Barack Obama has chosen cleantech and climate superstar Bill Richardson to be his Secretary of Commerce. That means “the voice of business in government” will be, for the first time in U.S. history, someone who is a champion of clean energy.

As a bonus, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be overseen by a champion of climate science. I briefly worked with Richardson at the department and can certainly attest that he gets it. Grist has his green credentials here.

I trust all those journalists and bloggers who wasted devoted time dissing the appointment of Gen. James Jones as National Security Advisor — even though NSA plays no significant role whatsoever in domestic energy or climate policy (see “Stuff I learned at DOE, Part 1: SOS trumps NSA (Hillary Clinton trumps Gen. Jones)” — will devote equal time to praising the appointment of Richardson to a post that is far more crucial to advocates of climate action.

Indeed, Richardson’s appointment is doubly important because it means a Cabinet position that is typically filled by Chamber of Commerce type (i.e. a naysayer on serious energy and climate action) is instead held by an advocate for real change. It is yet another clear sign that Obama meant it when he said, “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

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The Charleston (SC) Daily Paper’s Stratton Lawrence has penned a cover article on coal industry propaganda and reality with the appropriate title, The Dirty Truth. He demolishes the myth of “clean coal” propagated by front groups like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE):

Unfortunately, to call today’s coal “clean” requires a handful of mind-erasing psycho-somethings and a magic carpet ride to Fairyland. It’s true — the potential to burn coal far cleaner than in decades past is now here. Scrubbers, injectors, activators, and a host of other doohickeys and thingamabobs can be installed in smokestacks to trap and remove mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other toxins before they muck up the air we breathe. But the best devices are expensive and only in use at a few power plants across the country.

Lawrence also notes the problem that captured pollutants still need to be disposed of, often by “storing it in collecting ponds that can end up polluting rivers and groundwater. And that doesn’t even take into account the horrible effect that strip-mining has had on southern Appalachia, or the ecological impact of transporting mountains of coal around the nation.”

From the article also comes this excellent diagram:

The text of the diagram: Read more

OK, this isn’t entirely news to CP readers (see here). But the Energy Information Administration’s just released final report covers pretty much everything a climate junkie could possibly want to know about U.S. GHG emissions in 2007. The bottom line:

Total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2007 were 1.4 percent above the 2006 total…. An increase in the carbon intensity of electricity generation … contributed to higher energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2007.

President Bush immediately released a statement:

We are effectively contributing to the problem of global climate change through flawed energy policy, obstructionist domestic and international climate policy, and general disinformation.

Okay, he didn’t release that statement, but he should have, given that after EIA revealed the temporary dip in 2006, he claimed:

We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment.

Bush is so funny it hurts.

As an important aside, the main reason emissions growth haven’t been even faster under Bush is that he’s had two economic slowdowns, 9/11 (which severely depressed air travel), record fossil fuel prices for much of his term, and a rapidly growing trade deficit with China. Had we manufactured in this country everything we actually consumed over the past seven years, the rate of growth of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would have been about 50% higher.

That is quite a record of economic/energy failure masquerading as an emissions reduction strategy [see "Give Bush some (perverse) credit for emissions drop"]. For most of last year we had to put up with nonsense from delayers about Bush’s successful climate policy compared to the rest of the world. In September 2007, the President actually said

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Gregg Easterbrook, a writer employed as a science expert by a prominent Washington think tank, evidently doesn’t understand basic science. Easterbrook, a prolific writer and editor for The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Monthy, and NFL.com, is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, whose mission is to “conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations” for general prosperity and democracy. Easterbrook’s Brookings profile claims expertise in a remarkable swath of knowledge — environmental policy, global warming, science, space policy, “well-being” research, Christian theology, and professional sports — evidently based on his work as a journalist after receiving degrees in political science and journalism.

Dr. Joseph Romm, a Center for American Progress Senior Fellow, has well documented that Easterbrook knows nothing about global warming and environmental policy, as have other bloggers. More simply, Easterbrook knows nothing about science. To wit, in his weekly Tuesday Morning Quarterback sports column, Easterbrook digressed into other matters of his purported expertise, science and space policy:

A few columns ago, I speculated that even if there is never any way to exceed or circumvent the light-speed barrier, relatively nearby planets might still fight by hurling nuclear bombs at each other at 99 percent of light speed — with existing technology, something moving that fast wouldn’t even be seen until nearly here. Let’s hope any world advanced enough to build near-light-speed stardrive will also have become wise enough to forswear war. But based on the only model we know, human society, technology and wisdom do not go hand in hand. Anyway, John Duezabou of Helena, Mont., adds this creepy postscript: “A bellicose or paranoid extra-solar civilization that could accelerate an object to 99 percent of light speed wouldn’t need to launch bombs at us. They could shoot anything with devastating results, because the kinetic energy of a moving object is half its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity, or KE = 1/2 mv². Thus, one pound of anything — a pint of vanilla ice cream, for instance — accelerated to 99 percent of light speed has an energy of about 4.8 megatons, roughly the blast yield of the largest hydrogen bombs.” A moderate-sized object, say a small asteroid, if accelerated to 99 percent of light speed, could conceivably shatter the Earth.

Ignoring many of the obvious problems with Easterbrook’s thought experiment, the science here is simply wrong. The kinetic energy of a moving object is actually m₀c²(1/(1-v²/c²)^1/2 – 1) (where m₀ is the rest mass, v the velocity, and c the speed of light) which the Newtonian formulation closely approximates only for non-relativistic speeds. A one-pound mass accelerated to 99 percent of light speed actually has a kinetic energy of about 68 58 megatons of TNT, greater than the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated.

This isn’t grad-school level physics — this element of relativistic mechanics is taught in high schools across the nation and is of course readily available online.

This kind of scientific illiteracy is of no great shakes for a sports columnist, and science fictional scenarios are an excellent learning tool for non-scientists. But under no circumstances should anyone who writes this be considered a science expert, let alone by one of the most august think tanks in the nation. Or, as the Poor Man Institute bloggers write, “Dear God make it stop.”

(H/T Eschaton.)

Like landfills, oil sands, and “occasional irregularity,” the term Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is in the euphemism Hall of Fame. But once a rip-offset, always a rip-offset. Reuters reports:

The U.N. climate change body has suspended one of the largest auditors of clean energy projects under Kyoto Protocol, a move highlighting problems long aired by critics of the climate pact’s greenhouse gas trading scheme.

Norway’s DNV had their accreditation as project auditors suspended late last week for five “non-conformities” relating to its practices, the U.N. said after performing a spot check of the company’s operations in early November.

Speaking of euphemisms, if George Carlin were still alive I’m sure he’d add “non-conformities” to his famous list. DNV wasn’t fraudulent or incompetent. No. It’s just a misunderstood nonconformist. Fortunately, DNV isn’t a big player or central to the entire CDM process.

DNV is a major player in the $13 billion CDM market, having validated close to half of the projects registered by the U.N.

D’oh. Well, at least the non-conformities weren’t in areas central to CDM credibility, like, say project auditing and verification would be.

DNV said the non-conformities related to project auditing and verification procedures.

Never mind.

Seriously folks, let’s remember that the West got suckered into giving China some $6 billion to destroy greenhouse gas refrigerants that probably cost Chinese companies $100 million to capture and destroy (for more details, see “Kyoto’s Great Carbon Offset Swindle“). Let’s remember that a major 2008 analysis from Stanford found

… “between a third and two thirds” of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) — set up under the Kyoto treaty to encourage emissions reductions in developing nations — do not represent actual emission cuts.

Let’s remember that

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MSNBC has done a nice story on the Green Recovery event:

Carol Browner, head of the Obama-Biden transition’s energy and environment team, opened the doors to the public yesterday, leading a panel discussion on the convergence of energy, the environment and the economy. The discussion entitled “Green Recovery” was held at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and featured speakers Gov. Ed Rendell (D- PA), and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

VIDEO: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman speaks at the Center for American Progress.

Broadcast live online, the event gave a glimpse into the types of ideas and discussion on energy President-elect Obama promised would take place in his administration. Browner acted more as a moderator, fervently taking notes as Rendell and Friedman hashed out their perspectives. Friedman, who wrote a book on the subject, carried the audience into the “Hot, Flat and Crowded” world.

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