A supermarket employee in Seattle bags groceries into a cloth bag. On August 18, the city will vote on a plastic bag fee modeled after Ireland’s successful PlasTax fee.

We’ve all heard of the plastic menace. Plastic bags litter streets, trees, and streams. They suffocate wildlife. They can take over 1,000 years to decompose. And we’re only consuming and throwing away more of them every year.

They also have a knack for getting into the world’s oceans. Plastic bags and cigarettes account for more than 80 percent of marine litter, according to a recent landmark study by the U.N. Environment Programme, or UNEP. They are eaten by all kinds of fish and kill an estimated 1 million seabirds a year. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of litter twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, is largely made up of plastic. UNEP says cutting bags off at the source is much cheaper than removing them later.

Enter the bag tax. A bag tax works by charging shoppers a fee””typically between 5 and 30 cents””for every bag they get in a store. This fee drives consumers to buy reusable bags and change their habits. It also causes high-quality reusable bags to emerge and diffuse because it’s a market solution. The resulting revenue can be used to raise awareness, to pay for environmental clean up, or to subsidize reusable bags.

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More than perhaps any other company, McKinsey has documented how an aggressive energy efficiency strategy sharply lowers the cost of climate action (see “McKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero“).

Today they released their most comprehensive analysis to date of this country’s energy efficiency opportunity, “Unlocking energy efficiency in the U.S. economy.”  Bottom line:  If this country get serious about energy efficiency — for instance, by passing a climate and clean energy bill like Waxman-Markey — then we can sharply reduce existing emissions at a large net savings to the public and U.S. businesses.  McKinsey has a new cost-curve just of efficiency measures (click to enlarge):

The width of each column on the chart represents the amount of efficiency potential (in trillion BTUs) found in that group of measures….  The height of each bar corresponds to the average annualized cost (in dollars per million BTU of potential).

For those expecting to seeing efficiency below the line (i.e. negative cost), McKinsey has added a dashed line that represents the average cost of a new power plant.  McKinsey said at the press conference today that all the measures above have a positive net present value.

McKinsey explains that these measures, if fully enacted over the next decade, would save a remarkable 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, which is 17% of U.S. CO2e emissions in 2005.  In other words, the entire 2020 target in the Waxman-Markey climate bill could be met with energy efficiency at a net savings to U.S. consumers and businesses of $700 billion.

And what is even more stunning about this analysis is that it didn’t even look at the transportation sector, where we know huge savings opportunities are possible (see “U.S. can cut half its transportation emissions by 2050“).

McKinsey explains “The central conclusion of our work”:

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NIMBY, meet NUMBY:  Not under my backyard.

The Guardian reports today:

It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.

But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.

Ouch.  Perhaps CCS is just another (open) pipe dream.

CCS was never going to be a slam dunk.  As I explained a year ago, “CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role“:

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U.S. can cut half its transportation emissions by 2050 — report

The United States can cut greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in half by 2050 with strategies ranging from cutting speed limits to imposing road pricing, according to a report released today by federal agencies and environmental and industry groups.

Examining about 50 transportation strategies, the report found transportation emissions could be reduced 24 percent by 2050 by acting to change travel behavior and land-use patterns. The emissions reduction hit 47 percent by adding road pricing techniques, ranging from pay-as-you-go insurance to charging Americans for every mile driven….

John Porcari, deputy secretary at the Department of Transportation, said the report shows that lawmakers looking to recast the nation’s transportation system to curb emissions and fuel consumption will need to look for combinations of policy changes. “There is no magic bullet,” he said. “There is no single strategy that can be pursued to help us turn our corner. We need to look at a number of options.”

Transportation accounts for roughly 28 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and the sector has been one of the fastest-growing in the past two decades — representing nearly half of the nation’s total increase in greenhouse emissions since 1990

A Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions From Deforestation

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This is the video that Anthony Watts demanded YouTube take down.  This is what the former TV weatherman who runs a leading anti-scientific website, WattsUpWithThat, is afraid to let the public see:

Fortunately, Anthony Watts knows even less about copyright laws than he does about climate science, if that’s possible [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"].  So YouTube has put it back up after temporarily removing it, which is standard practice for them.

Here’s some background on the terrific video from DeSmogBlog:

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