One of global warming’s most immediate and devastating effects comes from the melting glaciers. From Bhutan to Peru, glacier melt is accelerating. As the Melting Andean Glaciers Could Leave 30 Million High and Dry puts it:

Loss of glaciers in the Andes mountain range is threatening the water supply of 30 million people, and scientists say the lower altitude glaciers could disappear in 10 years.

What’s happening to those most closely tied to the glaciers?

His community can no longer can seed indigenous potatoes in fields located at lower levels, because sufficient water does not flow there any longer. “We must seed them to greater height. But every year that happens, also we have less earth in mountains, Felipe says. “In few years more, no longer we will have no place to seed these potatoes.”

Maybe they should move to the cities? But wait:

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Yesterday, yet more information about the politicization of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came to light as the result of a congressional investigation.

One of the responsibilities of the EPA is to protect Americans from exposure to toxic chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects, and death when found in air, food, or water — such as Alar, chlordane, formaldehyde, and malathion. Since 1985 the EPA has placed its scientific risk assessments of such chemicals into a database called the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS). In a contentious oversight hearing yesterday, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) released a damning report that exposed how the “assessments are being undermined by secrecy and White House involvement.”

Before Stephen L. Johnson became administrator in 2005, the assessment process was a straightforward one run by the staff scientists of the EPA:

IRIS Procedure Before Stephen Johnson

Even so, the IRIS assessment program was slow and deliberative, with fewer than 15 full-time staff and under 10 assessments completed each year from 2000 to 2004. But in 2004, the process was changed to give the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oversight of the program:

Current IRIS Procedure

Although IRIS staff has quadrupled, productivity has collapsed. In fiscal 2006 and 2007, only two assessments were completed. The current process gives OMB control over IRIS assessments — the GAO found the OMB aborted five assessments in 2006 without explanation. Other federal agencies such as the Departments of Defense and Energy — who “are among the biggest contributors to toxic Superfund sites” — can interfere with the assessment in complete secrecy and add years of delay. On April 10, the EPA announced it would be further changing the process to institutionalize this complete takeover of scientific procedure:

Proposed IRIS Procedure

In the words of Richard Wiles of the Environmental Working Group, “With these rules in place, it’s now official: The Bush White House is where all good public health protections go to die.” Read more

Bush blames Congress’s failure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for high gasoline prices (here). The Administration’s own Energy Information Administration found otherwise in a 2004 Congressional-requested “Analysis of Oil and Gas Production in ANWR“:

It is expected that the price impact of ANWR coastal plain production might reduce world oilprices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel [in 2025].

Don’t spend it all in one place, American public! [Note to Bush: There are 42 gallons in a barrel.] EIA continues:

Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could countermand any potential price impact of ANWR coastal plain production by reducing its exports by an equal amount.

Curses, foiled again!

Then again, it’s laughable of the EIA to think OPEC (or anyone else) will have any spare capacity in 2025 (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“). But that’s the EIA for you.

Now, in “fairness” to the EIA, they did report at the time that the 30 to 50 cent per barrel price is

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This post will explain why some sort of massive government Apollo program or Manhattan project to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a priority component of the effort to stabilize at 450 ppm.

Put more quantitatively, the question is — What are the chances that multiple (4 to 8+) carbon-free technologies that do not exist today can each deliver the equivalent of 350 Gigawatts baseload power (~2.8 billion Megawatt-hours a year) and/or 160 billion gallons of gasoline cost-effectively by 2050? [Note -- that is about half of a stabilization wedge.] For the record, the U.S. consumed about 3.7 billion MW-hrs in 2005 and about 140 billion gallons of motor gasoline.

Put that way, the answer to the question is painfully obvious: “two chances — slim and none.” Indeed, I have repeatedly challenged readers and listeners over the years to name even a single technology breakthrough with such an impact in the past three decades, after the huge surge in energy funding that followed the energy shocks of the 1970s. Nobody has ever named a single one that has even come close.

Yet somehow the government is not just going to invent one TILT (Terrific Imaginary Low-carbon Technology) in the next few years, we are going to invent several TILTs. Seriously. Hot fusion? No. Cold fusion? As if. Space solar power? Come on, how could that ever compete with CSP? Hydrogen? It ain’t even an energy source, and after billions of dollars of public and private research in the past 15 years — including several years running of being the single biggest focus of the DOE office on climate solutions I once ran — it still has actually no chance whatsoever of delivering a major cost-effective climate solution by midcentury (see “This just in: Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still dead“).

I don’t know why the breakthrough crowd can’t see the obvious — so I will elaborate here. I will also dicusss a major study that explains why deployment programs are so much more important than R&D at this point. Let’s keep this simple:

• To stabilize at 450 ppm, we need to deploy by 2050 at least 14 stabilization wedges (each delivering 1 billion tons of avoided carbon) covering both efficient energy use and carbon-free supply (see Part 1).
• Myriad energy-efficient technologies are already cost-effective today — breaking down the barriers to their deployment now is much, much more important than developing new “breakthrough” efficient TILTs, since those would simply fail in the marketplace because of the same barriers. Cogeneration is perhaps the clearest example of this.
• On the supply side, deployment programs (coupled with a price for carbon) will always be much, much more important than R&D programs because new technologies take an incredibly long time to achieve mass-market commercial success. New supply TILTs would not simply emerge at a low cost. They need volume, volume, volume — steady and large increases in demand over time to bring the cost down, as I discuss at length below.
• No existing or breakthrough technology is going to beat the price of power from a coal plant that has already been built — the only way to deal with those plants is a high price for carbon or a mandate to shut them down. Indeed, that’s why we must act immediately not to build those plants in the first place.
• If a new supply technology can’t deliver half a wedge, it won’t be a big player in achieving 450 ppm.

For better or worse, we are stuck through 2050 with the technologies that are commercial today (like solar thermal electric) or that are very nearly commercial (like plug-in hybrids).

I have discussed most of this at length in previous posts (listed below), so I won’t repeat all the arguments here. Let me just focus on a few key points. A critical historical fact was explained by Royal Dutch/Shell, in their 2001 scenarios for how energy use is likely to evolve over the next five decades (even with a carbon constraint):

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They titled their piece, “Bush rhetoric on energy strays from the facts.” Some people might call that making stuff up, but who can complain about a story that begins:

President Bush put politics ahead of the facts Tuesday as he sought to blame Congress for high energy prices, saying foreign suppliers are pumping just about all the oil they can and accusing lawmakers of blocking new refineries.

Bush renewed his call for drilling in an Arctic wildlife refuge, but his own Energy Department says that would have little impact on gasoline prices.

And then goes on to compare Bush’s “spin” with the facts. Kudos to AP’s H. Josef Hebert, who has been at this game a long time.

Recently, CNN’s senior business correspondent Ali Velshi has been promoting coal-based liquid fuel as a response to high oil prices, even though it leads to climate disaster. Yesterday, the Wonk Room noted that Velshi has even implied coal is cleaner than himself. This afternoon, Velshi continued his obsession with liquid coal in a discussion with CNN’s Glenn Beck. Beck is a self-described “big dumb rodeo clown” who believes the United States is a “suicidal superpower” for not turning coal into gasoline:

This can be done — coal to oil — at $55 a barrel. That’s about half of what we are paying right now for oil. We can have cheap oil that is actually good for the nation because it is all home grown. We’re sitting … just Montana is the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Montana does indeed have vast coal reserves. But coal-based fuel is in fact a dangerous and expensive prospect once the high costs of its pollution are factored in — especially its carbon dioxide global warming emissions.

Velshi then noted that his “clean coal” boosterism has raised questions about his journalistic integrity:

Well you know, South Africa, most of the gasoline it uses is produced from coal. I did something on this the other day and the number of e-mails and comments I got about how I’m shilling for the coal industry . . .

After Beck scoffed, “Oh please,” Velshi then made his most accurate pronouncement about coal to date:

I don’t think it’s clean. It’s not cleaner. It just happens to not be oil.

Glenn Beck — whose response to the threat of climate change is to complain that polar bears eat people — was terribly alarmed by Velshi’s moment of truth:

Now hang on just a second. We can sequester the CO2 now. We can make it cleaner than it has been.

In fact, there is not a single coal plant producing electricity or fuel that sequesters carbon dioxide anywhere on the planet. Although we definitely can make coal cleaner, the coal industry is doing everything it can to ensure that the American taxpayer foots the bill. If Velshi were truly interested in the economics of coal, he would host financial analysts that discuss the economic risks of coal power, not global-warming deniers like Glenn Beck.

Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

George W. Bush — dark green? I kid you not. Here’s what he said in his press conference today:

One thing I think that would be — I know would be very creative policy is if we — is if we would buy food from local farmers as a way to help deal with scarcity, but also as a way to put in place an infrastructure so that nations can be self-sustaining and self-supporting. It’s a proposal I put forth that Congress hasn’t responded to yet, and I sincerely hope they do.

I have no idea what he’s talking about — what proposal did he put forward to Congress about local food? But I’m sure the 100-Mile Diet folks are on the phone with the White House right now.

What’s next for Bush — composting?

Bush had a press conference this morning (see here) to blame Congress for soaring energy and food prices: ”Unfortunately, on many of these issues, all they [Americans' are getting is delay."

What does non-delayer Bush propose. Well, of course, new technology -- what else is new old? (see here and here). Heck, he even said the long-term answer was hydrogen. [Not!]

Oh but he did offer some “short-term” solutions. His anwer to rising electricity prices — nukes:

As electricity prices rise, Congress continues to block provisions needed to increase domestic electricity production by expanding the use of clean, safe nuclear power.

[Pause for laughter.]

Bush seems unaware of the soaring prices for nukes (see “Power plants costs double since 2000 — Efficiency anyone“). I am preparing a major analysis on this topic. Suffice it to say for now that a new nuclear power plant would probably not be able to deliver power substantially below $0.15 a kilowatt hour (not counting transmission and distribution costs)! Nuclear power is about the last form of electricity you would turn to if you care about price — or if you cared about delivering power in a hurry, for that matter.

High oil prices? That’s any easy one. It’s Congress’s fault for not opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, says the President.

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[Bill Becker says that a better stimulus than a rebate check would be vouchers for energy-efficient products.]

This is the week that all patriotic Americans will begin hitting the malls to rescue the U.S. economy — a redo of the Bush Administration’s appeal after 9-11 that we boost the economy by going shopping.

By the end of this week, nearly 8 million taxpayers will find rebates automatically deposited in their bank accounts. By July, the Treasury Department will distribute 130 million more rebates by mail — typically $600 for each individual taxpayer, $1,200 for couples filing jointly and $300 for each child. The talk in Congress is that another round of rebates may follow later this year.

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Someone else who makes Climate Progress and most everybody else into optimists, relatively speaking.

“In the new world order, energy scarcity will dominate our lives — determining when we drive, if we travel, and what we eat” — so says Michael T. Klare, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies.

Klare is in the Kunstler school of energy dystopia, not a view I share (see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia“).

He writes in Salon (here):

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as you’ve known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

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Because this series has turned out to be so popular, I’m going to expand it to cover more issues relevant to The Question of the Century Millenium in the headline. This post will lay out the full series as I now envision it, and the final post, probably sometime next week, will include a revised version of “The Solution,” the 14 wedges, based on recent input I have received

I am definitely open to being lobbied on the final 14 wedges. But only by people who take the trouble to go back to the original Princeton analysis (and my comments on it) and present seriously-calculated wedges that save 1 gigaton of carbon by 2050 and that don’t double count (i.e. don’t save carbon already saved by existing wedges).

That said, don’t waste your time trying to convince me there is more than one wedge of biofuels, nuclear, or coal with CCS. Too many smart people I know think those choices are already way too optimistic. [BTW, I would NOT use much of the biofuels wedge for car and light truck travel. I would use it for things like air travel and long-distance trucking.]

Here is how the series will unfold:

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Previewing his interview with the CEO of Sasol, a South African company that produces coal-based liquid fuels, chief business correspondent Ali Velshi admitted on CNN’s American Morning on Friday that “There are issues with coal,” but minimized its problems:

There are issues with coal. It’s not the cleanest thing in the world. You see the signs for clean coal, 99 percent clean. I’m not 99 percent clean when I get out of the shower. . . I just look clean.

Watch it:

Velshi’s hygiene is his own business, but it’s no secret that coal is a dirty fuel and Velshi’s “99 percent clean” is false:

– The misleading “clean coal” ads from the coal-industry front group ACCCE only claim that “today’s coal-based generating fleet is already 70 percent cleaner based upon regulated emissions per unit of energy produced.”

– The “70 percent” baseline is from 1970 and only refers to air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act, not water and land pollution or greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

– Because coal use has more than tripled since 1970, total pollution from coal plants has increased. In fact, in 2004 the Clean Air Task Force found coal-plant pollution “cuts short the lives of nearly 24,000 people each year.”

Velshi has now used his position to repeatedly promote coal-to-liquids technology and minimize its problems. Perhaps he wasn’t kidding when he said, “I only look clean.”

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The nation’s top climate scientists, James Hansen, has just published a general-audience article, “Tipping Point,” in “2008-2009 State of the Wild,” from Island Press. It is well worth sending to folks who don’t like all the math. His key points:

We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice….

Prior major warmings in Earth’s history, the most recent occurring 55 million years ago . . . resulted in the extinction of half or more of the species then on the planet….

In my view, special interests have undue sway with our governments and have effectively promoted minimalist actions and growth in fossil fuels, rather than making the scale of investments necessary.

You might also like this figure on “cumulative fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions by different countries as a percent of global total”:

China has a long way to go to catch up to this country — let alone the entire industrialized world — on cumulative emissions (though they are obviously trying as hard as they can).

The showdown in Kansas over two proposed coal-fired power plants continues to escalate such that any gamer or game theorist could be entertained for days on end.

After Secretary Rod Bremby rejected the coal plants’ permits, Governor Kathleen Sebelius has twice vetoed legislation attempting to leapfrog Sec. Bremby’s decision. A few weeks ago, the Kansas legislature came one vote short of overriding Sebelius’ veto. And the battle rages on.

The Kansas legislature is likely to try to override again. If they manage, Kansas Lieutenant Governor Mark Parkinson has begun to discuss the Administration’s willingness to take legal action.

The past few months Gov. Sebelius has been clear about her terms of acceptance for legislation. Accompanying her veto, she offered a compromise:

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This weekend, CNN’s senior business correspondent Ali Velshi devoted his “Your Money” show to rising gas prices. In one segment, he introduced an interview with Pat Davies, the CEO of the South African energy company Sasol:

Any way you slice it, prices at the pump are high, even if you stick with the regular gas. One innovative energy company based in South Africa thinks it has a workable solution. For decades it’s been turning coal and natural gas into gasoline.

In reality, Sasol’s coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology is neither “workable” nor a “solution” to high gas prices. In the interview, Davies modestly admitted that there’s a global warming problem, saying “We need to do some more work.” The truth is liquid coal is a climate killer. The energy required to convert coal to liquid fuel doubles the amount of carbon dioxide released compared to petroleum-based gasoline, producing a ton of carbon dioxide for each barrel of liquid fuel. The New York Times shows how liquid coal is the worst of all possible alternative fuels:

Furthermore, Velshi concludes his piece by debunking the claim that CTL is a “workable solution” to the rising cost of gasoline:

This is not about lowering the cost necessarily of gasoline, it is about creating alternatives and particularly coal is something you don’t eat, unlike corn, which makes ethanol. Sasol is looking to open some facilities here in the United States and it’s conducting feasibility studies. So it would take years before the first coal-to-gasoline fuel could possibly enter the U.S. market.

Watch it:

In fact, the only benefits would accrue to the coal industry, who paid CNN millions to sponsor their presidential debates, and companies like Sasol, who paid lobbyists $400,000 last year to promote their technologies.

Extended drought certainly leads to behavior change — and it’s one of the likeliest impacts of human-caused global warming.

Since “Australia today = U.S. southwest by 2050” — let’s go down under to see our future in the making. The BBC News has a good article on “The children at Wattle Park primary school [who] have only ever known drought” [see pretty but parched kids in picture on right].

What is life like for these kids?

When they wake up they use timers to take two minute showers, and collect the water in buckets so it can be re-used in the garden.

At school they have “scarecrow monitors” whose job it is to oversee the filling of more buckets from under the drinking taps to water the school vegetable patch.

Their teacher, Randall Simons, says every drop is now watched carefully, at school and at home.

Sounds like something out of Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. The Aussie kids have lived through ten years of drought, learning:

“Water is precious and we’ve got to realise that water’s not always there. You need to save it,” says Sonia, a pupil at Wattle Park Primary School in Melbourne.

This restriction would be the real toughie for Americans:

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The good news: The earth’s carbon cycle has natural negative feedbacks that reverse natural surges in carbon dioxide.

The bad news: We are spewing CO2 into the atmosphere 14,000 times faster than nature has over the past 600,000 years, far too quickly for those feedbacks to respond.

This comes from “Close mass balance of long-term carbon fluxes from ice-core CO2 and ocean chemistry records,” in Nature Geosciences (subs. reqd, news article here) by Zeebe and Caldeira. Put another way:

“These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change … that we’re going to see in the next several hundred years,” Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. “Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium.“

Zeebe notes that, “the average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume.” Humans have run up CO2 levels 100 ppm over the last two centuries!

In the ancient past, excess carbon dioxide came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed.

This antique excess carbon dioxide — a powerful greenhouse gas — was removed from the atmosphere through the weathering of mountains, which take in the chemical….

The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess carbon dioxide, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.

See, the skeptics were right: The planet is self-healing. You go, deniers [no, seriously, please, just go]! So my great-great-great-great — [insert 10,000 "greats" here] — great-great-great grand-kid will be doing just fine, thank you very much!

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Food riots? Rationing? Governments overthrown?

… a series of poor harvests in the area led to soaring bread prices, provoking food riots…. A worker’s daily bread took 97% of his income…. With bread prices at record levels, hungry mobs attacked the gates … where customs collected taxes on incoming grain convoys. They raided every possible source of arms, ending up with capturing the Bastille prison.

Oh, sorry, that was 1789. No worries, then. Not like that lead to a violent revolution or anything.

Anyway, the Washington Post has a terrific front-page article, “The New Economics of Hunger: A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world’s poor suffer most,” which is the first in a series.

No, national and global mandates for biofuels (= bad energy policy) aren’t the only reason for this emerging catastrophe. Obviously, high oil prices (= bad energy policy) play a role. And then there are those poor harvests in places like Australia due to climate change (= bad energy policy). OK — the last one was kind of a stretch, given that the amount of climate change to date was probably all but inevitable. But my point is that if we don’t drastically reverse our self-destructive energy policies soon, things are going to get much worse….

We have mandates for far more biofuels (see “The Fuel on the Hill — The Corn Supremacy), and we are going to see much higher energy prices (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“) and much worse global drought and desertification (see The Century of Drought“).

What they heck are people supposed to eat then — Biofuels? Apparently that’s what politicians in this country and Europe think. Heck, in a Friday article, “IEA warns against retreat on biofuels,” the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, ironically enough, has this to stay:

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Can’t say I thought there could or should be a climate bill this year (See, “Don’t hold your breath on Lieberman-Warner passing in 2008.”) But what’s going on in that House probably seals the non-deal. E&E Daily (subs. req’d) has the story:

A critical House committee tasked with crafting global warming legislation appears to be stuck in a partisan struggle to find a unified strategy for moving forward.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chairman of the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, complained yesterday that the committee’s GOP leadership won’t allow rank-and-file Republicans to enter negotiations on a mandatory cap-and-trade bill. Without Republicans, Boucher said he doubts there will be legislation.

“We cannot and we should not try to pass a bill through the committee and through the House that is a purely partisan bill,” Boucher said in an interview. “That would be bad policy and I do not think it’d be politically successful either. So unless the Republicans are prepared to cooperate with us, it’s difficult to see what the next step is.”

Hmm. I guess Boucher isn’t a big climate bill fan, if he’s tying its fate to what conservatives want. As if conservatives ever cared what progressives thought when they were running the House. The rest of the story continues:

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[I am retroactively inserting this entry in the series for the sake of completeness. Much of the content has been previously posted.]

What happens if we fail to take the following actions to reverse emissions trends starting in 2009?

1. Start a cap-and-trade system that sets a serious price for CO2.
2. Launch most of the 14 to 16 major mitigation strategies (wedges) described here.
3. Begin a global effort to ban new coal plants that do not capture and store their carbon, an effort that quickly brings in China and other developing countries.

Failing to do that, we are headed to 800 to 1000 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The idea of stabilizing at, say, 550 or 650 ppm, widely held a decade ago, is becoming increasingly implausible given the likelihood that major carbon cycle feedbacks would go into overdrive, swiftly taking the planet to 800 ppm or more. In particular, the top 11 feet of the tundra would probably not survive 550 ppm (a point I will be blogging about soon) and two other key carbon sinks — land-based vegetation and the oceans — already appear to be saturating. That said, even if stabilizing at 550 ppm were possible, it would probably bring catastrophic impacts and in any case requires implementing some 10 wedges starting now.

At 800 to 1000 ppm, the world faces multiple miseries, including:

1. Sea level rise of 80 feet to 250 feet at a rate of 6 inches a decade (or more).
2. Desertification of one third the planet and drought over half the planet, plus the loss of all inland glaciers.
3. More than 70% of all species going extinct, plus extreme ocean acidification.

LIVING/SUFFERING IN A 1000 PPM WORLD

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