For any first time visitors here, this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress.  Tom Friedman described me in a 2008 column as

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

In June 2010, Time magazine names Climate Progress one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010″³ — and one of the “top five blogs Time writers read daily.” U.S. News & World Report featured me in their April 2009 issue as one of five “key players” who are “Driving Public Policy in Washington,” writing:

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“This record’s going LEED platinum.”

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change designed the “Greenhouse Gamble” roulette wheels to depict the “probability of potential global warming over the next hundred years,” based on the latest scientific research. They compared the gamble of warming with and without an international agreement to reduce emissions through programs like the cap and trade system proposed by President Obama. Today, they released updated roulette wheels, reflecting how much worse the gamble has gotten:

The ‘No Policy’ Gamble (2002 v. 2009)
2002	2009
These wheels assume a scenario in which “no policy” action is taken to try to curb the global emissions of greenhouse gases. In the previous wheel the likelihood of exceeding 5°C was about 4%, but in the new wheels that likelihood is 57%. MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, 2009.

The ‘Policy Action’ Gamble (2002 v. 2009)
2002	2009
If greenhouse gas emissions are controlled to relatively low levels then the Earth systems feedbacks are much lower, but there is no longer any possibility of less than 1°C warming. MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, 2009.

The “policy” scenario reflects the establishment of mandatory policies to reduce emissions, such as building standards and cap and trade systems, that limit total carbon dioxide concentrations to 550 parts per million. However, as climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf recently explained, even limiting warming to two degrees Centigrade cannot be considered safe, which is why there is a growing demand for policies that limit CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm.

The new roulette wheels were initially released in February 2009, with a reset color scale that made a direct comparison between the old and new scenarios difficult. The Wonk Room thanks the Global Change Program for taking our suggestion to update the wheels.

Cathy Zoi, CEO of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) under Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Zoi has a unique combination of expertise in clean energy and high level federal government experience — she was Chief of Staff in the Clinton White House Office on Environmental Policy, managing the staff working on environmental and energy issues (full bio here, recent writing below). Since I have known Zoi for nearly 2 decades and since in 1997 I held the job she is now nominated for, I can personally attest she will be able to hit the ground running in the crucial job of overseeing the vast majority of the development and deployment of plausible climate solutions technology.

What does EERE do? You could spend hours on their website, here, exploring everything they are into. Of the 12 to 14 most plausible wedges the world needs to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm — the full global warming solution — EERE is the principal federal agency for working with businesses to develop and deploy the technology for 11 of them!

The stimulus and the 2009 budget dramatically increases — more than doubles — EERE funding for technology development and deployment. Zoi’s most important job is deployment, deployment, deployment. And again she is a uniquely qualified to get clean energy into the marketplace. Zoi was a manager at the US Environmental Protection Agency where “she pioneered the Energy Star Program,” which was the pioneering energy efficiency deployment program launched in the early 1990s.

So we know Zoi gets energy efficiency. Here’s what she wrote last year about “Embracing the Challenge to Repower America“:

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