Speaking of vampires in need of slaying, the AP reports:

A force as insidious as Dracula is quietly sucking a nickel of every dollar’s worth of the electricity that seeps from your home’s outlets.

Insert the little fangs of your cell phone charger in the outlet and leave it there, phone attached: That’s vampire electronics.

Allow your computer to hide in the cloak of darkness known as “standby mode” rather than shutting it off: That’s vampire electronics.

The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, a phenomenon energy efficiency experts find all the more terrifying as energy prices rise and the planet warms. That amounts to about $4 billion a year.

The percentage could rise to 20 percent by 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Everything you could possibly want to know about standby power is here.

Buffy is back in Climate Progress. I’ll take any excuse!

Turns out former Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar is green, or at least green-tinged, like those monsters she used to fight.

She brings her own reusable bag to Whole Foods. Why? “So I get a discount.” Okay so the millionaire actress is cheap frugal. You got a problem with that?

She also rides a bike, to the annoyance of her neighbors:

“Not only is it bright pink with the bell and streamers and the whole thing, but it has Hello Kitty tires. Every time I leave my apartment, my doorman just shakes his head.”

Interestingly, some of the demons on Buffy spin-off Angel were also green, figuratively speaking. For the sake of its vampire employees, the Los Angeles offices of Wolfram & Hart employ “Necro-tempered” tinted glass, which “filters out the constituents of sunlight that are dangerous to vampires while leaving the brightness in tact. Plus it’s thirty percent more energy efficient“!

And you thought TV was a vast wasteland.

Yes, America’s climate policy is immoral. But that doesn’t make China’s rapacious coal plant building moral. The N.Y. Times has published the sobering numbers, which bear repeating:

The country built 114,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel-based generating capacity last year alone, almost all coal-fired, and is on course to complete 95,000 megawatts more this year.

For comparison, Britain has 75,000 megawatts in operation, built over a span of decades.

China is now the main reason the world is recarbonizing — the carbon content of the average unit of energy produced has stopped its multi-decade decline, as noted. Yes, America is still responsible for a great deal more cumulative emissions, which is what drive concentrations, and China is doing Much of its dirty manufacturing for U.S. consumers (never said our hands were clean).

But China seems to have adopted a policy of build as many coal plants as is humanly possible until they are forced to stop — or, I suspect, until they get a deal that pays the country to shut them down (much as they have gamed the clean development mechanism under Kyoto).

If China won’t alter its coal policy to make its environment livable today even with the Olympics coming, it will require very strong international leadership (led by an America with a moral climate policy of our own) to have any chance at making them alter it to preserve a livable climate in the future.

So why doesn’t China pursue alternatives? The NYT story explains:

Read more

Worldwide backlash hits biofuels – USA Today:

• Scientist Jane Goodall says the rush to grow biofuels is threatening primate habitat in Uganda and Indonesia.

• Brazil is trying to crack down on near-slave labor conditions that have helped keep down the cost of ethanol production.

• Paramilitary groups are forcing peasants from their land in Colombia to make room for palm oil plantations, raising the specter of “blood biofuels.”

Reimagining the Automobile Industry by Selling the Electricity – New York Times profiles a global venture capitalist. “He plans to extend the existing electric-power grids with a wide network of intelligent recharging stations in urban areas and supplementing it with a smaller number of automated battery-replacement stations.”

GM Launches New Advanced Science and Research Center in Shanghai – Green Car Congress. China is teaming up with universities and businesses to launch research centers in China designed to explore alternative fuels and the energy efficiency of new vehicles. A quick analysis excerpted from the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) summarizes:

The Commitment: GM is investing in fuel-efficient technology research in China, the world’s fastest-growing auto market.

The Intent: Chinese adoption would mark an endorsement because of the market’s size and the government’s involvement.

The Barrier: Fuel-saving technologies could find a limited market because they may appeal only to China’s most affluent drivers.

Eleven years ago, I wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly with various predictions and warnings on oil and energy technology and climate. Since those subjects remain hot today — concern over oil prices and peak oil is at a three-decade-high and Shellenberger and Nordhaus have reignited the technology debate with a variety of historically inaccurate claims about the clean energy R&D message — and since this is probably the best thing I wrote in the 1990s, I am going to reprint it here. It is a long piece so I will divide it up into several posts.

“MidEast Oil Forever?” (subs. req’d), coauthored by then deputy energy secretary Charles Curtis, became the cover story for the April 1996 issue (click on picture to enlarge — yes that is a lightbulb, the sun, and a windmill about to go over the edge of a sea of oil).

The back story is that the Gingrich Congress had come in with its passionate hatred of all applied energy research, and the Clinton Administration was desperately trying to save the entire clean energy budget from being zeroed out. I wrote most of the piece in the summer of 1995 and revised it in January 1996. The title was a warning that the U.S. would be stuck with its dependence on MidEast Oil if that happened. Hence the subhead for the article:

Congressional budget-cutters threaten to end America’s leadership in new energy technologies that could generate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, reduce damage to the environment, and limit our costly, dangerous dependency on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region.

[Note: The original online article had active links, and I have kept those that still work. In the interests of space, I will not indent the whole article, as I normally do for extended quotations.]

Imagine a world in which the Persian Gulf controlled two thirds of the world’s oil for export, with $200 billion a year in oil revenues streaming into that unstable and politically troubled region, and America was importing nearly 60 percent of its oil, resulting in a $100-billion-a-year outflow that undermined efforts to reduce our trade deficit. That’s a scenario out of the 1970s which can never happen again, right? No, that’s the “reference case” projection for ten years from now from the federal Energy Information Administration.

Imagine another world in which fossil-fuel use had begun a slow, steady decline; more than a third of the market for new electricity generation was supplied from renewable sources; the renewables industry had annual sales of $150 billion; and the fastest-growing new source of power was solar energy. An environmentalist’s fantasy, right? No, that’s one of two planning scenarios for three to four decades from now, developed by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the world’s most profitable oil company, which is widely viewed as a bench mark for strategic planning.

Read more

You’ll be glad to know The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has launched a major climate program whose goals are to ensure that:

• the increased energy prices that are an essential part of climate-change legislation do not drive more households into poverty or make poor households poorer; and
• climate-change legislation generates sufficient revenue both to protect low-income households and to address other needs related to the fight against global warming, so that it does not increase the deficit.

CBPP is a great group. But they need to understand that a central strategy for fighting the impact of higher energy prices on low-income consumers is an aggressive energy efficiency strategy to keep overall bills from rising, which I don’t see in their work so far.

No, I don’t mean cost, safety, waste, or proliferation — though those are all serious problems. I mean the Achilles heel of nuclear power in the context of climate change: water.

Climate change means water shortages in many places and hotter water everywhere. Both are big problems for nukes.

… nuclear power is the most water-hungry of all energy sources, with a single reactor consuming 35-65 million litres of water each day.

The Australians, stuck in a once-in-a-1000-years drought, understandably worry about this a lot:

Operating a 2,400 Watt fan heater for one hour consumes 0.01 litres of water if wind is the energy source, 0.26 litres if solar is the energy source, 4.5 litres if coal is the energy source, or 5.5 litres if nuclear power is the energy source.

Hotter water is another serious worry:

Read more

You can listen live in the DC area on 89.3 FM or online at WPFW.org, today, Tuesday, October 30, 10 am, EST.

The Earthbeat segment I have become a semi-regular on is hosted by Mike Tidwell.

The United States and other nations that trade heavily with China are indirectly responsible for nearly a quarter of China’s carbon emissions, according to a briefing note issued late Friday by the U.K.’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Last week, we wrote about a new study showing that global carbon emissions in 2006 were 35 percent above the 1990 baseline set down in the Kyoto Protocol. For some time, head-scratching over a successor treaty to Kyoto has occupied climate scientists and economists. This task is becoming much more difficult as it becomes clear that carbon-emissions trends may not belong to individual nations at all, but the fluid trade systems that weave them together. “[Research] suggests that a focus on emissions within national borders may miss the point,” the Tyndall authors write.

Tao Wang and Jim Watson conclude in the briefing note, titled “Who Owns China’s Carbon Emissions?”:

Whilst the nation state is at the heart of most international negotiations and treaties such as those for combating climate change, global trade means that a county’s carbon footprint is open to some interpretation. Should countries be concerned with emissions within their borders (as is currently the case), or should they also be responsible for emissions due to the production of good and services they consume? The scale of emissions from exports from countries such as China and the neglect of emissions from international transport provide some arguments for the latter approach.

This research opens the door for confusion and contradiction among players in the U.S. climate debates. Are proponents of free-trade likely to voluntarily accept research about–and therefore responsibility for–the fraction of trade partners’ emissions generated by goods the U.S. buys? Will U.S. companies that move production off-shore, to China and other developing countries, count emissions in the nation they are generated or the nation their goods are sold? How can proponents of national legislation restrict themselves to Congress, when only international treaties can address the full carbon footprint of American consumers. These questions strike at the heart of what it means to live in a globalized world–and even who we are as individuals, Americans? Global consumers? Economic players on the playing field of international economic regulatory bodies, such as NAFTA or the World Trade Organization? These questions need to be answered as a post-Kyoto plan is designed.

Click on figure for more detail. See below for more discussion:

Read more

… I hope this article will tide you over: “Offsets – Hype Or Hope?” by me. The article is published in Bridges, the publication of the Office of Science & Technology at the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC.

I do intend to do more posting on offsets, since they continue to attract more interest than they probably deserve.

Mass extinction is certainly one of the gravest threats posed by climate change. A new paleoclimate study underscores the danger:

We analysed the fossil record for the last 520 Myr against estimates of low latitude sea surface temperature for the same period. We found that global biodiversity (the richness of families and genera) is related to temperature and has been relatively low during warm ‘greenhouse’ phases, while during the same phases extinction and origination rates of taxonomic lineages have been relatively high. These findings are consistent for terrestrial and marine environments and are robust to a number of alternative assumptions and potential biases. Our results provide the first clear evidence that global climate may explain substantial variation in the fossil record in a simple and consistent manner.

The conclusion of the study, “A long-term association between global temperature and biodiversity, origination and extinction in the fossil record“:

Read more

Global warming threatens our 4th of July celebrations with droughts that have forced communities to scrap plans for fireworks displays. And it threatens our White Chistmases with winter heatwaves. And our Arbor Days with record wildfires. And now it imperils our Halloweens.

In a story headlined, “Rain, Drought, Wipe Out Pumpkin Crops Across U.S.” Fox News reports the frightening news:

Scorching weather and lack of rain this summer wiped out some pumpkin crops from western New York to Illinois, leaving fields dotted with undersized fruit. Other fields got too much rain and their crops rotted.

Pumpkin production is predicted to be down for the second straight year.

One expert ominously predicts a run on pumpkins: “If you’ve got to have them for your 5-year-olds, I certainly would not wait a long time to get them.”

Even Stephen Colbert has reported on what he calls the War on Halloween (though, characteristic of his out-of-the-mainstream politics, he doesn’t make the obvious link to global warming).

The bottom line, however, is clear: Pumpkins (like most people) hate extreme weather. Sadly, global warming means more droughts and more deluges.

What exactly does extreme weather done to pumpkins?

Read more

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Auden Schendler as a guest blogger. Auden is Executive Director for Community and Environmental Responsibility at Aspen Skiing Company. Named a “Climate Crusader” in TIME magazine’s 2006 special issue on climate change, Auden once worked for Amory Lovins at Rocky Mountain Institute (as I did). You can read his full bio here. Auden has unique insight into the difficulties of corporate sustainability in the absence of government leadership and a price for carbon. Welcome, Auden!

Recently, Businessweek covered Aspen Skiing Company’s work on emissions reduction as part of an article titled “Little Green Lies.” The article has received considerable coverage in the blogosphere because it addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to business claims on the environment.

Joe asked me if I’d like to clarify that story, and I jumped at the opportunity.

My main point, which probably didn’t get across in the article, is that even at a remarkably progressive company like Aspen Skiing Company, which has strong support from ownership, management, and staff, cutting CO2 emissions is very difficult. Imagine how hard it must be in most standard businesses that don’t have this level of buy-in! This statement may seem obvious, but it cuts against conventional wisdom. Most entities involved in emissions reduction have a stake in saying it’s profitable, relatively easy, and sometimes fun. The NGO community makes its living on this perspective. The government needs its own programs to look good. And corporations have a stake in their perceived success as well.

Read more

Those of us who have never tried to push a bill through Congress can’t appreciate what a difficult and frustrating process it is. It’s time we do — and time we take to the streets.

Some weeks ago, I posted a column about the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, which proposes that by 2020, we reduce greenhouse gas emissions 15% below their level in 2005. That’s less than half the goal set by the European Union – the equivalent of a 32% reduction in emissions by 2020 compared to 2005. The Lieberman-Warner cap is hardly a model policy for the world’s second-largest source of GHG emissions. I was not happy with a group of U.S. environmental leadership who endorsed that goal in a letter to Congress.

I spent time last week with one of those leaders — a man who carries a picture of his grandson in his shirt pocket to remind him of why working on the climate issue is worth the grief he gets from people like me – and I gained a different perspective: Inadequate action on the Hill is the result of inadequate action on the streets. The political calculus for climate caps is the same as it is for virtually every other dicey issue in Congress: Members feel they are more likely to keep their seats supporting a 15% reduction than supporting a 30% reduction.

We need to flip that calculation, making bold climate action the best way for members of Congress and presidential candidates to win the next election, and that puts the burden back on us voters. While our environmental leaders are chasing legislative aides through the halls of the Capitol, the rest of us need to take to the streets in a nonviolent show of solidarity that elected officials cannot ignore.

The movement to the streets may take legs this week.

Read more

The remarkably low fueling cost of the best current hybrids (like the Toyota Prius) and future plug-in hybrids are a major reason why I don’t worry as much about peak oil as some do.

James Kunstler, for instance, argues in his 2005 book The Long Emergency (see Rolling Stone excerpt here), that, after oil production peaks, suburbia “will become untenable” and “we will have to say farewell to easy motoring.” In Rolling Stone, Kunstler writes “Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” [No -- that distinction probably belongs to China's torrid love-affair with coal power].

But suppose Kunstler is right about peak oil. Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.

And suppose oil hit $280 a barrel and gasoline rose to $8 dollars a gallon in 2025. You would replace your hybrid with a plug-in hybrid, and those trips less than 30 miles that have made suburbia what it is today would actually cut your fuel bill by a factor of more than 10–even if all the electricity were from zero-carbon sources like wind power–to far below what you are paying today. The extra cost of the vehicle would be paid for in fuel savings in well under five years.

Read more

The legendary Internet technologist Bill Joy has found a better place than the Internet to put his venture capital dollars: green technology.

Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, joined the famed venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 2005 (more proof, if needed, that the rich get richer). In a recent talk, Joy said:

“Eugene Kleiner, the co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, said there is a time when panic is the appropriate response. And I think we should go into a panic–not only (because) the scale of the problem but also the economic opportunity that becoming more efficient in our use of energy gives to us.”

What does this technology guru — and sometimes techno-dystopian — think is hot in clean tech?

Read more

I recently “won” a Thinking Blogger award — not exactly the Nobel Prize but you take what you can get in the blogosphere.

Even my modest amount of modesty forbids me from repeating what Michael Connelly at Corrections Sentencing blog had to say about ClimateProgress. All I’ll say about Michael Connelly is that I don’t even know him, and this was the first I even heard of his blog, a “place for corrections/sentencing policy readers seeking latest information and research” — not really my forte.

But someone gave him a Thinking Blogger award and this award is sort of a virtual chain letter. So here are the five blogs I would give the thinking blogger award to:

Read more

Slate has published my reply to economist’s Steven Landsburg’s ill-informed hit-piece, “Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn’t understand about climate change.”

The editor wisely cut out some of my snarkier comments (Note to self: Slate is not Climate Progress!) but kept the title: “Save the Earth in Two Not-So-Hard Questions: What Steven Landsburg doesn’t understand about climate change” and the last paragraph:

Landsburg seems to believe that only economists can discuss climate change seriously, while the rest of us are wasting everyone’s time: “If you’re not talking about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you’re blathering.” Landsburg’s piece proves that you can talk about those things and still be blathering.

I do have a serious point to make in the piece. There are two key questions that everyone in the climate change debate needs to answer:

1. How great a threat does inaction on climate change pose for future generations’ quality of life–and for life itself?
2. Will significant action on climate change require sacrificing our quality of life in any meaningful sense?

To see that the answer to the second question is a definite “no,” you need to define the threat in question 1, which I do at length in my book (and on Climate Progress) and briefly in the piece. My bottom line:

Read more

The important new study, “Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks,” that we blogged on earlier is now available online (tip o’ the hat to John M). You can get the abstract here and download the full study here.

What carbon sinks are saturating? A recent and persistent increase in winds (photo, British Antarctic Survey) “over the Southern Ocean, caused by greenhouse gases and ozone depletion, has led to a release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere and is preventing further absorption of the greenhouse gas”(original Science article here).

Let me quote one key, sobering paragraph from the new study:

Growth in Atmospheric CO2. Global average atmospheric CO2 rose from 280 ppm at the start of the industrial revolution (circa 1750) to 381 ppm in 2006. The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years. The growth rate of global average atmospheric CO2 for 2000–2006 was 1.93 ppm. This rate is the highest since the beginning of continuous monitoring in 1959 and is a significant increase over growth rates in earlier decades: the average growth rates for the 1980s and the 1990s were 1.58 and 1.49 ppm respectively.

What is particularly novel about this Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper is that the authors provide the first quantitative explanation I have seen for this accelerated growth rate:

Read more

No, the profile of famed scientist James Lovelock in Rolling Stone will not give you renewed hope about humanity’s fate in the face of global warming. It will make you — or Al Gore or James Hansen or even me — look optimistic by comparison:

Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful”….

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world’s top scientists. “Our future,” Lovelock writes, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.”

Doh!

But surely we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid this terrible, terrible fate. Lovelock says, no, it’s too late:

Read more