I have a new article in Salon, “The car of the future is here,” about plug-in hybrids. The two central points of the article are:

1. Plug-in hybrids (and electric cars) are an essential climate strategy, enabling renewable power (even intermittent sources like wind) to become a major low-cost transportation fuel.
2. Practical, affordable plug-in hybrids will be here in a few years — even if we don’t get a technology breakthrough in batteries.

[I am even more confident of these conclusions given the amazing joint announcement today by Renault-Nissan, Project Better Place, and Israel -- see below.]

If you read the Salon article, you’ll know more than billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who recently said:

Forget plug-ins. They are nice toys. But they will not be material to climate change.

The subject deserves a far more serious discussion. Transportation is the toughest sector in which to achieve deep carbon emissions reductions. Of the three major alternative fuels that could plausibly provide a low-carbon substitute for a significant amount of petroleum:

• I am excited about the near-term reality (next five years) of plug in hybrids and electric cars
• I am hopeful that cellulosic biofuels could be a medium-term strategy, rather than a long-term one, especially for long-distance travel by air, sea, and land (which batteries probably can’t handle).
• I am increasingly convinced hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end especially from the perspective of avoiding catastrophic climate change (which requires deep emissions reductions by 2050). I’ll have a long article on hydrogen in the near future.

I was especially impressed by AFS Trinity’s plug-in hybrid design, which I test drove last year (see “The Extreme (plug in) Hybrid — no breakthrough needed!“).

I am even more heartened about the prospects for pure electric vehicles (EVs) in other countries after seeing the following truly ground-breaking announcement today.

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I meant to blog on this earlier, but lost track of it after failing to find the original study (for reasons that will become clear). The bottom line is:

Global warming could cut the rate at which trees in tropical rainforests grow by as much as half, a new study based on more two decades of data from forests in Panama and Malaysia shows.

The effects, so far largely overlooked by climate modellers, Nature magazine said, could severely erode or even remove the ability of tropical rainforests to remove carbon dioxide from the air as they grow.

More evidence that the carbon sinks in the ocean and on the land may saturate sooner than scientists expected, which will inevitably lead to an acceleration of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (see below).

You might think from this article or even this blog, which begins, “The study is contained in Nature magazine,” that the original study is from Nature. But, nooooo! Someone — we won’t name names — could waste a lot of time looking for it there before they found out that it was only written about in Nature.

The actual study is from Ecology Letters, and here is a preprint. The abstract is sobering:

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The international dimension of climate in Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):

The “international fairness” issue is the emotional home run. Given the chance, Americans will demand that all nations be part of any international global warming treaty. Nations such as China, Mexico and India would have to sign such an agreement for the majority of Americans to support it.

–Frank Luntz, 2002

We don’t need an international treaty with rules and regulations that will handcuff the American economy or our ability to make our environment cleaner, safer and healthier.

–Frank Luntz, 2002

What country’s insatiable thirst for oil imports is most responsible for the tightening world market since the mid- 1990s? Hint: It’s not China. From 1995 to 2004, China’s annual imports grew by 2.8 million barrels a day. Ours grew 3.9 million. China sucks up about 6 percent of all global oil exports. We demand 25 percent, even though China has a billion more consumers.

In what year will China’s total contribution to climate change from burning fossil fuels surpass ours? Hint: Climate change is driven by rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and those concentrations have been driven by cumulative emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution. While China’s CO2 emissions might well exceed ours by 2010, its cumulative emissions might not surpass ours until after 2050.

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