republicans win big on November 2 and he becomes chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Upton has a hit list of White House policy czars he plans to investigate starting with White House energy adviser Carol Browner.
Upton says he’s in position to be awarded the chair of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. His staff circulated an interview with “Politico” in which he states his intention to investigate President Barack Obama’s “poisonous regulations” and the role of policy “czars” in the White House, including Browner.
“If we have the gavel, I can assure you that the oversight subcommittee will be very busy,” Upton said, adding that Browner can expect frequent invitations to testify.
“We’ll have a seat reserved for her,” he said.
Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson also will likely be in the hot seat. Republicans see EPA and its efforts to tackle climate change as a prime example of government overreach and anti-business regulation.
Why has fanaticism replaced reason in the Republican party?
from Environment Forum:
The World Bank’s $6 billion man on climate change
As the special envoy on climate change for the World Bank, Andrew Steer might be thought of as the $6 billion man of environmental finance. He oversees more than that amount for projects to fight the effects of global warming.
"More funds flow through us to help adaptation and mitigation than anyone else," Steer said in a conversation at the bank's Washington headquarters. Named to the newly created position in June, Steer said one of his priorities is to marshall more than $6 billion in the organization's Climate Investment Funds to move from smaller pilot projects to large-scale efforts.
While the World Bank is not a party to global climate talks set for Cancun, Mexico, later this year, it is deeply engaged in this issue, Steer said. Acknowledging that an international agreement on climate change is a long shot this year, he said there are still opportunities to make changes to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.
"We do see there are opportunities," Steer said. "The mistake would be if it's sort of all or nothing." The bank is strongly supporting action to limit deforestation, offer quick financing to start climate projects and reform carbon markets to extend them to countries that have been left out so far.
Even though the World Bank won't be at the negotiating table in Cancun, its members will be there, and 80 percent of them want the bank to focus on climate change, Steer said. It's all part of a what he sees as a fundamental shift in the international attitude toward dealing with this problem.
"There is a new revolution that's going on now," he said . "It's not only driven by personal commitment, like it would have been 15 years ago ... Now it's driven by just the sheer logic ... If you care about long-term poverty reduction, you simply cannot avoid this issue."
Photo credits: REUTERS/Supri Supri (Andrew Steer (right) then the World Bank's Indonesia country director, with World Health Organization's Georg Peterson at a news conference in Jakarta, August 24, 2006)
from Environment Forum:
Campaign ad equating global warming with weather gets “pants-on-fire” rating
By now, almost everybody -- with the possible exception of Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina -- realizes there's a difference between climate and weather. Fiorina, running in the California primary and ultimately aiming to unseat Democrat Barbara Boxer, paid for and appeared in a campaign ad slamming the sitting senator for being "worried about the weather" when there are serious concerns like terrorism to deal with.
Take a look here:
A few problems with this ad earned it the not-so-coveted beyond-false "Pants on Fire" rating from Politifact, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalism website that checks on the truthfulness of political advertising. First off, Boxer didn't say she was worried about the weather. She said that climate change was "one of the very important national security issues" -- a position in line with the Pentagon and the CIA. The site also found that it's not an either/or thing, that focusing on climate change doesn't necessarily mean neglecting national security. They took a look at Boxer's record and found she has supported at least six bills against terrorism.
"Fiorina casts climate change as something you need to pack an umbrella for, or that prompts you to curse at the TV weatherman -- which strikes us as not only a trivialization of climate change but also a failure to distinguish between two well-established scientific specialties," Politifact said. "She also ignores Boxer's lengthy record supporting bills against terrorism. So we have to light up the meter (the site's Truth-o-Meter): Pants on Fire!"
Not surprisingly, Boxer's campaign fired back in a press release, saying that, "during Fiorina’s tenure at HP, the company sold millions of dollars worth of high tech gear to intermediary shell companies selling to Iran, despite trade sanctions against Iran, a country that the U.S. State Department has named as a State Sponsor of Terror."
Should be an interesting race. The California primary is on June 8.
Photo credits: REUTERS/Fred Prouser (Carly Fiorina at "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" panel Beverly Hills, California April 26, 2010. REUTERS/Fred Prouser)
@ truthseeker18
In the 80s there was a “… dearth of actual empirical information” that the Soviet Union would ever actually attack the U.S. (i.e. it had never happened). Yet this did not stop Reagan and the Republicans from squandering scores of billions of taxpayer dollars on building more missiles.
As for “legitimate scientists on both sides of the debate surrounding global warming theory”
The preponderance of legitimate scientist do not seriously question that the huge emissions of greenhouse gases by humans will be affecting the global climate negatively.
I suppose that you do not consider the **possibility** of serious crop failures, invasive diseases, and rising water levels and all the political turmoil that would ensue as a security issue?
from Environment Forum:
Washington math: oil spill + climate bill = new environmental polls
With BP's spilled oil shimmering off the U.S. Gulf Coast, and a re-tooled bill to curb climate change expected to be unveiled this week in the U.S. Senate, what could be more appropriate than a bouquet of new environmental polls? Conducted on behalf of groups that want less fossil fuel use, the polls show hefty majorities favoring legislation to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide.
In the kind of harmonic convergence that sometimes happens inside the Capital Beltway, a new poll released on Monday by the Clean Energy Works campaign showed "overwhelming public support for comprehensive clean energy legislation," with 61 percent of 2010 voters saying they want to limit pollution, invest in clean energy and make energy companies pay for emitting the carbon that contributes to climate change. A healthy majority -- 54 percent -- of respondents said they'd be more likely to re-elect a senator who votes for the bill.
Last Friday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been pushing for climate change legislation for years, released its own poll numbers. NRDC's pollsters found seven in 10 Americans want to see fast-tracked clean energy legislation in the wake of the BP oil spill, and two-thirds say they want to postpone new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated and new safeguards are put in place.
Going back one more day, Rasmussen Reports found that even after the Gulf oil spill began dominating the Web, TV newscasts and newspaper front pages, 58 percent of respondents still favor offshore drilling. That's a big majority but a 14-point drop from the 72 percent who favored offshore drilling after President Barack Obama announced at the end of March that he was opening new areas to exploratory offshore drilling for the first time in more than two decades.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed reporters to a poll by Republicans for Environmental Preservation -- a quote on their website reads "Nothing is more conservative than conservation" -- that showed 52 percent of Republicans and a similar number people who consider themselves conservatives support a U.S. energy policy to boost domestic energy production and cap carbon emissions.Even among Tea Party respondents, who are generally hostile to what they call big government, the poll found more favored the policy -- 47 percent -- than the 42 percent who opposed it.
Remember: the oil hasn't really reached the Gulf Coast yet. And the bill, long delayed, isn't set for launch until Wednesday. Let's start counting now to see how many polls on these contentious issues arrive before a) the spill is cleaned up and b) the bill either becomes law or fails to gain congressional approval.
Photo credits: REUTERS/Navy (Oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in an aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Mobile, Alabama, in this photograph taken from a U.S. Coast Guard HC-144 Ocean Sentry aircraft on May 6, 2010 and obtained on May 9, 2010)
Honk! Wheeze! Atchoo! It’s getting hot in Washington, and it’s not just the weather
Spring in Washington means cherry blossoms, azaleas and a collective wet sneeze from the hundreds of thousands of allergy sufferers in the region. This year, a long snow-covered winter may actually have protected plants while an early burst of summer-like temperatures called forth the blossoms, creating what felt to many like a pollen bomb.
Plants that would usually have bloomed in an orderly sequence — forsythia, daffodils, tulips, cherry blossoms, dogwood, azaleas and lilacs — are all flowering together. Cars, streets, pets and other plants are covered with a gritty yellow-green sneeze-inducing residue. Allergy symptoms are the common result, and they cost a bundle.
It doesn’t help that Washington is part of a U.S. trend spurred by climate change, with the signs of spring coming about 10 days earlier than they did two decades ago. That means some missed connections in the natural world, as some plants and animals adapt better than others to the early onset of spring.
There’s another kind of early heat settling in over the U.S. capital, and that’s the run-up to new legislation to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, the next priority for the Obama administration now that health care reform has passed through Congress. The compromise legislation is expected to be unveiled next week, a few days after Earth Day on April 22.
As Washington deals with this meteorological and legislative warming trend, scientists are concerned about some heat that has apparently gone missing. About half of the excess heat generated by human activities over the 150 years or so simply can’t be accounted for. Lots of this extra heat is stashed in the world’s oceans, scientists report. But the rest of it has to go someplace and researchers haven’t figured out where.
Is there any possibility that this missing heat is what’s fueling those volcanic eruptions in Iceland? “The answer is a definite no,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. The volcanic heat might help solve the missing heat conundrum if it were substantial enough, but it isn’t. “On a global basis, the amount (of heat from the Icelandic volcano) is very tiny and at least an order of magnitude too small.”
The volcano has been enough to have an impact on some events in Washington, including this weekend’s meeting of global financial leaders. Some participants have been stranded elsewhere or delayed in arriving, even as the volcanic ash cloud moved off and air travel from Europe resumed. They’ll participate by videoconference if they can’t get here, meeting organizers at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund say.
Has U.S. “missed the boat” on long-range renewable energy planning?
There was President Barack Obama, working a friendly crowd in Henderson, Nevada, not far from Las Vegas. And then a sympathetic comment from a French businessman who wants to see U.S. regulation of climate-warming greenhouse emissions seemed to get the president all wound up.
After noting that the weather has been particularly wild lately — five feet of snow in Washington DC, rain at the Vancouver Olympics — Obama said the best way to “unleash” dynamism in the energy market is to set fuel efficiency standards, notably for cars.
“If you’ve got a fuel-efficiency standard in place that says your car needs to get 20 miles a gallon or 30 miles a gallon, suddenly all these engineers are thinking, well, how do we do that? And all these companies start coming up with new technologies that make your cars more fuel-efficient. Ultimately, you end up seeing jobs and businesses thriving in response to the regulation that’s been put there,” Obama told the town hall meeting.
Putting a price on carbon emissions could have the same effect by spurring innovation and ultimately creating jobs, he said.
The transition to cleaner renewable energy isn’t going to happen overnight, the president said.
“But what we should be doing is planning over the next 20, 30 years to move in that direction. That’s what countries like China are doing. That’s what countries like France are doing. That’s what countries all across Europe are doing, and all across Asia are doing. We don’t want to be left behind. We’re the only ones who have kind of missed the boat. So we’re still using 20th century technologies and everybody else is producing 21st century technologies.”
Strong language, but the crowd seemed to be with him. And he went on:
We have already come to the conclusion that using fossil fuels is accelerating the greenhouse effect that normally occurs in cycles as geological history shows. Entrenched business want to continue profiting from brown technologies.
That’s all well and good for now. But there has been no major push for clean energy technology. And this is what is REALLY needed if we are to lead in the 21st century. I haven’t seen any incentives for clean energy development yet. Obama needs to push the issue on clean tech.
But even more importantly he needs to do what he can to remove corporate constituents. Corporations are not people. If business is allowed to sway law makers into making the environment easy for them to profit while they do nothing to innovate, then innovation will go out the window in favor of easy profit. This is happening now and is why there is such a strong lobby against climate change bills. They are being obstructed by entrenched brown energy companies.
Get rid of corporate citizenship. Strike down corporate personhood and return the government of the people back to the people.
bst23, how do you explain shrinking polar ice caps, vanishing large fresh water lakes, increased desertification and rising sea levels globally? Also how is it that atmospheric oxygen content is diminishing while CO2 is 30% higher right now than at any point during the last 600,000 years? These are facts that our Congress has been well aware of since the early 1960s. Scripps was the first to start collecting such data as early as 1957 and reports their findings every year to Congress.
For those interested in the truth google “Scripps Institute of Oceanography” and open their website. Their work has been duplicated and verified by universities and research institutes around the globe. Everyone can find the answers for themselves.