Stop the presses!

Asia Pacific countries have agreed [to] a common statement on climate change after intense wrangling between rich and emerging nations, a source involved in the talks said Friday.

The document, which is not binding, contains an “aspirational” target of reducing energy intensity….

Oh, it gets better:

… the statement urges nations to reduce energy intensity by 25 percent by 2030 but does not make an enforceable commitment.

Do they even realize that in just one year, 2006, U.S. energy intensity fell 4% — and energy intensity (energy consumed per dollar of GDP) routinely drops 2% a year in this country, and more in fast-growing countries. If U.S. GDP grew 3% a year for the next 23 years, we could meet that 2030 target even if our energy consumption rose a whopping 75% (and of course, our carbon emissions could rise more than that since this is an energy goal, not a carbon goal).

And it ain’t even enforceable.

If John “You cannot be serious!” McEnroe were dead, he’d be turning over in his grave.

He’s running for President now, so let’s revisit his climate change confusion. He took some standard Denier myths — and threw in a dash of his own unwarranted sarcasm — to create this mishmash on the Paul Harvey radio show:

Plutonic Warming

By Fred Thompson

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto.

NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn’t even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There’s a consensus.

Ask Galileo.

I thought Thompson was a member of the Churches of Christ, not a heliolater or perhaps a Druid. I have previously debunked this bit of denier disinformation and will expand on the key facts below — especially his misguided sun worship.

What is saddest to me — besides the possibility he might actually become president — is the ease with this otherwise intelligent man believes the entire scientific community somehow failed to examine the contribution of the sun to recent global warming.

His Law and Order alter ego D.A. Arthur Branch would not be so easily duped. He would demand evidence. Here it is:

Read more

Like solar thermal power, geothermal power is too often neglected. Indeed, the Bush administration has proposed zeroing out the geothermal energy program for two years running.

But a major 2007 study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, “The Future of Geothermal Energy” (a 372-page PDF) reveals the potential if we redouble our efforts toward this zero-carbon power source. The MIT-led panel of scientists, economic experts, and engineers found that Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) that use “heat-mining technology, which is designed to extract and utilize the earth’s stored thermal energy” could contribute 10% of baseload power by mid-century:

The panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale that would produce more than 100,000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050. This amount is approximately equivalent to the total R&D investment made in the past 30 years to EGS internationally, which is still less than the cost of a single, new-generation, clean-coal power plant.

Technology Review has a nice summary piece here. And you can find a lot more about geothermal here.