This year has seen a great many important climate stories.  Obviously, the continued self-destructive failure of the nation and the world to reverse greenhouse gas emission trends always deserve to be the top story in some sense:

• Biggest Jump Ever in Global Warming Pollution in 2010, Chinese CO2 Emissions Now Exceed U.S.’s By 50%
• IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy”

The emergence of a genuine grassroots movement following Obama’s fecklessness on the environment is a major U.S. story (see “A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest“).

And the energy story with the biggest climate implication was clearly Fukushima:

• Japan scraps plan for 14 new nuclear plants
• No nukes, No problem. Germany is proving a rapid transition to renewable energy is possible:  “Within four decades, one of the world’s leading economies will be powered almost entirely by wind, solar, biomass, hydro, and geothermal power.”

But the climate story that affects the most people around the world today by far is well described in this post — Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World.

Climate Progress had been covering those who have been warning the day would come when humanity’s  unsustainable energy and agricultural policies would collide with global warming, who warned that the agricultural system we need to feed the world was built on a relatively stable climate that we are now destroying.  Lester Brown has been our Paul Revere on food insecurity (see the 2009 post Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”).

We covered the emergence of this story last year:

• The Coming Food Crisis: Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse; Podesta, Caldwell: “Lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require … action to confront climate change.”

But CP really dug in to this story starting in January, when food prices soared — see Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs — and I had lunch with Brown (see Washington Post, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).

Brown’s work persuaded me that genuinely destabilizing food insecurity may occur as soon as this decade — assuming 1 billion undernourished people isn’t already a crisis.  So I decided to add a new category, “food insecurity,” and began a series of posts on food insecurity and the threat of Dust-Bowlification, which ultimately led the journal Nature to ask me to make the case that this was the gravest threat to humanity posed by climate change.  As my piece concluded:

“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

Of course, it’s not just climate change that is driving food insecurity.  We have an “unsustainable surge in demand and not just ‘peak oil’, but ‘peak everything’,” as uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” put it in a must-read analysis (see  “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever”).

Here’s the key chart:

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Want to see just how much coal consumption in Asia has grown in the last 30 years? These new animated info-graphics from the Energy Information Administration tell a powerful and scary story.

As expected, much of the recent growth in Asia — particularly since 2003 — has come from China. That country’s use of coal has increased 500% since 1980, made up almost three quarters of Asian consumption, and half of global consumption last year.

Clicking on the graphic below will re-direct you to the EIA’s website, where you can watch the animation.

Back in September, the EIA published its International Energy Outlook, which we described as a “denier’s fantasy world.” Under a do-nothing, business-as-usual scenario, the agency predicts China’s continued use of coal will increase carbon emissions so dramatically, the country’s climate pollution levels will double the U.S. in the next 15 years.

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Today, as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the final reduction requirements for mercury and other toxics from power plants, Carol Browner, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, released the following statement:

President Barack Obama adopted public health safeguards today that will drastically reduce dangerous emissions of mercury, arsenic, acid gases, and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants. The new safeguards are preventative medicine—they will annually forestall thousands of premature deaths, hospitalizations, and respiratory ailments.

In less than three years, President Obama has reduced harmful air pollution from two major sources: power plants and vehicles. Cleaning up toxic and cross-state air pollution from dirty power plants will save 45,000 lives every year, or prevent nearly five deaths every hour. And modernizing vehicle fuel economy standards will slash carbon dioxide pollution and reduce oil use by more than 2 million barrels per day.

Both initiatives will put tens of thousands of Americans to work inventing, manufacturing, and installing modern pollution-control technologies.

The support for the new toxics reduction rules by some major utilities demonstrate that the standards are readily achievable and affordable, and pose little threat to our electricity system.

In the following “Ask the Expert” video, Browner answers two questions:

What are the public health benefits of these new mercury standards? Can coal-fired power plants meet the new standards without harm? How do the president’s actions on reducing air pollution compare to recent administrations?

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As U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administration Lisa Jackson announces the first-ever Clean Air Act rules to limit mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, Republicans are already attacking this historic advance for public health. The health risks of this potent neurotoxin are enormously well-documented. Methylmercury from coal pollution accumulates in fish, poisoning pregnant women and small children. Mercury can harm children’s developing brains, including effects on memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills. But Republicans are willing to argue that the profits of the coal industry outweigh the well-being of America’s children.

“There are already strict regulations relating to mercury emissions,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), the chair of the House energy and power subcommittee, falsely claimed in an interview today with Fox News. “Obviously whatever controls the EPA has in place are not working if our fish are tainted,” Fox’s Alisyn Camerota shot back. Whitfield then made the false claim that “there is not going to be any benefit from this new regulation in reducing mercury levels”:

CAMEROTA: As I’m sure you know, for the past years doctors have been advising pregnant women not to eat any fish when they are pregnant because the mercury levels are so high in fish. So what to do about this? Obviously whatever controls the EPA has in place are not working if our fish are tainted.

WHITFIELD: Well, let me just say this to you, the scientists that testified before our committee were unanimous in the view that there is not going to be any benefit from this new regulation in reducing mercury levels. All of the benefits were calculated from the reduction of particulate matter, which is already covered under ambient air quality standard regulations. This is about closing coal plants, and that’s precisely what it is about.

Watch it:

Whitfield and energy committee chair Fred Upton (R-MI) have assiduously avoided having medical experts testify about the EPA’s mercury rules, instead parading utility and coal industry officials before their committee to make exaggerated claims about the costs of upgrading power plants to protect children’s health. At one such hearing, Rep. Joe Barton denied the “medical negative” of mercury exposure.

The glimmer of fact in Whitfield’s claims is that the health costs of mercury poisoning of our nation’s children over decades of unlimited coal pollution are difficult to quantify. Mercury poisoning is rarely fatal and hard to detect, but causes undeniable, insidious developmental harm to fetuses and babies.

Cost-benefit analyses conducted by epidemiologists for the new rule emphasize the equally real live-saving impact of cutting the deadly soot pollution from the few dozen ancient coal plants that emit most of the nation’s mercury pollution. By conceding that cutting the particulate matter would save thousands of lives, Whitfield was in effect admitting that current ambient air quality standards are not sufficient to protect American health either.

Economists are beginning to recognize that the costs of coal pollution outweigh the benefits of “cheap” coal electricity. Unless the coal industry cleans up its act, coal power is making the American economy sick.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was once a venture capitalist. So when he became governor of Massachusetts, he recognized the need to set up a Green Energy Fund (!) in his state to “to provide equity capital, loans and management assistance to Massachusetts-based renewable energy businesses.”

Today, with continued state-level support, Massachusetts is a leader in cleantech venture capital — competing with Silicon Valley in biotech, renewable energy, and efficiency investments.

But now, in his bid to join the Solyndra scare-mongers in the GOP fringe, Romney is claiming the federal loan guarantee program that helped leverage tens of billions in private capital will cause investments to “disappear.” In an interview with Charlie Rose earlier this week, Romney said the program “kills solar energy.”

When the president says, “I’m going to … put a half-billion dollars into my favorite solar energy company, Solyndra,” let’s pretend for a moment that it didn’t go bankrupt. Let’s just pretend it was successful. Here’s what he doesn’t understand. There are well over 100 different businesses, I’ll bet, in this country that are trying to develop new solar technology. When he picks one that the government gets behind with $500 million, the investments in all the others disappear, because no one wants to compete with the government.

He kills solar energy by having the government play the role of venture capitalist. You either believe in free enterprise and freedom and the American system or you believe in the European government-dominated system, and that system is a failed system.

That must be why, in spite of the loan guarantee program that helped many “first-of-a-kind” solar projects get off the ground, General Electric is building a 400-MW thin film solar manufacturing facility in Colorado on its own. Or why companies like Google are throwing tens of millions of dollars behind solar projects throughout the U.S., helping accelerate the solar market into another record year.

Yep. That loan guarantee program sure did kill solar investments.

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Tens of thousands of residents in China’s southern Guandong Province gathered in the streets yesterday, occupying a highway to demonstrate against the development of a new coal plant near Shantou city. The residents say existing coal plants in the area are fouling local air and water, and are making people sick.

Each year, protests spring up to counter the construction of dirty coal plants. But this appears to be the biggest yet. Officials now say they will abandon plans to build a new coal plant in the area. Two people were reportedly killed in clashes with police, but the government is denying those reports.

China’s coal use has exploded over the last few decades. Since 1980, coal consumption in China has grown 500%, and now represents three quarters of consumption in Asia. That has coincided with a five-fold increase of lung cancer since 1970, now the leading cause of death in China. (Of course, an increase in smoking is also a huge contributor.)

Watch the protesters gather in the streets throughout Guandong Province protesting coal plants and local land rights:

by David Roberts, cross-posted from Grist

Earlier this month, Nicholas Stern — respected U.K. economist and author of the famed Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change — cast a spotlight on what he calls a “profound contradiction at the heart of climate change policy.”

On one side, the world’s governments have pledged to hold temperature rise to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). To have even a 50/50 shot at meeting that target, humanity has a “carbon budget” of about 1,400 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between now and 2050. The more we exceed that budget, the more the 2 degrees target slips out of reach. Here’s the thing, though: The world’s proven fossil fuel reserves, if burned, would create about 2.8 trillion tonnes of CO2, double that carbon budget. If countries are serious about 2 degrees, they must be planning to leave a lot of fossil fuels in the ground. Right?

On the other side, however, the world’s top fossil fuel companies are valued at some $7.42 trillion (including the top 100 listed coal companies and the top 100 listed oil and gas companies). They are valued at this level because of proven fossil fuel reserves to which they have access. In other words, their valuation carries the implicit assumption that they will burn the fossil fuels available to them.

Markets are assuming that fossil fuel companies will burn the fossil fuels that the world’s governments have, at least implicitly, said they cannot burn. That’s the “profound contradiction.” So what are markets thinking?

Well, either they think a full-fledged carbon capture and sequestration solution is going to spring into being overnight (spoiler: they don’t think that) or they just don’t think countries are serious about climate change. They think it’s going to be business as usual. “If this is the case,” says Stern …

… the resulting rise in atmospheric concentrations could eventually mean, with a substantial probability, global warming of 5 degrees [C] or more, to temperatures not seen on Earth for more than 30m years. That would probably transform where and how people could live and lead to the migration of hundreds of millions, as well as to conflict and severe economic decline.

Yet markets don’t seem to be pricing those risks either! In fact, global markets don’t seem to be taking climate change or climate policy seriously. Even if you don’t care about that ecologically, it’s alarming economically. It’s a huge, unacknowledged, unhedged risk, and if we’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that having huge, unacknowledged risks at the core of your economy is ill-advised.

I was thinking about this “profound contradiction” as I looked over Black & Veatch’s latest “Energy Market Perspective” (they update it every six months), which contains a variety of predictions and projections about U.S. electricity markets. It’s a great example of what Stern is talking about, in microcosm. Here’s the core finding (keep in mind, this graph shows power produced — megwatt-hours — not capacity):

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Other stories below: Europe’s Debt Crisis Threatens Cap and Trade; U.S. Helps Britain Investigate Hacked Emails

Court Upholds Europe’s Plan to Charge Airlines for Carbon Emissions

The European Union’s highest court on Wednesday endorsed the bloc’s plan to begin charging the world’s biggest airlines for their greenhouse gas emissions from Jan. 1, setting the stage for a potentially costly trade war with the United States, China and other countries.

A group of United States airlines had argued that forcing them to participate in the bloc’s potentially costly emissions-trading program infringed on national sovereignty and conflicted with existing international aviation treaties.

But in its ruling, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg affirmed an opinion issued in October by its advocate general, who had rejected their claim.

“The court confirms the validity of the directive that integrates aviation activities in the system for trading emissions quotas,” the ruling said, adding that it “infringes neither the principles of customary international law at issue, nor the ‘Open Skies’ agreement” concluded with the United States in 2007.

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