Projected carbon emission (in billions of tons of carbon a year) from thawing permafrost.  From a 2011 NOAA/NSIDC study with moderate warming and other conservative assumptions.

The good news:  The best NOAA analysis “suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates.” Climate Progress first reported that finding 2 years ago.  The lead author of that work confirms to CP it still remains true — despite the fact that methane levels have been rising for the past 5 years after a decade of little growth.

The bad news:  Leading experts at NOAA, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and around the world now expect the permafrost to become a major source of atmospheric carbon in the next few decades (see “NSIDC/NOAA: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100″ and “Nature:  Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation!“)

NY Times science reporter Justin Gillis has just published an excellent overview article, “As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks.”  The piece makes clear we may be near a tipping point, citing University of Alaska scientist Vladimir Romanovsky:

In northern Alaska, Dr. Romanovsky said, permafrost is warming rapidly but is still quite cold. In the central part of the state, much of it is hovering just below the freezing point and may be no more than a decade or two from widespread thawing.

That thawing is of great concern because the permafrost contains a staggering amount of carbon, as Nature reported:

The latest estimate is that some 18.8 million square kilometres of northern soils hold about 1,700 billion tonnes of organic carbon⁴ — the remains of plants and animals that have been accumulating in the soil over thousands of years. That is about four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity in modern times and twice as much as is present in the atmosphere now.

The permafrost carbon thus represents a dangerous amplifying feedback or vicious cycle whereby warming leads to accelerated emissions, which leads to further warming.  And that could lead to a point of no return, as Gillis reports:

In the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly — typical estimates say that will take more than a century, perhaps several — but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop….

That’s especially true since sea ice loss in the Arctic is happening faster than every major climate model projected — and accelerated Arctic warming and permafrost loss was linked to ice loss in a 2008 study by leading tundra experts, “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss“:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland and is apparent throughout most of the year, peaking in autumn. Idealized experiments using the Community Land Model, with improved permafrost dynamics, indicate that an accelerated warming period substantially increases ground heat accumulation. Enhanced heat accumulation leads to rapid degradation of warm permafrost and may increase the vulnerability of colder permafrost to degradation under continued warming. Taken together, these results imply a link between rapid sea ice loss and permafrost health.

And, of course, recent analysis suggests that our current “no policy” approach to climate will lead to staggering Arctic warming this century (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F).

So by any objective measure, the recent science and observations of the permafrost are increasingly worrisome.

While the NY Times‘ Gillis gets this right in the print edition, NYT blogger Andy Revkin asserts in a post published 3 days earlier focused on sea-based methane hydrates, “There’s an entirely different set of questions, also with relatively reassuring answers, about the vast amounts of methane locked in permafrost on land.”  Not!

The NYT would seem to be schizophrenic on this crucial topic, but Gillis clearly has the story right and it isn’t reassuring at all.

Indeed, Gillis adds some new reporting that is very un-reassuring:

A troubling trend has emerged recently: Wildfires are increasing across much of the north, and early research suggests that extensive burning could lead to a more rapid thaw of permafrost.

Let’s look at the highlights of the important Gillis piece before returning to the sea-based issue:

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In an “exclusive” story, Fox News executive editor George Russell argues that “sustainable development” is a stalking horse for a United Nations-Environmental Protection Agency plot to give the agency “vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems”:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyzes problems and makes decisions, in a way that would give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable development,” the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June.

Russell is spinning his conspiracy theory from a National Academies of Science report entitled Sustainability and the U.S. EPA, which is “intended to help the agency better assess the social, environmental, and economic impacts of various options as it makes decisions.”

This exclusively inane rant was promoted by the Drudge Report and echoed among the right-wing conspiracy blogosphere. “The idea is to reduce economic activity now so that future generations can also share in the scarcity,” cries the PJ Tattler’s Rick Moran. “They believe that a ‘sustainable’ world population is about 900 million,” says Moran in an even more breathless screed at American Thinker. “Be afraid, be very, very afraid,” says Weasel Zippers, without apparent irony.

So why is the EPA interested in considering the “economic impacts” of its decisions?

Since the founding of the EPA, right-wing polluter-friendly critics have bludgeoned the agency for putting “nature over man” and “environment over economy,” not considering the costs to businesses of protecting environmental and public health. The critics conveniently fail to mention that the EPA is expressly forbidden from conducting cost-benefit analyses of much of its work by law, since lawmakers in the Nixon era believed that the value of human life, clean water, and clean air transcends dollars and cents.

Environmental policy has shifted in the last 40 years to incorporate explicit economic analyses of the costs and benefits of restricting the amount of deadly, toxic, and dangerous pollution that is produced. There is an increasing understanding of how environmental policy can correct market failures, building freer markets by reducing externalities that distort economic incentives. The drive toward sustainable development has been non-partisan and relatively non-ideological in the past. The Bush administration promoted government-business partnerships by which corporations would voluntarily adopt more sustainable business practices instead of setting mandatory regulations. With advances in environmental monitoring, economic science, and globalization, corporations have integrated sustainability into their bottom lines — often realizing short-term, private profit because of the focus on efficiency and long-term viability.

But the reality of “sustainable development” is immaterial to the propagandists of the right, who put partisanship and polluter profits above the American people. So everything the EPA does — even if it helps businesses and people thrive, if it strengthens free markets, health, and liberty — is an internationalist socialist plot.

by Stephen Lacey and Richard Caperton

The truth can be very inconvenient. With real-world experience and numerous non-partisan research organizations showing over and over again that state-level renewable energy targets have not substantially driven up electricity rates, clean energy opponents are simply creating their own numbers.

The latest gusher of lies comes from Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, who just ran an op-ed in Politico co-authored with his colleague Patrick Gleason. The piece is laughable — until you realize how much power Norquist has over ideologues determined to stop any effort to promote renewable energy or address climate change.

Let’s start with their first assertion:

Renewable energy standards, by design, are intended to drive up energy costs — requiring utilities to use more expensive and often less reliable sources of energy. Not surprisingly, such laws have hit ratepayers hard. States that have a binding RES now have electricity costs that are 39 percent higher than states that don’t have a binding RES.

The more important metric is how much electric rates have changed in states with standards versus states without. Norquist and Gleason would like you to believe that states with clear standards see rapidly increasing electric rates, but it’s simply not true. In fact, the data shows that the presence of a state-level renewable energy standard has a virtually zero statistically-significant impact on how much electric rates changed from 2000 to 2010:

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The Obama administration, under the leadership of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, is finally closing loopholes in the Clean Air Act that allowed coal plants built before 1970 to have uncontrolled pollution. The EPA has established two rules for these dirty power plants, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that curbs pollution that crosses state lines, and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that finally limit mercury pollution. These rules, which would save tens of thousands of lives a year and improve the health of millions of Americans, have been the target of brutal attack by polluters and their conservative allies. The Associated Press’s Dina Cappiello surveyed the plant operators who would be affected by these rules, and discovered that the “average age of the plants that could be sacrificed is 51 years“:

The average age of the plants that could be sacrificed is 51 years. These plants have been allowed to run for decades without modern pollution controls because it was thought that they were on the verge of being shuttered by the utilities that own them. But that didn’t happen.

The number of plants that will be shuttered, the AP found, is as low as 32 and as high as 68. The survey, “based on interviews with 55 power plant operators and on the Environmental Protection Agency’s own prediction of power plant retirements, rebuts claims by critics of the regulations and some electric power producers.”

These dirtiest coal plants in America are toxic dinosaurs, enjoying loopholes in the original Clean Air Act of 1970 and the updated rules in 1990. Some of the plants were built when Harry S Truman was president.

“We can’t say there isn’t going be an issue. We know there will be some challenges,” John Moura, manager of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., told AP. “But we don’t think the lights are going to turn off because of this issue.”

In the AP’s survey, “not a single plant operator said the EPA rules were solely to blame for a closure,” because coal prices are going up, natural gas is cheaper, and state clean air rules and existing EPA rules discouraged keeping the dirtiest coal plants open.

Defenders of coal pollution who have raised panic about America’s lights turning off because of the EPA include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr.

At the dawn of 2009, the U.S. had just two factories manufacturing advanced batteries, producing less than 2% of the world’s supply. But with recent investments, the U.S. share of global production capacity for advanced batteries will grow sharply by 2015.

– Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman in a CAP repost

Our story begins on December 7, when The Washington Post published a skeptical assessment of government investments in advanced, efficient vehicles and related technologies under the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program and grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Post questioned whether and when taxpayers would see a return on their money, and it noted that some analysts “warn that some federally subsidized companies could be forced to shut down in coming months.”

In this piece we will respond to The Post’s criticisms while clarifying why we need to maintain investments in this program to stay globally competitive in the thriving advanced vehicles industry and build a market for clean cars that reduces our dependence on costly oil imports. The Post piece also ignores the Obama administration’s recent rules to double car fuel economy standards between now and 2025, which will increase demand for advanced, efficient vehicles.

Why the program matters

Let’s start with clarifying what the program is.

The Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program provides direct loans to support production of advanced, efficient vehicles and associated components such as advanced batteries. President George W. Bush originally signed it into law.

The program was created to help domestic auto manufacturing facilities retool to build significantly cleaner cars. So far, $5.4 billion in direct loans from the Department of Energy have been granted to six companies under the program. The loans will result in almost 42,000 jobs in 11 states, primarily around manufacturing facilities.

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Like debates, a firm grasp of basic facts is not known to be GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s strong suit. So Perry surprised a few town hall attendees in Iowa yesterday when he confidently asserted that there is absolutely no proof that hydraulic fracturing (more commonly known as fracking) for natural gas causes groundwater pollution.

“We can have this conversation but you cannot show me one place, not one where there is a proven pollution of groundwater by hydraulic fracking,” Perry said, interrupting an Iowan concerned about fracking’s environmental effects. “That’s false,” replied one audience member, spurring Perry to demand published proof and add, “I’m truly offended that the American public would be hoodwinked by stories that do not scientifically hold up”:

PERRY: Bring me the paper, bring me the paper, show me the paper. I am truly offended that the American public would be hoodwinked by stories that do not scientifically hold up. If that was true, it would be on the front page of every newspaper. It would be on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News. Everybody would be running that story. We have been using hydraulic fracturing in my home state for years and this is a fear tactic that the left is using and the environmental community is using that absolutely, excuse the pun, does not hold water.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Not true.

PERRY: Bring me the evidence and once we do that, you show it to me, and I’ll be the first to say you’ve got a point.

Listen here:

In fact, if Perry wants to be shown “one place” where fracking has polluted groundwater, he has at least five to choose from. Pavillion, Wyoming; Sublette County, Wyoming; Dimock, Pennsylvania; Bradford County, Pennsylvania; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are all home to confirmed cases of groundwater contamination caused by fracking.

Indeed, the EPA just announced for the first time that fracking likely causes groundwater contamination — a “significant finding” that was reported on by ABC, NBC, CBS, and even Fox News.

In fact, Perry’s home state is so concerned about the consequences of fracking that it joined Colorado in adopting rules “that require oil and natural-gas companies to disclose the chemicals they inject underground.” The new rules show that Texas is “serious about regulating the rapidly expanding hydraulic fracturing,” the Wall Street Journal noted.

But since Perry seems to have missed all this, perhaps a photo will be proof enough. After all, nothing says fracking like a sulfur-smelling fireball in a glass.

With the cost of solar photovoltaic projects declining steadily and cost reductions in concentrating solar power (CSP) projects falling at a slower pace, some are calling 2011 the year that PV killed CSP. In the last year and a half, roughly 3,000 MW of CSP projects in the U.S. have been converted to PV.

In the short term, PV seems to have won the day. But that may not always be the case. A new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory explores how the value of CSP increases with a higher penetration of solar on the grid, making the technology an important enabler of solar PV.

At a 10%-15% solar penetration, say NREL researchers, the value of CSP (with storage) increases by 1.6 – 4 cents due to better dispatchability, a reduction in curtailment (i.e. having to shut down a solar or wind plant because it’s easier ramp a fossil plant up and down), and increased capacity. The chart below shows how a combination of PV and CSP with storage can substantially reduce curtailment of solar plants, thus making bringing the cost of energy down:

Recognizing the need to increase the value of their product, CSP developers have been integrating more storage. Leading U.S. developer BrightSource announced in November that it would add molten salt storage to three of its power tower projects in the U.S., calling it “the largest storage deal in the world.” Along with molten salt storage technologies, AREVA solar is integrating CSP into gas and coal plants, thus increasing the efficiency of existing infrastructure.

Here’s how the NREL researchers described the value of ancillary services from CSP plants when coupled with storage:

From a policy standpoint, a simplistic approach to choosing a generation technology might be based simply on picking the option with the lowest overall levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). However, deployment based simply on lowest LCOE ignores the relative benefits of each technology to the grid, how their value to the grid changes as a function of penetration, and how they may actually work together to increase overall usefulness of the solar resource.

Given the dispatchability of CSP enabled by thermal energy storage, it is possible that PV and CSP are at least partially complementary. The dispatchability of CSP with TES can enable higher overall penetration of solar energy in two ways. The first is providing solar-generated electricity during periods of cloudy weather or at night. However a potentially important, and less well analyzed benefit of CSP is its ability to provide grid flexibility, enabling greater penetration of PV (and other variable generation sources such as wind) than if deployed without CSP.

In other words, the simplistic attention to lower-cost PV ignores the important benefits that a “firm” technology like CSP can bring to the grid, thus enabling more variable technologies.

As Keely Wachs of BrightSource points out: “not all CSP technologies are created equal. While some projects have moved from PV to CSP, other CSP technologies are doing very well. Power Tower technologies are thriving as evinced by BrightSource and SolarReserve projects being built, and that at more than 2400 MW, BrightSource has one of the largest solar pipelines in the US.”

There are about 1,200 MW of CSP projects underway in the U.S. today.

So don’t rule out CSP. While some investors have been delaying or abandoning CSP plants in favor of PV, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Appearing on on Sunday’s Meet the Press, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) defended the Republican decision to attach a two-month deadline for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in the unrelated middle-class tax cut bill. He also repeated discredited, grossly inflated claims about the economic impact of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline project, which the State Department and independent estimates agree would create no more than 6000 temporary jobs, and possibly as few as 500.

Boehner dismissed as “nonsense” the State Department’s stated need to take more than two months to re-evaluate the impact of changing the pipeline’s Nebraska route. Plans for a new route have not even been submitted yet. Denying the obvious that the 60-day deadline would short-circuit oversight of a risky foreign oil pipeline, Boehner tried to make the oil-industry gift an election-year issue for President Obama:

GREGORY: White House officials I’ve talked to say you are guaranteeing that he’ll say no to this because the State Department has already said they can’t get the review done for the extension in that amount of time.

BOEHNER: That’s nonsense. David, it’s been going on for three years. All the studies are done. It’s gone through every part of the regulatory process. The only issue here is that the president doesn’t want to have to make this decision until after his election. Twenty thousand direct jobs, 100,000 indirect jobs, to build a pipeline from Canada down to the Gulf that would help our energy security, help produce more energy here in North America. This is the right thing to do, the American people support it, and the president shouldn’t continue just to put this off for his own election convenience.

Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate kept the Keystone XL provision in a Saturday vote, despite President Obama’s earlier veto threat, which he appears to have rescinded.

Transcript: Read more

Industry: Light bulb war a dim idea

Big Business usually loves it when the GOP goes to war over federal rules.

But not when it comes to light bulbs.

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Congressional Republicans are sticking to their attempt to force a rushed decision on the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Speaking on Meet the Press yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner called the need for more environmental review “nonsense,” claiming “all the studies have been done.”

As part of a package to extend the payroll tax cut as President Obama requested, Republicans have thrown in a major political and climate bomb — a mandatory 60-day decision on Keystone XL, the proposed 1,700 mile pipeline that would bring energy and carbon-intensive tar sands crude from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries. The pipeline has been dogged by public backlash after realizations that the environmental review was conducted by a major contractor of TransCanada, the company building the pipeline. The State Department eventually ordered a new environmental review of the project.

But Boehner and his Congressional colleagues aren’t interested in what’s best for the environment. They slipped the 60-day mandatory decision into the payroll tax cut bill, knowing full well that the project would be denied. The State Department has said multiple times that the two-month window would be insufficient and would virtually guarantee the project is killed.

“That’s nonsense. David this has been going on for three years. All the studies are done. It’s gone through every part of the regulatory process,” said Boeher yesterday. (Note: Video starts with a 15-second ad.)

Along with a complete disregard for a sound environmental review process, Boehner continues to spew thoroughly-debunked job creation numbers. On Meet the Press, Boehner again claimed that the pipeline would create 20,000 direct jobs — when an independent study from Cornell found that it would only create between 2,500 and 4,650 direct jobs. Even TransCanada has downsized its figures, saying that it would create about 6,500 jobs. Boehner’s false claims were left unchallenged in the interview.

However, the fate of this legislation is uncertain — and could be near death. Boehner said yesterday that House Republicans would reject the Senate version of the package, calling for an extension of the payroll tax cut longer than two months. It is unclear if the House and Senate will be able to work through their differences.