In Part 1: Is there a lot more natural gas than previously thought? I asserted it now appears likely that, thanks to unconventional supplies, natural gas alone could meet a great deal of the Waxman-Markey CO2 target for 2020 “” without requiring gobs of new power plants to be sited and built or thousands of miles of new transmission lines.  In this post I will explain the two key reasons why.

First, today, dirty coal plants are being “dispatched” (or utilized) to provide electricity by grid operators first, while natural gas plants that could provide electricity with far lower emissions of carbon dioxide remain unutilized or underutilized — even though their electricity costs are only slightly higher.  This is occurring in at least two regions of the country, according to a major under-reported May study by the Energy Information Administration, “The Implications of Lower Natural Gas Prices for Electric Generators in the Southest.”  A cap on CO2 emissions and even a low price of CO2 will switch the dispatch order, generating large emissions savings at low cost (if the gas is available, as now seems likely).

Second, the fundamental flaw in Waxman-Markey is that the 2020 target is too weak both from the perspective of what climate science says is needed (see “The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target“) and from the perspective of what straightforward energy analysis suggests can be done at $15 a ton of CO2 or less.

Let me run through a rough analysis.  The W-M bill requires a 17% emissions cut by 2020.  Now EIA’s amazing April report — Updated Annual Energy Outlook 2009 Reference Case Reflecting Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Recent Changes in the Economic Outlook — forecasts that just on the basis of the clean energy deployment from the stimulus (together with the lingering impact of the recession), U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will be some 2% lower in 2020 than in 2005 (see “EIA projects wind at 5% of U.S. electricity in 2012, all renewables at 14%, thanks to Obama stimulus!“):

But then we have to throw in the oil reductions from Obama’s recent fuel economy deal (see Obama to raise new car fuel efficiency standard to 39 mpg by 2016 “” The biggest step the U.S. government has ever taken to cut CO2) — and, of course, from higher oil prices than EIA forecasts since it mostly ignores peak oil (discussed here).  Let’s call that another 2% emissions drop.

Then we have Waxman-Markey itself.  It achieves huge energy efficiency savings.  The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) projects “such savings will avoid about 293 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020” (see “Waxman-Markey could save $3,900 per household“).  That’s another 5% drop.

So far we are maybe 9% below 2005 levels in 2020.  I’m going to skip the large low-cost savings potential from conservation — although I think by 2020 that the painful reality of global warming will be so obvious to all that a large fraction of the public and businesses will want to pitch in to avert Hell and High Water (but then, I’m an optimist or is that a pessimist?).

Now we have to meet the remaining 8% cut with some combination of low-cost renewables, natural gas, and offsets.  How will that break out by cost?

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A Republican energy plan launched with great fanfare attempts to deny the threat of global warming out of existence. Today, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the leader of the Republican “American Energy Solutions Group” and a prominent denier of climate change science, unveiled the latest repackaging of Bush-era dirty energy policies. The “American Energy Act” confronts the problem of greenhouse gases head on — by prohibiting their regulation:

The Republican response to our dependence on fossil fuels and their pollution is to give billions of dollars in new tax breaks and subsidies to the oil, coal, and nuclear industries, while rolling back environmental protections, despite the claims of their Orwellian talking points.

Further following George Orwell’s principles of Newspeak, the GOP website that trumpets this dirty legislation as an “all-of-the-above solution” attempts to erase the climate threat from existence by leaving out mention of global warming in the bill’s talking points document and summary. Unfortunately for Pence and his climate denier colleagues, they haven’t figured out how to rewrite the laws of physics as well.

UPDATE:  Gunther thinks my critique of his piece goes too far.  But then, he also thinks my critique of George Will goes too far.  Anyway, read the piece, his comment, and my response.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Apparently all federal efforts to develop clean technology should be banned — at least that’s what Reuters and the oddly named website “Greenbiz.com” seem to believe.

If they gave out awards to columnists for advice that would cause the most harm to the nation if anybody actually followed it, then Greenbiz.com, Reuters, and Fortune contributer Marc Gunther would be a serious contender with his astonishingly uninformed piece “Beware of Obama’s ‘Battery Gold Rush’.“  Let’s call this award the “Willie” named after George Will.

You might think it would be hard for anyone to seriously oppose a competitive federal technology grant-making program run by Nobelist Steven Chu aimed at restoring US leadership in battery technology — since “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars are a core climate solution” and “electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence.”

And that’s especially true since major trading competitors are aggressively pursuing dominance in advanced batteries and electric vehicles, including Japan, South Korea, and especially China (see “World’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid is from “¦ China, for $22,000?” and “China begins transition to a clean-energy economy“).

But Marc Gunther, a “longtime writer on business and the environment” manages to “cringe” at the notion, inspired by those (politically) right-thinking folks at the WSJ:

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Badly outnumbered and months behind in the debate on energy and climate change, House Republicans plan to introduce an energy bill on Wednesday as an alternative to the Democratic plan barreling toward a House vote this month.

The Republican proposal, drafted by a group led by Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, leans heavily on nuclear power, setting a goal of building 100 reactors over the next 20 years.

The GOP energy proposal, the American Energy Act (AEA), is nothing more than a good old-fashioned energy tax on consumers.  The House energy and climate bill, on the other hand could save $3,900 per household by 2030, thanks to its strong emphasis on energy efficiency, which is utterly absent from the GOP plan.

The cornerstone of the GOP plan — whose acronym just happens to be nearly identical to that of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) — is an $800 billion plan to build 100 nukes (see “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns”).  Taxpayers will assume the full liability for any default on those nuclear plants.   The Congressional Budget Office estimates the likely default rate of these loans at over 50% — so that’s $400 billion down the toilet right there.  And of course taxpayers already assume the liability for any catastrophic meltdown.

Now we know that if you even start building a nuclear power plant, electricity bills go up a decade before any customer sees a single electron (see “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases”¦.“  For customers of Progress Energy in Florida, which is trying to build twin nukes, bills jumped 25 percent in January “to cover early costs for the new reactors as well as increases in the cost of fuel Progress purchases to generate power.”

By spreading 100 nukes around the country and with no strategy to stop fuel prices for power generation from rising, the GOP plan would be the equivalent of a 25% tax on every American’s electricity bill.

But that’s not all.

The Atomic Energy Agency American Energy Act is “Identical To President Bush’s Failed Plan” as Media Matters demonstrates with a side-by-side comparison between AEA and the Cheney plan.  In April, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a detailed analysis showing the main result of the Bush-Cheney plan was that energy costs rose more than $1,100 for the average American household:

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Big media struggles with how — or even whether — to explain to the public that the increase in extreme weather we are seeing is precisely what scientists have been predicting would occur because of human-caused climate change (see, for instance, “CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story “” never mention climate change“).

But the AP and the Washington Times has explained quite well (here) the likely source of Brazil’s double punch — brutal drought followed by brutal flooding, Hell and High Water:

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

The surprise isn’t just the record flooding, it’s that the flooding followed record droughts:

Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

The BBC also got the story right last month, “Experts say global warming may be behind the wild climate swings that have brought periods of unprecedented droughts and flooding to the Amazon in recent years.”

Interestingly, the same exact swings in extreme weather hit Louisiana in 2005, as I wrote in my book Hell and High Water:

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Hotter Planet Means More Underweight Babies

If current projections of a warming planet prove accurate, the percentage of dangerously underweight newborns will increase significantly in the U.S. by the end of the century, according to a paper recently published in the American Economic Review. Due to the effects of hot temperatures, mean birth weights will decrease, on average, by 0.22 percent among whites and 0.36 percent among blacks.

“We find an estimated 5.9 percent increase in the probability of a low-birth-weight birth (defined as less than 2,500 grams) for whites and a 5.0 percent increase for blacks,” the researchers conclude.

“I would expect these effects to be possibly much larger in poorer/hotter countries,” added Deschenes, the lead author and associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Deschenes and his colleagues came to these conclusions by comparing data on birth weights from 1972-1988 (from the National Center for Health Statistics Natality Detail Files) with the daily average temperature for each American county (as compiled by the National Climatic Data Center). They found a significant correlation between low-birth-weight babies and hot temperatures during the second and third trimesters.

“In addition to a predicted increase in average temperatures, many global climate change models contain the oft-overlooked prediction that there will be a large increase in the number of very hot days,” the paper notes. “Our estimates imply that exposure to such extreme ambient temperatures will have deleterious effects on fetal health, causing a decrease in birth weight and an increase in the probability of low birth weight.”

China eyes 20 pct renewable energy by 2020: report

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“Ich bin ein Berliner” — not!

The other intellectual leader of the right wing — the one whose first name isn’t Sarah — summed up the narrow minded and ultimately self-destructive “every-country-for-themselves” mentality of the modern conservative movement Monday.  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was keynoting the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Senate and House Republican campaign committees — standing in for the dithering Alaska governor (see WP‘s “Palin Sideshow Spotlights Cracks in the GOP“).

l had thought the Republican National Convention’s chant of “Drill baby, drill” was the moment the Republic died.  But if conservatives continue blocking strong U.S. climate and clean energy legislation — and thwarting the international action needed to prevent this gravest of all threats to citizens of every country — then this statement by Gingrich might top it.

Gingrich’s self-defining and self-defeating statement was doubly ignorant from a historical perspective.  First, he was attacking Obama for remarks that President Reagan himself had made a quarter-century ago, which CNN itself failed to report in its coverage of Gingrich’s remarks.  As Media Matters explains:

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