An anonymous commenter on a previous blogpost asks,

“GM has alway said that the battery might not be ready…. GM never lied about it but like always lots of people like to knock GM. Why not pick on Toyota for a while.”

I’ve got no problem picking on Toyota, too. Toyota continues to use the Prius to cover a multitude of sins. They are selling larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles than ever; they slap a hybrid drive into a $100,000 Lexus, achieve minimal fuel savings, and earn more green kudos all while continuing to spread disinformation about the value of true electrification by advertising their hybrids as half electric cars “you never have to plug in.” Of course the truth is you can’t.

But unlike GM, Toyota hasn’t promised a plug in car. They haven’t had to. (Although they built a damn good one when they were forced to. Read all about it here.) While I have no doubt Toyota will release a plug-in car as soon as someone else does, until then they will join the “batteries aren’t ready” chorus.

It truly is, not surprisingly, all about the bottom line. Every automaker wants to continue selling only internal combustion engine cars (hybrids included) because they believe that is the best route toward the greatest profitability in the near term. Needless to say this hasn’t proven true in GM’s case. They couldn’t have been in worse shape had they continued even very limited production, and sale, of the EV1. It would have been their Prius, only better.

– Marc G. Plugs and Cars Blog

In Salon’s article “How to build a green building without really trying (or caring about the planet),” I was expecting to read a piece on how intuitive it is to use building materials and structural design in a wise and consequently green manner. Boy, I was wrong — about the article.

Writer Daniel Brooks’ focus on LEED certification as the green building movement leader results in a criticism of the state of green building. His premise is that scrutiny of the standard’s application turns out buildings that fit LEED’s happenstance checklist better than true environmental benchmarks.

For example, for the same number of points, designers could add an inexpensive bicycle rack (and not actually change any behavior) or install an efficient heating system – much more expensive, but much more influential on environmental impact.

True, LEED is changing itself a few ways in 2008. It’s teaming up to evaluate communities, not just buildings, and it’s reassessing its checklists. But if our country is to seriously go down the path of green building, LEED isn’t going to suffice.

And because buildings alone account for 39 percent of our emissions, we must be looking into green building and retrofitting. Not to mention, energy efficiency is often called our ‘first fuel’ and is the quickest way to ensure emissions reductions while we develop more comprehensive and long-term solutions.

That said, competition for LEED is welcome, particularly if the marketplace is the most efficient and cost effective place to raise standards. Or perhaps something more like what the California Public Utilities Commission recently initiated. I’ve also heard rumblings over how useful a strict, nation- and industry-wide standard would be (one standard would make building across statelines easier). This is certainly a niche calling out for more policy development, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

– Kari M.

Just received a fascinating press release from the Carbon Coalition via Adam Markham of Clean Air-Cool Planet:

NH Independents Reward Candidates Who Made Global Warming Solutions a Priority

Portsmouth, NH — Advocates for an aggressive federal program to tackle climate change are celebrating the results of today’s New Hampshire primary. John McCain and Hillary Clinton’s wins tonight were due in part to the efforts of New Hampshire’s climate voters, who sent a strong message that they are seeking a leader who will deal with the crisis of climate change.

“Since last spring when citizens in 164 New Hampshire towns passed the NH Climate Change Resolution, we knew that climate change would prove to be an important issue to people as they met with, listened to and decided upon candidates for President,” said Roger Stephenson, project director for the Carbon Coalition (www.carboncoalition.org/index.php), a non-partisan coalition of citizens, scientists, businesses, students, communities and organizations. “It should come as no surprise that the two candidates who won here listened to those 164 towns and made climate a key issue in their campaigns.”

The Carbon Coalition has spent the past two years educating citizens in New Hampshire about the need for an aggressive program to tackle global warming:

Read more

In November 2006, California voters rejected Proposition 87, a ballot initiative to raise the oil industry’s taxes by $4 billion for research into renewable energy.

Four months before the ballot, a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 61% of likely voters favored the idea, including 51% of Republicans.

What changed between the survey and the vote? The oil industry pumped more than $60 million into a campaign to defeat the measure. Proposition 87 contained a specific provision that would have forbidden oil companies from passing the tax along to consumers. Nevertheless, a central part of the industry’s message was that Proposition 87 would raise the price of gasoline.

On the Hill and in the voting booth, the specter of higher costs and taxes is the big weapon in fossil-fuel industry’s arsenal against climate action. The question is, what’s the defense.

It is important to acknowledge and to anticipate that putting a price on carbon will raise energy prices. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released an estimate last November that carbon pricing to achieve a modest 15% reduction in emissions would cost the poorest fifth of the population between $750 and $950 a year on average. That’s big money to a family living on $13,000 — and fossil-energy costs presumably would grow as carbon caps get stricter.

But we can mitigate those costs:

Read more

Another excerpt from Hell and High Water paperback edition (now available on Amazon).

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.
–Wallace Broecker, climate scientist, 1995

The ongoing Arctic warming corresponds to the predictions of the more pessimistic climate models. By extension, the pessimistic scenarios of climate change can be expected to unfold in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
–Louis Fortier, climate scientist, June 2006

We are on the brink of taking the biggest gamble in human history, one that, if we lose, will transform the lives of the next fifty generations….

My focus in this chapter is the question of the century:

Do we humans have the political will to stop the great ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica from melting . . . to stop Hell and High Water?

… On our current emissions path, Earth’s average temperature will probably rise 1.5°C by midcentury. By century’s end we will be more than 3°C warmer than today. The last time Earth was 1°C warmer than today, sea levels were 20 feet higher. That occurred during the Eemian interglacial period about 125,000 years ago, when Greenland appears to have had far less ice.

How fast can the sea level rise? Following the last ice age, the world saw sustained melting that raised sea levels more than a foot a decade. Many scientists believe we could see such a melting rate–a catastrophic melting rate of more than 12 inches every ten years– within this century. Sea levels ultimately could rise much more than 20 feet because Antarctica contains far more landlocked ice than Greenland.

The last time Earth was 2° to 3°C warmer than it is now, some 3 million years ago, sea levels were more than 80 feet higher.

… The answer to the question of the century–Do we humans have the political will to stop the great ice sheets from melting?–is, at best, “Not yet”….