The financial giant JP Morgan Chase announced on Earth Day that it intends to make dramatic reductions in its global warming emissions:

JPMorgan Chase says that by increasing energy efficiencies in its facilities worldwide, purchasing energy from renewable sources, and educating employees on energy conservation, the firm aims to cut its global emissions 20 percent by 2012 using 2005 baseline. In addition, the firm will offset 100 percent of all employee air travel.

This is another step in a remarkable turnaround for the fourth largest company in the world. Four years ago, JP Morgan was the “largest US bank without a comprehensive environmental policy.” Under pressure from environmental activist groups such as the Rainforest Action Network, JP Morgan has since established an Office of Environmental Affairs, Environmental Markets Group, and the JPMorgan Environmental Index to integrate climate change and other environmental concerns into its decisionmaking.

Changing its internal practices to be climate-friendly is a significant milestone for JP Morgan Chase. However, JP Morgan’s primary climate impact is where its money goes — the “continued financing of greenhouse gas intensive activities and projects” like new coal fired power plants. The JP Morgan Chase fortune is built on financing the U.S. Industrial Revolution, which transformed this nation into an economic superpower but also the most profligate greenhouse-gas polluter in the world. J.P. Morgan’s bank financed the rise of the U.S. electricity, rail, and steel industries, and the Rockfellers used the Chase bank to finance the great Standard Oil monopoly. JP Morgan Chase’s $1.5 trillion in assets represents over a century of profits gained from not having to pay the true costs of global warming pollution — costs that now threaten the entire planet.

JP Morgan — with Citi, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America — has begun taking steps to recognize those costs in future investments. In February, the banks established The Carbon Principles — which state that “carbon risks” should be assessed when financing electric power projects. The question now is whether they will accurately assess those risks.

[Warning: This post has lots of numbers in it and isn't short. But I hope this will be a "Eureka! I finally get it" post for those who read it to the end, as I'm going to unlock the final mystery of the wedges.]

I’d like to thank (!) Roger Pielke for his post, “Joe Romm’s Fuzzy Math.” Not because his analysis is correct — it isn’t. Not because of the tone — he says my climate solution is “fantastically delusional,” which better not be the case or our children and the next 50 generations are screwed. No, I’m thanking him because explaining why he isn’t correct will illuminate two key points in the climate solutions debate:

1. Princeton’s Socolow and Pacala make an important but surprising assumption in their wedges analysis (here) that few people realize. Anyone who wants to come up with their own 14 wedges (as opposed to accepting my solution laid out in Part 2), must understand what they did.
2. When you understand what Princeton did, then you’ll understand why Pielke’s critique is fundamentally wrong, and then I think you can understand at a more intuitive level why his Nature article is wrong, too.

THE WEDGES’ FUZZY MATH

Let’s start with what looks to be a major analytical mistake in the Princeton analysis. Recall that one wedge is a climate strategy that ultimately saves 1 billion tons of carbon a year or 1 GtC/year.

If you look at the original paper (here), they identify a typical wedge (#9 on their list) as “Nuclear power for coal power.” That “would require 700 GW of nuclear power with the same 90% capacity factor assumed for the coal plants” [which means the plant delivers power 90% of the time, or 8760 hours/yr x 0.9 = ~7900 hours/yr.]

But wait, you say, everybody knows a typical coal plant has a carbon intensity of 290 kilograms per Megawatt-hour. Or at least everyone who reads page 9 of the online Supplemental material (available here with subscription), much of which is now on their website, wedge by wedge, here. As they explain in the “efficient baseload coal plant” wedge (here), citing the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, 2002:

Year 2000 carbon in and electricity out for coal-based power plants were, respectively, 1712 MtC/y and 5989 TWh/y, resulting in a carbon intensity of 290 gC/kWh.

I have always preferred to use tons per MW-hr, so 290 gC/kWh = 290 kgC/MWh = 0.32 tC/MWh.

[For those who prefer CO2, that is ~1.2 tons/MWh for a typical coal plant -- which, by the way, is a handy number to keep in your head for back-of-the-envelope calculations.]

But wait. If the 700 GW (= 700,000 MW) of nukes are replacing 700,000 MW of coal running 7900 hours a year and spewing out 0.32 tons of carbon per MWh, then this wedge yields 700,000 MW x 7900 hrs x 0.32 tC/MWh = 1.77 billion tons of carbon.

Oops. Isn’t a wedge 1 billion tons of carbon? This would seem to be a big mistake. Ah, but you didn’t read the fine print:

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Okay, I didn’t make their Top 50 Eco Blogs post, but in honour of Earth Day, they created “an extra helping of eco blogs — this time compiled from your suggestions on Green Central.” So thank all of you who wrote in for me!

The new list is here. Climate Progress is under “The big picture”:

Climate Progress – Former energy advisor to the Clinton administration Joseph Romm’s blog; tool up on insider eco knowledge.

Here are the other nine:

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Our guest blogger is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

Jim Rogers, President and CEO of Duke Energy, has become one of the most prominent industry voices calling for the regulation of global warming pollution from power plants and other sectors of the economy. Not only does Rogers advocate a cap-and-trade system, like that adopted in Europe, but he also proposes a “surcharge” on all electricity use to fund low carbon technology research and development.

However, as one of the largest producers of global warming pollution, Rogers’ policy prescriptions warrant special scrutiny. In making his case for action, Rogers includes a very important caveat: regulate greenhouse gases, but regulate in a way that ensures that the American taxpayer foots the bill for cleaning up the company’s aging and high-emitting power plants. In 2007, Duke’s coal-heavy fleet released 108,500,000 tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere, the equivalent of about 18 million cars. This climate two-step is not new for Rogers:

Rogers’s sleight-of-hand lies in his proposal for distributing the emissions permits (allowances) under a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program. According to Rogers, Congress should stick to the grandfathering approach that was used more than two decades ago when it established the Acid Rain program, by which he means giving allowances away for free to companies based on their proportional share of historic CO₂ emissions.

What he neglects to mention is that Duke Energy would receive an allocation valued at more than $2.0 billion annually (equivalent to 10% of the North Carolina state budget), which the company’s unregulated generating assets will use to drive up company profits while at the same time raising consumer electricity costs — precisely the issue that lead to criticism, and ultimately modification, of the European Union’s cap-and-trade system.

Rogers argues that cap-and-trade based regulation is “not about punishing people for making decisions 40 years ago.” However, nor should it be about rewarding the biggest polluters and preserving the status quo. If companies want free allowances, they should earn them by investing in renewable energy technologies, carbon capture and storage technology, and energy efficiency.

Read more here.

[Another post by Ken Levenson.]

UPDATE: Links should be fixed — very weird glitch!

If you’ve recovered from your hangover you may recall that the President made a “major” speech on global warming last week. While it was frighteningly predictable in content or lack thereof, some of the reactions were eye opening. Let’s start with

The Bush Administration itself: Because if anyone can understand what the President is saying, they can:

Bush’s chief adviser on climate change, Jim Connaughton, defended the U.S. position. “It was a speech directed at domestic audiences,” he said of the president’s address. Bush’s aides said it was aimed at heading off a “train wreck” of varying emissions legislation in the U.S. Congress.

For a domestic audience? While the Paris conference he set up is underway? The Administration cares even less about international opinion than they do that of Americans. Perhaps obvious but you’d think with American’s approval at below 30% he’d try to find refuge somewhere other than the Saudi Royal Family.

And what’s this about heading off a legislative train wreck? Of course there is the Lieberman-Warner Bill – named for the well known lefties John Warner Republican of Virginia and Joseph Lieberman Independent of Connecticut – seeking more than a 50% cut in US GHG emissions by 2050. Is there another climate/energy bill seriously contending for passage? Where’s the potential train wreck? Oh, right Bush doesn’t want ANY meaningful legislation. Another Bush alternate reality foisted upon us. A potential “first step” transfigured into train wreck (read temper tantrum)- these guys have no shame. Because if you don’t take a first step there can be no second step … brilliant.

New York Times Hydra starting with the Editorial Page: Nada. Really, for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days. Then on the 6th day, Earth Day, the editorial page weighed in, concluding:

It is hard to find anything redeeming in this speech, though it contains two obvious truths: This president has no intention of addressing climate change. The next president will have no choice but to do better.

We waited six days for this? “DO BETTER.”!? “Do better” is a suicide pact. I wonder if anyone’s told them the planet’s on fire? Andrew, when you’re done blogging on the plankton please yell upstairs to the editorial desk – would ya? If they don’t know what the heck is going on maybe it’s not surprising the public isn’t so informed either.

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Robert M. Sussman of the Center for American Progress takes on the latest White House red herring:

As the Senate prepares to consider global warming legislation in early June, a new diversionary tactic has emerged from the White House–a steady drumbeat of warnings that a regulatory train wreck is on the horizon because courts are interpreting existing environmental laws to apply to climate change. Stated in increasingly shrill tones, the implication is that Congress has the wrong priorities because it is focused on passing a new law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rather than on changing existing laws so they can’t (yes, can’t) be used to address global warming.

You can read the whole article here, but I will reprint it below because I think this is an important issue. Remember, depending on how the presidential election turns out, we could end up in a few years with conservative court majority that reinterpret existing laws and make it much more complicated to write legislation that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (see here). The Sussman article continues:

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