Back in November, the EPA Environmental Appeals Board voted to stop new coal plants cold (see “No new coal plants without “Best Available Control Technology” for CO2“).

But as the NYT reported Friday, “Officials weighing federal applications by utilities to build new coal-fired power plants cannot consider their greenhouse gas output, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency ruled late Thursday.” [Note to self: Keep repeating, "January 20, January 20, January 20."]

Now E&ENews PM (subs. req’d) reports,

The chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee asked the Justice Department to force U.S. EPA to withdraw a “blatantly illegal memo” by its administrator saying the agency need not consider greenhouse gas emissions when permitting new coal-fired power plants.

And people say I’m a (technology) optimist! Boxer’s letter is here. The article continues:

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John Tierney, a libertarian columnist whose work graces the New York Times science pages, slammed President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of John Holdren as chief science adviser this weekend. Tierney attacks Holdren for being “spectacularly wrong about a major issue in [his] field of expertise,” for having “resistance to dissenting views,” and for “his tendency to conflate the science of climate change with prescriptions to cut greenhouse emissions.” Tierney quotes at length from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Reason Foundation, both right-wing libertarian think tanks.

Tierney takes special umbrage at Holdren’s critique of Bjorn Lomborg’s 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, even though it’s a hodge-podge of ideological pseudo-science and dishonest rhetorical fallacies. Actually, Tierney’s defense makes sense, because John Tierney’s own stock in trade is a hodge-podge of ideological pseudo-science and dishonest rhetorical fallacies.

Tierney does appear to go off the deep end with this bizarre paragraph:

Even if most climate scientists agree on the anthropogenic causes of global warming, that doesn’t imply that the best way to deal with the problem is through drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions. There are other ways to cope, and there’s no “scientific consensus” on which path looks best.

It’s not a complex fact that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere won’t stabilize until we stop adding new emissions. Natural processes to sequester atmospheric CO2 in the deep ocean and rocks take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. If the climate is to stabilize at any level in the meantime, net anthropogenic emissions will have to approach zero — requiring “drastic cuts.” Considering that the climate system is rapidly destabilizing, those drastic cuts are going to have to happen fast.

To be fair to Tierney, this assessment is failing to consider “other ways to cope,” which fall into three categories:

1. Magic technology to suck up emissions
2. Magic technology to block out the sun
3. A medium-scale nuclear war

(By “magic” I mean “undeveloped, unresearched, untested, and needed to be deployed on a global scale.”) Perhaps Tierney is arguing that the kind of science advice Obama truly needs is plans for seeding the ocean with vast amounts of iron, a fleet of orbital mirrors or an Arctic Christo-wrap to reflect insolation, or heightening tensions in Kashmir.

For now, I’d rather stick with cutting energy waste, shifting away from fossil fuels, and promoting reforestation and sustainable agriculture. Not quite the stuff one reads about in science-fiction novels or Gregg Easterbrook columns, but it’s a good deal less stupid.

A Politico story today begins:

A major coal industry group has spent an estimated $45 million on an ongoing advertising campaign promoting the clean energy potential of coal, but its members are spending relatively little on the research that would make the technology a viable solution, a report by the Center for American Progress [CAP] finds.

View details of investment in carbon capture and storage by companies backing clean coal front group.

The only hope for the coal industry (at least in a world that is itself not suicidal) is a very well-funded effort to demonstrate and deploy carbon capture and storage. This will take at least 10-years from the time the industry (and government) gets serious — and probably much longer (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“). That was true ten years ago when the coal industry — and car companies — lobbied against Kyoto saying they needed time to develop new technology. But those complaints turned out to just be an excuse for inaction, as many warned.

Detroit suicidally squandered that time, with the support of their conservative allies (see “The car companies bailed out on us“). The equally self-destructive behavior of the coal companies were also enabled by conservatives (see “In seeming flipflop, Bush drops mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project“).

Now CAP has a new report that details just how unseriously the industry has taken the pursuit of its only hope for long-term survival:

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Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

America’s coal industry is blowing smoke on the American public, misleadingly hyping its commitment to cleaning up its act. A series of feel-good ads this year showcased a variety of people straight from central casting saying “I believe in…Clean Coal. America’s Power.” These ads were sponsored by the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), an industry group comprised of 48 coal and utility companies. ACCCE spent at least $45 million on advertising this year to convince Americans that coal is a clean panacea to the world’s problems.

Despite the ads’ claims, an analysis by the Center of American Progress determined that ACCCE’s companies spend relatively few dollars conducting research on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the experimental but promising technology that would allow power plants to capture 85 percent or more of their carbon dioxide emissions and permanently store them underground in geological formations. CAP’s analysis found that the 48 ACCCE companies made a combined profit of $57 billion in 2007 while investing over several years only $3.5 billion in CCS research.

ACCCE companies combined made $17 in 2007 profits for every $1 invested in CCS research over several years. This is a very generous estimate, because the analysis includes several projects that haven’t yet begun. Nonetheless, the research funding over a number of years is dwarfed by the profits for a single year. The 18 CCS projects by ACCCE companies have a lifetime cost of $5.7 billion, or one-tenth of the ACCCE companies’ profits in 2007 alone. Of this total cost, the ACCCE companies would eventually spend $3.5 billion on these projects, based on our analysis of publicly available data. The Department of Energy would provide an additional $1.9 billion. [CAP, 12/22/08]

With such relatively small investments in CCS research, it’s no wonder that it may take many years to develop and commercialize the technology. The lack of investment reinforces the notion that the real purpose of the clean coal campaign is to postpone requirements to reduce emissions. Read more

Roger Pielke, Jr. is usually very hard to pin down. But at least it is now plain for everyone to see that his climate policies are no different from Bjorn Lomborg’s, or George Bush’s for that matter (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”). Following Pielke’s “specific policies” would inevitably result in the self-destruction of humanity as we know it. So something useful has come out of our back-and-forth.

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Scientists know the Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass “100 years ahead of schedule” (see “AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003” and “Antarctic ice sheet hits the fan“).

Now, as Nature‘s climate blog reports, two studies presented last week at the AGU meeting document what should not be a surprise, but still is. New research suggests “the entire Antarctic continent may have warmed significantly over the past 50 years“:

The study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle and soon to be published in Nature, calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century.

… they found warming over the entire Antarctic continent for the period 1957-2006. Restricting their analysis to 1969 to 2000, a period for which other studies have found a net cooling trend, Steig’s study found slight cooling in east Antarctica, but net warming over west Antarctica.

How did they perform the analysis of the harshest, most remote climate on the planet?

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David Roberts reprints so many of my posts, I though I’d return the favor with one of his. I will get around to writing a long piece on this subject, but the recent piece in the Washington Post, “For Obama Cabinet, A Team of Moderates” cried out for an immediate response.

Steven Chu is a progressive environmentalist because he’s a good scientist

I’ve been reading the discussion sparked by Chris Hayes’ latest piece in The Nation — “The Pragmatist,” about Obama’s much-discussed pragmatism — with great interest. Pragmatism is a subject dear to my heart and something I studied in grad school, though the kind you study there and what goes by the name in political discussion bear little resemblance. On that note, Hayes is absolutely on point:

… pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions. It demands a skepticism not just toward the certainties of ideologues and dogmatism but also of elite consensus and the status quo. This is a definition of pragmatism that is in almost every way the opposite of its invocation among those in the establishment. For them, pragmatism means accepting the institutional forces that severely limit innovation and boldness; it means listening to the counsel of the Wise Men; it means not rocking the boat.

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