Many readers have expressed interest in learning more about the water consumption of concentrating solar power and how measures to reduce it might impact system efficiency and cost.  After my recent CSP post, “World’s largest solar power plants with thermal storage to be built in Arizona,” Michael Hogan wrote in the comments (here) about a low-water-consuming cooling system he had experience with.  I asked Hogan, a long-time power industry executive and currently the Power Programme Director for the European Climate Foundation (bio here), to write a longer piece for Climate Progress.  Here is what he put together, with links and figures (click to enlarge).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  If concentrating solar power (“CSP”) is a core climate solution, indirect dry cooling systems (also known as “Heller” systems) will be a crucial enabling technology, since large-scale CSP will be located in desert regions. US power companies have long favored direct dry cooling systems for fossil plants, probably because of the visual impact of Heller systems.  But Heller systems have long experience in certain regions and will probably play an important role in the success of large-scale CSP.  This is due to their higher efficiency, smaller footprints, quieter operation, lower maintenance, higher availability, and more flexible site layout.  Heller systems can reduce water consumption in a CSP plant by 97% with minimal performance impact.  The height of the cooling towers should be less of an issue in remote desert locations, especially since the central tower in power tower facilities will be of comparable height.

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Fred Hiatt, the opinion page editor of the Washington Post, is sticking to his guns in defense of George Will’s egregiously mendacious global warming columns. In an online chat today, Hiatt repeated his claim that Will’s lies were just “inferences,” and lashed out at Will’s critics:

Boston: This doesn’t relate to Obama but would you care to address the whole George Will global warming column controversy? Is there any concern that lax standards for accuracy hurts the prestige of The Post opinion page more generally?

Fred Hiatt: Happy to, because we don’t have lax standards for accuracy. He addressed the factual challenges to his column in detail in a later column. In general we do careful fact checking. What people have mostly objected to is not that his data are wrong but that he draws wrong inferences. I would think folks would be eager to engage in the debate, given how sure they are of their case, rather than trying to shut him down.

When faced with an opportunity to restore the Washington Post’s besmirched reputation, Hiatt instead slung mud. The reality is that Hiatt does have “lax standards for accuracy,” and Will’s errors were both errors of fact and of “inference.” Will, of course, did not address “the factual challenges to his column in detail in a later column” — he added new errors. It’s bizarre that Hiatt is worried for Will’s ability to reach an audience — the man is one of the most widely syndicated columnists in one of the most prominent newspapers in the land, with a weekly appearance on national television. From the beginning, critics have been calling on the Washington Post to run a correction — something that, to this day, Hiatt refuses to do.

(HT: Media Matters)

One of the main purposes of this blog is to save you time.  As the Washington Post labels its TV columns on American Idol, “We watch … so you don’t have to.”

Nature has devoted much of its April 30 issue to “The Coming Climate Crunch” (subs. req’d).  Sadly, after sitting through pretty much the whole thing, I can’t actually recommend anybody else see buy it. Any regular reader of this blog will learn very little new from the dozen or so articles — and the issue fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:

1. A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.
2. A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.

What is particularly embarrassing for Nature, whose coverage of this issue has been second to none, is that they don’t even bother with #2 — even though they have a full article devoted to geo-engineering (a puff piece by someone who “now participates in scientific research on the topic”), another full article on adaptation, and yet another full article just on capturing CO2 from the air, which even one of its major proponents is quoted as saying is “the most expensive climate-mitigation technology.”  What were the editors thinking?

The most useful thing in the entire issue is part of one of the figures in the article “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C” — which I’ve extracted and added to my must-have Powerpoint collection:

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Geo-engineering remains at best a secondary climate strategy if you first do really aggressive CO2 reductions and keep concentrations below 450 ppm.  For now, as Obama’s science advisor put it, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.”

At worst, geo-engineering is an utterly false hope that will undercut efforts to achieve the kind of emissions reductions needed for it to have any value.  That, of course, is why conservatives love it, which is the subject of the guest post today by Alex Steffen, Executive Editor, Worldchanging.com (first posted it here).

Here is Steffen’s article.  He notes, “This is a draft essay, and obviously still rough in patches. I’d appreciate feedback!

The Idea of Geoengineering is Being Used Dishonestly

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Another busy day in the life of Henry Waxman

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman had a busy day yesterday hearing the many different concerns and sticking points surrounding his draft climate change bill.

In the morning, the California Democrat and his top lieutenant, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), sat down with more than a dozen members of the House Ways and Means Committee, including Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), to talk about the tricky turf lines that the two powerful congressional panels share when it comes to drafting cap-and-trade legislation.

Just after lunch, Waxman switched to one-on-one sessions with several of the moderate committee Democrats who have gone public with their concerns about his proposal.

And then turning his attention beyond U.S. borders, Waxman met with China’s top climate diplomat, Xie Zhenhua, the vice chairman of National Development and Reform Commission, and about eight other Chinese officials in town for U.S.-led global warming talks.

The story continues with an extended discussion of Waxman’s efforts to craft a majority for his energy and climate legislation:

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Our guest bloggers are Andrew Light and Nina Hachigian, Senior Fellows at the Center for American Progress.

Su Wei, China’s chief climate change negotiator.

This week the Obama administration convened a meeting of 17 of the world’s major economies in a forum on global warming outside of the ongoing U.N. climate change process. Though the history of this Major Economies Forum is somewhat tainted, it may well provide a useful opportunity to engage China on global warming, on its way to surpass the United States as the world’s number one carbon emitter. Recent statements by top Chinese officials evince a new openness to adopting targets to reduce the rate of growth in carbon emissions:

Su Wei, a leading figure in China’s climate change negotiating team, said that officials were considering introducing a national target that would limit emissions relative to economic growth in the country’s next five-year plan from 2011.

While that is a small step, it’s a significant one. China and the five other major emitters among developing nations — India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico — were not required to accept mandatory carbon emissions caps under the Kyoto Protocol, as they did not put the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing current increases in global temperatures. The United States alone is responsible for nearly 30 percent of all cumulative global warming pollution. Nonetheless, this exception for developing countries was a key part of the unanimous Senate objection to U.S. ratification of the treaty. The China exception remains at the core of congressional objections to an international agreement on climate change.

Enticing direct negotiation with the major emitting developing nations — especially China — is critical to getting a global climate change agreement inside or outside of the UNFCCC process. There are many indications that China is ready to talk — and even more that China is already taking action.

China is ahead of the United States in terms of its own green stimulus package. It’s a much bemoaned talking point in these discussions that China has far surpassed U.S. capacity in solar cell production since 2005. Chinese leaders are “investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy.” China is spending twice as much as we are in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on green jobs and a green recovery despite the relatively larger size of the U.S. economy.

As China’s political climate changes, its physical climate is getting hotter as well. In January 2008, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification was held in Beijing, a megacity that is already severely swept by dust storms from western and northern regions every year. Shrinking glaciers are starting to cause serious water problems and more intensive damage in the country’s mountainous regions — problems that will soon stress the country’s capacity for short-term mitigation. Just as in the United States, the consequences of climate change are increasingly felt immediately and understood through direct observation rather than being confined to climate modeling.

Joint technological capacity building may be the best road to a new global energy future and help to stimulate the set of climate change agreements which will move us there. Xie Zhenhua, Vice Chairman of the National Development Reform Commission, reiterated that China’s commitment to accepting nationally appropriate reduction goals depends on receiving technology assistance. In Todd Stern’s testimony earlier this month he made it clear that the first priority for the United States in these meetings will be to push along the conversation on technology transfer as a key component of acceptance of emissions caps by the developing major emitters. Such proposals should be discussed now and followed up at the next Major Economies Forum this July in La Maddalena, Italy following the G-8 meeting.

The official Chinese position on climate change remains — you broke it, you fix it. But a creative nudge on the U.S.’s part and a subtle shift in Beijing’s position could open up some real movement in the diplomatic lead up to global climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Read the extended version of this post, “Rise of the Green Dragon?,” at the Center for American Progress.

The Republican conservative party is engaged in a murder-suicide pact.  They will commit climaticide followed closely by political suicide.

With the departure of moderate Sen. Arlen Specter from the GOP and the circling of the wagons by the remaining right-wing idealogues — a pre-20th century metaphor seemed most apt — I thought it worth pointing out the dead end path the entire party is on.

The conservative movement stagnation has staked its entire political future on an uber-short-term anti-scientific quest for political gain at the expense of humanity’s self-destruction (see also House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate. “Why do conservatives hate your children?” and “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh“).

Yet, while their united effort to demagogue any effort to make global warming polluters pay may well succeed in blocking strong enough domestic and international action to preserve a livable climate — conservatives can’t stop the scientific reality of catastrophic climate change caused by the human emissions they seek to accelerate.  And so their calamitous climate position will become increasingly untenable, increasingly divorced from reality.

Right now they are filling up YouTube with videos of the most insane statements (see House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.” and Rep. Shimkus: Cutting CO2 emissions is “Taking away plant food from the atmosphere” and Rep. Barton: Climate change is ‘natural,’ humans should just ‘get shade’ “” invites ‘expert’ TVMOB (!) to testify).  And they have stacked their “House GOP American Energy Solutions Group” with global warming deniers like Michele Bachmann.

Over the next decade, the painful reality of human caused global warming will really start to hit home (see “Climate Forecast: Hot “” and then Very Hot” and “Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming“).  We are likely to see an increasing number of “near-term climate Pearl Harbors.“  By the 2020s, we may well be approaching the collapse of the entire Ponzi scheme (see “When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green“)

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Senior advisors to the Chinese leadership, such as climate change negotiator Su Wei, below, are openly suggesting that China consider “carbon intensity” targets.  Even as China aggressively pursues world leadership in key clean technologies like solar and wind, it has also announced plans to keep expanding coal use at a pace so rapacious it would single-handedly finish off the climate no matter what we and the other rich countries do. That is why for Obama to preserve a livable climate and be a great president, he must have a climate deal with China. In this post, Andrew Light and Nina Hachigian discuss the “Rise of the Green Dragon?“

This week the Obama administration convenes a meeting of 17 of the world’s major economies in a forum on global warming outside of the ongoing U.N. climate change process. Though the history of this Major Economies Forum is somewhat tainted, it may well provide a useful opportunity to engage China on global warming. There are ample indications that China is ready for such an overture from the United States if not an outright proposal for action.

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