I won’t be reprinting Hansen’s e-mails in their entirety anymore, since he has now begun posting them online. For completeness’s sake, here is the rest of the July 23rd email (the whole thing is here):
My statement “It seems to me that young people, especially, should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty (no CCS) coal-fired power plants” raised a concern (of someone in Ireland) that “such a call amounts to incitement to civil disobedience”.
Offsets are spreading like kudzu:
General Electric does acknowledge some of the oxymoronic irony of pushing an Earth-friendly credit card:
It’s important to keep in mind that we can’t “shop away” global climate change.
Duh! U.S. (and Chinese) greenhouse emissions are so high thanks in part to credit cards, which have allowed us to consume far beyond our means (and to consume huge amounts of products made in carbon-intensive China).
But there is more irony. As Michael J. Brune, executive director for the Rainforest Action Network, notes:
It’s ironic. G.E. supplies parts for coal-fired plants, so its credit card offsets emissions it helps create.
G.E. is not the only one offsetting consumer purchases. Check out ClimateCooler. At least they specificy what offests they will be buying:
So Europeans are buying Indonesian palm oil as a “sustainable” biofuel, but it isn’t sustainable, as we’ve noted before. The tragedy continues:
How a big deal is this? As the New York Times put it earlier this year, “Considering these emissions, Indonesia had quickly become the world’s third-leading producer of carbon emissions that scientists believe are responsible for global warming.” [Note to NYT, you can drop the "scientists believe" crap: Carbon emissions cause global warming -- deal with it, MSM!]
The emissions from the 1997 fires alone are staggering, as Nature reported in 2002 (subs. req’d):
Even more from NASA’s climate guru:
Given the damage that fossil fuels cause to the climate, human health, wildlife, forests, lakes, ocean fish, etc., you may think that we place a very high tax on fossil fuels, right? Umm, well, not exactly. On the contrary, our government, egged on by special interests, chooses to subsidize them, or, more accurately, they volunteer YOU to subsidize fossil fuels.
Here’s yet another report cautioning that conventional oil can’t meet projected demand. This one, Facing the Hard Truths About Energy, is from the National Petroleum Council, an advisory group to the Secretary of Energy chaired by Lee Raymond (!), retired CEO of Exxon Mobil.
The report wisely recommends: “Moderate the growing demand for energy by increasing efficiency of transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial uses.” But it unwisely calls for promoting liquefied coal and oil from tar sands, especially counterproductive from a report that actually acknowledges the future of growing carbon constraints.
Ah well, after five years working at the Energy Department in the 1990s, I can safely say that these reports typically are not very discriminating because they have members from all forms of energy. This one looks to be no exception.
Still, the warning that our current energy path is not sustainable is one policymakers need to hear:
It’s a hard truth that the global supply of oil and natural gas from the conventional sources relied upon historically is unlikely to meet projected 50 to 60 percent growth in demand over the next 25 years.
Let’s just hope policymakers are wise enough to forego dirty, unconventional sources of liquid fuel (especially liquid coal) and instead aggressively pursue efficiency, cellulosic ethanol, and plug-in hybrids.
On its Sunday op-ed page, the New York Times ran four dispatches about the “rash of extreme weather around the world.” The articles show how “human activity” is having “drastic and lasting” impact globally:
The Great Swiss Meltdown: Swiss glaciers “have lost almost 50 percent of their surface area in the past 150 years; half of this loss has occurred in the last 30. Some 100 out of our nearly 2,000 glaciers have already disappeared, and researchers predict that most will have melted away by 2050.” What this may mean to the Swiss?
Sunny California: Sunny and dry this year. This is the weakest of the four articles — heck it doesn’t even mention wildfires.
Dining in a Drought in Australia: Australia, by contrast,”is suffering what some are calling its worst drought in 1000 years, and the impact on our farmers, livestock and produces catastrophic. Scientists have linked the six-year drought to the changing climate….”
Israel’s Incredible Shrinking Sea: The Dead Sea is dying.
There is a hard rain coming, according to a new study, Before the Deluge: Coping with Floods in a Changing Climate. This is the International Rivers Network second annual “Dams, Rivers & People” report:
Floods are the most destructive, most frequent and most costly natural disasters on earth. Flood damages have soared in recent decades, despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on flood control structures. This is partly because global warming is causing more severe storms, and partly because of growing populations and economic activity on floodplains. It is also because flood control technologies and approaches often prove counterproductive.
Improving our ability to cope with floods under current and future climates requires adopting a more sophisticated set of techniques — the “soft path” of flood risk management, which aims to understand, adapt to and work with the forces of nature. Before the Deluge gives an in-depth look at the flaws with hard, structural flood-control techniques and describes what we need to do to make our communities safer from floods.
If we don’t take strong action to avert catastrophic global warming — and to improve flood risk management — we will be leaving our children and the next 50 generations a drenched and flooded world.
… and if you haven’t got enough of offsets — a big if, I know — come to The National Academies Building, 500 5th Street, NW, for a talk/debate, “Voluntary Carbon Offsets: Hype or Hope?”
I’ll be speaking along with Eric Carlson, Founder and Executive Director of Carbonfund.org, August 1, 12:30-2:00 PM. Here are more details:
Hansen offers his climate solution — two important actions and two “tweaks”:
When you are given a list of 101 things that you should do to save the planet, it is easy to get discouraged. Well, that way of looking at the problem, without some overall understanding, is discouraging! Moreover, you would need to convince everyone else to do all those things! Fat chance of that. Even if you convinced a very large number of people, the net effect would be to reduce the cost of oil (and other fossil fuels). With dirt cheap fossil fuels (they are already cheap) do you think that there is not someone in the world who will burn them?
I am not discouraging you from individual good deeds. Those will be a part of the solution, and they will be helpful in the upcoming critical battle with special interests, if we succeed in finding a leader with the guts to “go to the mat”. However, the deeds should be recognized as part of a workable strategy, a strategy that gets everyone to participate, not simply a drop in the bucket.
The solution is two plus two: two important actions and two “tweaks”. By far the most important action is “coal” solution, specifically an immediate moratorium in the West (developed countries) on new coal-fired power plants without CO2-capture, and phase-out of such existing power plants (or installation of carbon capture) over the next several decades. Within a decade or less a similar moratorium will be needed in developing countries.
Okay, this is somewhat off topic, although I do all of my blogging using Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) voice dictation software.
Anyway, a lot of people I know tried voice dictation a few years ago and gave up on it, since it wasn’t that good, especially IBM’s Via Voice. But the DNS software is really kickass now.
Okay, this is somewhat off topic, although I do all of my writing and blogging using Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) voice dictation software, which is why you will occasionally see an odd-looking mistake from the PC “mis-hearing” me.
Anyway, a lot of people I know tried voice dictation a few years ago and gave up on it, since it wasn’t that good. A lot of people had a bad experience with IBM’s Via Voice system. But the DNS software is really kickass now.
My mother happened to take Amtrak down to DC Friday — the day they were handing out trees to offset train travel, which is how I heard of this dubious program.
My mother received a transparent plastic cylinder containing a small Colorado Blue Spruce with the label “plant this tree and offset the carbon output from 14,000 miles of train travel.”
Yes, like the Pope, Amtrak never got the “trees are lousy offsets” memo from here or Gristmill. Fortunately, Amtrak is the energy efficient way to travel inland, and trees are great things to have — though it is a bit odd handing out the state tree of Colorado, which is native to the West, in DC.
Anyway, the plastic cylinder directs us to “Learn more @ whistlestop.Amtrak.com” where we meet “Arte the environmental engineer,” probably the lamest corporate environmental mascot ever. Arte is named for Amtrak Recognizes the Environment — yes, we all recognize the environment as it whizzes by us at 60 mph. More strangely, Arte is a typical leaf, but the Blue Spruce is an evergreen conifer.
Well, at least Amtrak isn’t handing out iron for ocean fertilization.
This offset business has given me my 15 minutes of fame. I was extensively quoted in a recent article on the subject, “Are green-minded folks getting their money’s worth?” But first, here’s a supporting view from the piece:
A spokesman for the Sierra Club says the group does not suggest members buy carbon offsets.
“I think it’s wonderful that people are thinking about their carbon footprint,” says Josh Dorner. “But the carbon-offsets market is completely unregulated, so it’s questionable whether it is really doing anything to reduce global warming. So what we recommend is that people take other steps in their life, such as driving a smaller car or unplugging appliances when they are not in use, that are verifiably productive.”
Here’s the part I’m quoted in:
Wow, two Republicans representing two very different groups have been going after each other on the blogosphere with words and phrases like “It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar” and “nasty-gram” — OK, nasty-gram isn’t a word, but what do you expect from CEI?
It’s Michael Eckhart, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) versus Marlo Lewis a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). You can read Lewis’s side at Planet Gore (where else?) and Eckhart’s side at ACORE’s blog.
I know Eckhart and he’s a solid guy — plus I’m not a big fan of 1) people who post private emails on the internet and 2) professional global warming Denyers — so I’ll take ACORE over CEI/PG any day. Also, this paragraph by PG is illuminating:
No, not supermodels. I feel obliged to include this part of Hansen’s e-mail for completeness’s sake, though it will probably not be of interest to general readers:
For fellow technocrats: “Climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS modelE”, to appear soon in Clim. Dyn., is available here.
“Lago Agrio is a forsaken little town where something rather large is going down.”
Lago Agrio, Ecuador, in English “sour lake”, is a former site of 20 years’ worth of oil extraction by Chevron (formerly Texaco), now witness to one of the world’s largest environmental lawsuits, potentially worth $6 billion.
The lawsuit first came to my attention at Live Earth, when Sting left the stage after immediately turning over his press time to his wife, who deferred to a U.S. advocate and the two lead Ecuadorean lawyers, all of whom plead their case (translators on-hand) before the dwindling number of press representatives (preparing for Sting’s stage performance).
In case you missed it (because I did), May’s Vanity Fair featured one of the lead lawyers, Pablo Fajardo, in a good-sized article on the case.
Vanity Fair traces the historical context of the oil extraction, the social and environmental devastation, including off-the-charts contamination levels, and, most poignantly, Fajardo’s personal battle leading up to his involvement with the case.
That said, I’d like to echo Fajardo’s final words of wisdom from the article:
One of the problems with modern society is that it places more importance on things that have a price than on things that have a value. Breathing clean air, for instance, or having clean water in the rivers, or having legal rights–these are things that don’t have a price but have a huge value. Oil does have a price, but its value is much less. And sometimes we make the mistake.
I was seduced back in May by GM’s seeming sincerity in developing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. We must always remember, however, GM is a master greenwasher.
An article in Edmunds, “Chevrolet Volt Goes to Washington To Underline GM’s Anti-CAFE-Increase Argument,” suggests GM is using the Volt the same way it used fuel cell cars to kill the electric car in California (as the movie explains):
General Motors’ North American operations chief, Troy Clarke, is meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill today, and he’s bringing along the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid prototype. GM hopes the Volt will help convince lawmakers that electric and alternative-fuel vehicles are the route to energy independence. The Big Three have strenuously opposed a proposed increase in CAFE standards, saying the cost of meeting higher mpg averages would take away resources that could be put toward development of alternative-energy vehicles.
Sad. If the Volt is mostly or even partly a head fake, then Toyota will win surely win the race for the car of the future.
At the same time, the automakers may be winning the fight against the Senate CAFE bill, according to the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) and E&E News (subs. req’d), excerpted below:
Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science has a good op-ed:
With respect to climate change, we have abruptly passed the tipping point in what until recently has been a tense political controversy. Why? Industry leaders, nongovernmental organizations, Al Gore, and public attention have all played a role. At the core, however, it’s about the relentless progress of science. As data accumulate, denialists retreat to the safety of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page or seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby from whom they first learned to “teach the controversy.” Meanwhile, political judgments are in, and the game is over. Indeed, on this page last week, a member of Parliament described how the European Union and his British colleagues are moving toward setting hard targets for greenhouse gas reductions.
More from our top climate scientist (I told you it was a long email — we’re about half way through):
California had a regulation that would have required automobile manufacturers to produce a small percentage of cars without emissions by such-and-such date, and a larger percentage later. Automakers despised this rule, and decided that they had enough clout to ignore it, arguing that it was impractical. Environmentalists seemed to conclude that they were overmatched. Rather than go to the mat, they decided to play ball with the automakers, to try to work with them, accepting promises that the automakers would do everything that they could to improve vehicle efficiencies and reduce emissions.
I know you’ve all been eagerly waiting for this–don’t worry, I don’t have many more rules. I got sidetracked by last week’s offset hearing.
Offset projects should deliver climate benefits with high confidence — that’s a key reason trees make lousy offsets, especially non-urban, non-tropical trees. An even more dubious source of offsets is geo-engineering, which is “the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment” to counteract the effects of global warming.
As John Holdren, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted in 2006, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.”
The only reason for this rule is that a company, Planktos, wants to sell offset credits for carbon that is supposedly sequestered when iron is seeded in the ocean to create algae blooms. Seriously. (This is the same company that is selling trees as offsets to the Vatican.)
This is such a dubious idea that 18 leading experts from 13 countries, who comprise the Scientific Steering Committee of the Surface Ocean–Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS)–a leadin group studying the ocean-atmosphere system–went to the trouble of issuing a “Position Statement on Large-Scale Ocean Fertilisation” last month:
Edited by Joe Romm, we cover climate science, solutions and politics. Columnist Tom Friedman calls us "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named us one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." Newcomers, start here.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.
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