By Daniel J. Weiss with Joe Romm

Like some horrible Freddy Krueger film, blocking the new energy efficiency standards for light bulbs is a bad idea that won’t die.  The House of Representatives failed to pass it with the needed two-thirds vote on July 12, but it has arisen again to be offered as an amendment to the House FY 2012 Energy and Water appropriations bill, H.R. 2345.  Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) plans to offer an amendment to this spending bill that would prevent the Department of Energy from spending funds to enforce the standards, though they would remain in place.  The House vote is expected on Friday July 15^th.

One of the arguments used by those against creation of efficiency standards for light bulbs is that significantly more efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs contain trace levels of mercury.  This argument has two flaws.

First, the law doesn’t actually ban incandescents, as a leading manufacturer explained to Climate Progress (see “Republicans Set To Repeal Light Bulb Efficiency Standard That Would Save Consumers $12 Billion A Year“).  You’ll still be able to buy them, they’ll just be much more efficienct — notwithstanding the utterly false claims of right-wing opponents of the bill, which were repeated unchallenged by NBC evening news in a story one might expect to see on Fox News:

Second, and again contrary to the error-riddled NBC story — and the demagoguing by Ted Poe (R-TX) that NBC replays without correction — the mercury in the bulbs isn’t particularly dangerous.  Even after more than 8 hours of exposure to a broken bulb, mercury levels are at most equal to eating a 6 oz can of tuna.  And that was a worst-case scenario where “every effort was made to force the mercury into the air” and the broken bulb “was disposed of in a trash can, in the room” and “entrances to the room were shut, and heating vents and windows sealed, leaving little chance for the mercury to disperse.”  More realistically, the “median of 45 breakage scenarios” compiled by Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection was “exposure to mercury … equivalent to about 1/50th of an ounce—a single nibble—of Albacore tuna!”

Read more

by Stewart Boss

RHETORIC: In its 2006 pipeline risk assessment for the U.S. State Department permit application, TransCanada predicted that Keystone would see one spill in 7 years.

REALITY: There have been 12 spills in 1 year.

Yellowstone River Clean Up.  AP Photo, Jim Urquhart

Back in 1997, National Geographic named the Yellowstone River America’s “last best river.”  That was before July 1, when ExxonMobil leaked around 1,000 barrels of crude oil that traveled as far as 240 miles downstream from the site of the spill along the longest undammed river in the lower 48 states.

As Congress struggles to understand just what went wrong with the Silvertip Pipeline spill in Montana’s Yellowstone River, the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials met Thursday morning to hear testimony and get answers on what exactly went wrong, and what government and industry can do to avoid similar oil spills in the future.

Unfortunately, this morning’s hearing was chock-full of “we don’t know” responses, illustrating big gaps in the ability of regulators and oil companies to guarantee strong oversight and adequate protection from future accidents. In opening Thursday’s hearing, subcommittee chairman Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) described the spill as a cause for “concern but not alarm.” Not surprisingly, he has received a total of $17,000 from ExxonMobil since 2000 while serving in Congress.

Thursday’s hearing was requested (and attended) by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT). The witnesses at today’s hearing were:

• Cynthia Quarterman, Administrator, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PMHSA), U.S. Department of Transportation
• Gary W. Pruessing, President, ExxonMobil Pipeline Company
• Douglas B. Inkley, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Wildlife Federation

Of particular concern was Quarterman’s response to a question from Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA), in which she admitted that it would likely not be until August or later that PMHSA would be able to recover the ruptured section of pipeline due to the persistently high water levels in the Yellowstone River. She said that it “may take weeks if not months” before the pipeline can be brought up from the riverbed to enable PHMSA to complete an investigation into the cause of the spill.

NPR has been covering the story, featuring an angry interview with Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer that you can listen to here, as well as a follow-up interview with ExxonMobil’s Pruessing, which you can listen to here. Schweitzer explained the impact of the crisis like this:

Read more

Imagine a summer camp director showing you around the facilities: the cabins, the mess hall, the waterfront, the baseball field and…the natural gas drilling operation?

According to a story in the Jewish Daily Forward, that’s what may happen at four Jewish summer camps in Pennsylvania this fall. There are about 30 Jewish camps located in the Marcellus Shale area covering New York and Pennsylvania – four of those camps signed leases that would open up fracking operations at the camps:

The technology used in the wells could allow extraction of gas without any well pads being placed on the camp properties. But the drilling companies do have the right to drill wells at the camps — in some cases, during camping season.

The leases were actually signed a couple years ago. But a commission at the Delaware River Basin halted drilling in areas of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware in order to set up new regulations to prevent water contamination. That ban may be lifted this fall – allowing Hess, the company leasing the property, to begin drilling at the summer camps.

Hess says the lease terms make sure drilling can’t “unreasonably interfere” with operations. But Hess will be allowed to drill while camp sessions are underway and fracking operations could come to within 500-1,000 feet of camp structures.

According to the story, one camp director felt pressured to sign the leases:
Read more

New York may soon decommission the four-decade-old Indian Point nuclear plant, a deteriorating 2-GW power station that supplies 25% of New York City’s electricity.

Some experts claim that closing the plant could de-stabilize supply, thus requiring a time-consuming build-out of centralized power plants and new transmission that will drive up rates.  The reality, however, is quite different.

The NY Times reported on the predicament yesterday:

Up to 2.1 million customers in southern New York would be vulnerable to power interruptions from 2016 to 2020 if Indian Point shut down, Rick Gonzales, chief operating officer of the New York Independent System Operator, or I.S.O., told a State Senate committee in May.

Some experts on New York’s electricity system suggest that existing transmission lines could be rebuilt to operate at higher voltage and thus provide more capacity. A proposal for a new line running from Quebec to New York City under Lake Champlain and the Hudson River is inching forward, for example, and sponsors say it could be completed by 2015.

Talk about a lack of imagination. We’re in the middle of a rapid shift in the economics of distributed energy and energy efficiency – with a shut-down of the plant still five years away – and the only reasonable solution people can think up is to build out more centralized infrastructure?

New York has limited transmission capacity, making it more difficult and expensive to transport electricity into the city. Because of these constraints, FERC issued a ruling in April that made it more expensive for generators to use transmission lines, potentially pushing up the price of electricity by 12%. That makes in-city generation much more valuable.

And so we come to one of the most valuable on-site electrical resources, solar PV.

Read more

Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at American Progress.

The latest oil industry-funded report touting unregulated offshore drilling reveals a severe case of amnesia. The report, commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the National Ocean Industries Association, documents a decline in offshore drilling-related jobs and revenue, attributing it to multiple factors, including general economic downturn and the slower pace of permitting new projects since the BP oil spill.

The report’s topline claim is that almost 190,000 jobs could be created by 2013 if offshore drilling returns to pre-spill levels. Yet this completely ignores the reality that the moratorium was put in place for a reason: namely, the biggest accidental oil spill in the history of the world. Only the lobbying might of API and other industry groups has successfully prevented Congress from enacting even a single piece of legislation strengthening safety or oversight of offshore drilling. Instead, congressional Republicans continue to push bill after bill catering directly to the oil and gas industry by recklessly expanding offshore drilling and concurrently weakening oversight.

Jack Gerard, president and chief executive officer of API insists, “We’ve done the necessary work raising the bar on safety.”

This assurance seems laughable, coming from the same man who engineered an entire astroturf movement built around killing offshore drilling safety measures. The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling report, released earlier this year, found that API’s role as the industry’s principal lobbyist and public policy advocate resulted in “compromised” safety standards that were a direct contributor to the BP disaster:

API’s proffered safety and technical standards were a major casualty of this conflicted role … Because the Interior Department has in turn relied on API in developing its own regulatory safety standards, API’s shortfalls have undermined the entire federal regulatory system.

Less than one year after the Gulf coast was left soaking in 200 million gallons of oil, the industry is advocating deregulation and irresponsible acceleration of pending projects.

Simply put, there are better ways to generate employment in our domestic energy economy. An analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that clean energy investments create about 16.7 jobs for every $1 million in spending. Spending on fossil fuels, by contrast, generates just 5.3 jobs per $1 million in spending.

What’s more, clean energy jobs work to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, and slow the damaging effects of climate change. And these jobs aren’t just hypothetical – data released yesterday by the Brookings Institution found that the clean economy currently employs 2.7 million workers — more than the biosciences and fossil fuel sectors.

Just as we can’t drill our way out of dependence on foreign oil, we can’t drill our way out of a recession either. While the final cost of the damage wrought by the BP oil spill won’t be known for years, it is overwhelmingly clear the Gulf Coast economy cannot weather another spill. API’s Gerard is exactly right that “we cannot continue to delay developing energy and hiring people in the Gulf.” As CAP and Oxfam suggested in a report earlier this year, let’s do it in a way that creates more jobs and doesn’t run the risk of a monumental environmental and economic disaster.

A major American utility is shelving the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming.

Well, it’s good to see the N. Y. Times get the story half right.

Yes, “American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant” that would also bury CO2 underground.  But, no, this can’t be described as a “severe blow” to efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions (and this isn’t even the biggest error in the story).

First off, failure to pass a climate bill was the truly severe blow.  This is more like a glancing blow — or a pulled punch — to overall efforts to cut emissions anytime soon.

Second, coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) was never going to be a big player in emissions reductions in the near future (see Harvard: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 — 20 cents per kWh!).  That was particularly true because the Bush administration had already set back the CCS effort many years (see “In seeming flipflop, Bush drops mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project“).

The Times spin on this story could not be more confusing:

The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

What “tougher federal limits” are they talking about?  If the NYT means the climate bill, well, that died a year ago.  If they mean pending EPA regulations, well, those have always been exceedingly unlikely to mandate a technology that isn’t commercial.

To be clearer than the NYT, “Congressional inaction on the climate change”  didn’t merely “diminish the incentives” — it eliminated the two that mattered the most by far.  First, it killed the chance for a predictably rising price for CO2, which is the vital medium- and long-term incentive for CCS.  Second, it killed the incentives for near-term deployment of CCS that might have exceeded $100 billion, which was vital to jump-starting the entire effort.

The real story here, which the NYT glosses over, is that the only hope for the coal industry (at least in a world that is itself not suicidal) is an immediate, very well-funded effort to demonstrate and deploy carbon capture and storage, as I wrote in December 2008 [see "the coal industry chooses (assisted) suicide"].

Read more

A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

Green energy bullish despite weak economy

Germany led the world in solar energy development last year as the renewable energy sector expands despite economic troubles, a U.N.-backed panel said.

“The global performance of renewable energy despite headwinds has been a positive constant in turbulent times,” Mohamed el-Ashry, chairman of Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, said in a statement.

Read more

Experts have always posed a problem for democracies.  Plato scorned democracy, rating it the worst form of government short of tyranny, largely because it gave power to the ignorant many rather than to knowledgeable experts (philosophers, as he saw it).  But, if, as we insist, the people must ultimately decide, the question remains: How can we, non-experts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

So begins a thoughtful NY Times online piece by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.  Here’s the rest.

Read more

Each day, the Energy Information Administration releases a slice of data from its archives illustrating the state of the U.S. energy market. It’s a helpful and often fun resource for anyone who likes energy data. (It can also be a downer, as the charts often show how far we have to go to scale non-hydro renewables.)

This chart, showing historic capacity additions to the U.S. electrical mix, is a case in point. To the optimist, it shows the beginning of a massive shift, with wind taking a huge slice of new power plant build-out in the last six years. From 2005 to 2009, wind represented about 35% of installed capacity, and in 2010 represented $11 billion in investment and 25% of new capacity additions. As we saw with hydro in the 40′s, coal in the 50′s and nuclear in the 70′s, we’re realizing the beginning of a new era in energy.

But the pessimist may ask: “Where’s everything else?” Indeed, there’s a notable lack of “other,” meaning solar PV, small hydro, geothermal and biomass. The fastest growing sector, solar PV, will put about 2 GW of capacity online in the U.S. this year — very large compared to historic growth, but still small in this context. Small hydro is bogged down in regulatory red tape, new geothermal build-out is moving slowly due to technical and financing issues, and concerns about emissions slowed biomass generation. And all of these resources are suffering from a lack of long-term certainty on the federal level.

And, of course, many renewables, like wind power, provide power for less time in a given day than many traditional plants, so their share of total delivered electricity is less than their share of capacity.

One wonders what this chart will look like a decade from now. We can only hope it has a lot more color on it.

 

Below are earlier comments from the Facebook commenting system:

David McMahon

This past February when it was -14 degrees in NM we saw the value of wind power, when rolling blackouts from Texas kept people from heating their homes. Sometimes reality intrudes. Wind provides intermittent power, and like it or not coal actually works. Wind energy is a nice theory if you don’t live where it gets very cold in winter.

July 16 at 2:01am

Richard Brenne

Coal also works to heat our planet to the point of catastrophe.

16 at 4:10am

John Kinker

Whatever. Nuclear doesn’t.

July 16 at 4:19pm

David McMahon

Hi Richard you might want to check the temperature record. There hasn’t been any statistically significant warming since 1996, and in many areas (including the US) temperatures have been steadily declining since 2001. HadCRUT also shows the global mean has declined, and that’s why some people are groping for answers (aka Chinese coal aerosols). Also in the past CO2 levels have been 10, 15 and even 18 times higher than today but there was no “catastrophe”.

July 16 at 4:30pm

Richard Brenne

Hi David, I have checked the most reliable temperature record from multiple sources many times. Have you?

Only one of four models (and I thought you guys didn’t like models) wildly conjectures that CO2 might possibly have been around 7000 ppm at the time of the Cambrian Explosion from single-celled creatures 542 million years ago. Since there has been animal life on land most of 400 million years ago, the four models have highs of 2000 ppm but average around 1000 ppm until almost 100 million years ago, when the high estimates all drop below 1000 ppm and average 500 ppm until the average drops below that after the Eocene 55 million years ago. During the last few million years during the evolution of all hominids CO2 has averaged around 280 ppm. What is most relevant to our species is that CO2 is now likely the highest it’s been for at least 15 million years.

(http://www.sciencedaily.co​m/releases/2009/10/0910081​52242.htm)

Fifteen million years ago is around the time when the earliest of our Great Ape ancestors first appeared. (Little did they know that one Great Ape would go Ape and possibly boost CO2 to 1000 ppm around 5000 times faster than Earth has ever experienced before.)

It is the rate of change that is the concern.

So yes, coal and the other fossil fuels are heating our planet o the point of catastrophe very soon as it already has in Pakistan, Australia, Russia, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and along the Missouri, Mississippi and many other rivers within the last year.

And there has been statistically significant global average temperature warming since 1996 or else sea ice and glaciers wouldn’t be melting as they are, along with dozens of other lines of evidence including devices called thermometers carefully placed and recorded by thousands of professional meteorologists. If you’re sincere and interested in the truth, please return often and study the science posts including archives here at CP. If you’re not sincere about learning the truth, please don’t.

July 17 at 4:46am

Gary Zavitz

Hi David. What is the source of your data suggesting no significant warming since 1996? May have misunderstood your definition of warming, so how do you define it? Looking here, it seems to suggest otherwise: http://www.wunderground.co​m/climate/ & http://thinkprogress.org/r​omm/2010/02/11/205494/scie​nce-meehl-ncar-record-high​-temperatures-record-lows/​.

July 17 at 9:40pm

Prokaryotes

Wave power exceeds expectations.
http://climateforce.net/20​11/07/14/wave-power-exceed​s-expectations/#respond

July 14 at 11:32am

Prokaryotes

Breaking

Wave device tested off Scotland exceeds expectations.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/​uk-scotland-highlands-isla​nds-14151945

July 14 at 9:27am

Prokaryotes

OPT added: “The company believes the capacity factor represented by these results exceeded that experienced by most other renewable sources.”

July 14 at 9:28am

Prokaryotes

The trials of the PB150 PowerBuoy required the consent of the Scottish government.

OPT has also been developing wave energy devices for powering US Navy and Marine Corps bases.

July 14 at 9:28am

stevegeneral999

Here’s an idea that may help geothermal….

Since a lot of the cost is dirt work, it just kills to see major dirt work without geothermal lines being installed. In places where soil erosion control permits are required, that process could be modified in many different ways to encourage geothermal install.

July 14 at 9:57am

John P. Romankiewicz

what’s thatnew coal capacity in 2007-2010?

July 14 at 9:46am

Mike twotwo

see slides 8 and 10 http://www.netl.doe.gov/co​al/refshelf/ncp.pdf

July 14 at 10:10am

 

Will Greene

That’s exactly what I was wondering.

July 15 at 4:19pm