Earlier, I wrote about a paper co-authored by climatologist Ken Caldeira.  A key point of the study is that we can’t slow projected warming with natural gas, you need “rapid and massive deployment” of carbon-free power.

I asked Caldeira about the implications of his work for the right mix of clean energy deployment vs. R&D

I have long been a big supporter of greatly expanded R&D for new near-zero-emission energy systems, but R&D is not a substitute for early deployment.

We will learn by doing. We need to do what we know how to do. We will learn a lot by doing that, and we will learn more (and different sorts of things) with a targeted R&D program. R&D cannot substitute for deployment, but R&D can made deployment cheaper and more effective. An R&D program without a deployment program is a sterile exercise.

Most technologies will be more expensive than the monetized costs of coal. What is the motivation to research and develop something if there is no plausible marketplace for the fruits of that research and development effort?

Caldeira elaborated on these points:

Whether it is prices or standards, we need drivers to deployment. Markets for near-zero-emission energy technologies will spur a lot of R&D in the private sector. There is also a role for public R&D, but public R&D cannot substitute for drivers for deployment.

Put it this way: I think we need both policies that drive deployment and public support for clean energy R&D. It is at least conceivable that drivers to deployment could spur the innovation we need to build the near-zero-emission energy and transportation systems of the future. However, it is inconceivable that public R&D alone can achieve that goal. So, if we had to choose one or the other, drivers to deployment or publicly funded R&D, I would pick drivers to deployment. However, we don’t need to make this either or, and we can do both.

In terms of dollars, the real cost is deployment. Globally, deployment costs will be in the trillions of dollars, while R&D costs might be in the tens of billions. We are talking about the elephant and the mouse.

I have tended to think that when we get truly serious about avoiding catastrophic global warming, we’ll want to spend at least 10 times as much money on deployment as R&D, as I’ve written before (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“ —and yes we need to do those simultaneously, the repetition was always meant to represent the relative spending levels).

But Caldeira is probably right than when we are spending the requisite trillions of dollars on deployment, “Markets for near-zero-emission energy technologies will spur a lot of R&D in the private sector.” I certainly agree with him that if one were forced to choose, one would pick the “drivers to deployment” — prices or standards (preferably both of those). BUT that is a forced choice only folks who don’t  understand climate science or clean energy technology the way Caldeira does would ever think of making.

I also asked Caldeira about his view of natural gas as a bridge fuel. He replied bluntly:

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“Few challenges facing America, and the world, are more urgent than combating climate change,” President-elect Barack Obama said on November 19, 2008. “My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process,” he promised.

Obama reiterated the pledge he made on the campaign trail and in his transition-team energy and environment agenda.

We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050.

Almost four years later, Obama’s rhetoric on climate change has disappeared. In the Blueprint for A Secure Energy Future: A Progress Report released today, prepared by Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, there’s only one mention of climate change other than Zichal’s title, in a voluntary international initiative on page 12. Last year’s Blueprint mentioned “global climate change” on page 37.

The blueprint does make several mentions of programs that reduce greenhouse pollution in individual sectors, but the Environmental Protection Agency’s work to regulate carbon pollution from power plants is not one of them.

Although the document does effectively explain that the Obama administration is working to moderately improve the health of our energy future despite intense partisan opposition, the abandonment of the goal of cutting carbon pollution in line with international obligations and scientific reality is a sad reflection of the power of the fossil fuel industry over American politics. It may also reflect the mistaken political calculation that Americans won’t support a leader who is willing to publicly fight the urgent challenge of climate change.

By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

It’s an election year, so a hardy perennial is sprouting again in western legislatures: the idea that states can, and should, take over millions of acres of federally managed land. As always, these proposals are unconstitutional and doomed to failure, but not before state politicians harvest a bumper crop of right wing outrage to feed their campaigns’ rhetorical war chests.

In Arizona, the state Senate last week overwhelmingly approved a bill that somehow requires the U.S. to extinguish all title to public lands in the state and transfer title to Arizona.

In Utah, a couple of days before Arizona made itself look foolish, the state legislature adopted a similar measure and set up a process for suing if the U.S. doesn’t capitulate by the end of 2014 to its demand for control of about 30 million acres owned by all Americans and managed on their behalf by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service. The legislation excludes national parks, designated wilderness areas and most national monuments.

In a state where education is chronically underfunded, the legislature has also authorized the attorney general to spend $3 million on the legal battle, a fight the legislature’s own attorney has said will likely fail. The legislation also flies in the face of public opinion in a region where 9 out of 10 respondents to a recent poll say that public lands are a key economic driver and are important to their quality of life.

John Leshy, a noted legal scholar on federal lands law who served as Interior Department solicitor during the Clinton administration, neatly summed up expert opinion on the phony issue:

Legally, it’s a ridiculous claim. It would be thrown out in federal court in five seconds. This is all about cranky, symbolic politics.”

The simple facts of the matter are that Utah relinquished any claim to those federal lands when it became a state, and under the Constitution only Congress can authorize their disposal.

The Salt Lake Tribune, an outpost of sanity in a state that seems increasingly taken over by the zany right, called the entire exercise an “embarrassing snipe hunt”:

Chance of success: Absolutely zero. Chance of motivating the far-right base of the Republican Party, the part that actually votes in the upcoming precinct caucuses and county and state conventions: Appallingly high.

Ever since the Sagebrush Rebellion of a generation ago, right wing politicians in the thrall of mining, energy, timber and livestock interests have kept alive the fantasy of a mass takeover of federal western lands.  Not surprisingly, these delusions flourish in election years.

Republicans running for their party’s presidential nomination, including Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, have been pandering to backers of this hopeless and wrongheaded cause. Romney said in Nevada he doesn’t know what the purpose is of federal land. Santorum said in Idaho the public estate should be sold to the private sector or taken over by the states. Paul in Nevada said he flat out opposes federal land ownership.

Timothy Egan, an elegant and perceptive chronicler of western life and history, shined a bright light of reason on those nutty ideas. In a New York Times piece last week he reminded the GOP that it was one of their own, Theodore Roosevelt, who saved so much of the public estate for future generations who, unlike the current crop of candidates, revere those landscapes.

The rest of us need our public land. The West is defined by new, fast-growing cities surrounded by the mountains, mesas, forests, sandstone spires and various shared settings. There is no other place in the world where urban and wild coexist over such a huge area. If you are poor, you can feel rich just minutes from the city, in your estate that is a national forest. If you ski in the high Sierra, or raft a runaway river in Utah, you are most likely doing it on land whose only deed of title is held by all citizens.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) told the Voice of Christian Youth America that God controls the climate, not humans.

Promoting his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe said:

Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

As TP Green points out:

Inhofe went on to attack evangelical leader Rich Cizik, the former Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has made the religious case for fighting climate change pollution. Inhofe said Cizik has been “exposed as a liberal” and that he is like idolatrous Romans described in the Bible as those who “give up the truth about God for a lie.”

In the interview, Inhofe did not mention he has received $1,352,523 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $90,950 from Koch Industries.

VCY America also argues that Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud, Muslim extremists have infiltrated the federal government, and that the United Nations has engineered the Agenda 21 program to transform human society through population control and energy use.

(H/T Right Wing Watch)

The Lorax was #1 at the box office for the second straight week. That dismayed conservatives, no doubt, who dissed the movie because of its anti-pollution, anti-unsustainability message. But it’s no surprise to anyone who actually saw the entertaining movie based on the Dr. Seuss classic.

But “whoever was in charge of promoting the film either didn’t get the message, or didn’t care,” as Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones has explained:

… the movie is being used to promote a new gasoline-powered crossover SUV from Mazda. Mazda is partnering with the film and the National Education Association for the Read Across America program. The automobile maker has agreed to give a $1,000 donation to 21 schools in 20 cities to support their libraries, and an additional $25 every time a kid convinces their parents to go take a Mazda for a test drive.

The most glaring indicator that the marketing department is out of touch with the film is that it includes a musical number from the Once-ler about how capitalism is awesome and everyone needs a Thneed, which plays over a scene of his company decimating the landscape with all its biggering and biggering. It includes a flash of a billboard featuring an image of the Lorax, who is definitely not happy about this situation, sporting a Thneed under the headline “Lorax approved!” Somehow, the irony was lost on the marketing department, which has backed a long list of 70 “Lorax-approved” launch partners.

There’s also an ironic mention in the movie that 5% of the environment-destroying corporate profits go to charity

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling created this humorous strip on the Lorax today:

In a new column, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum reiterates his conspiracy theory that global warming is a left-wing hoax, which his opponents Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich fell for, showing their “weakness of character.” Santorum’s rant at RedState, the radical right-wing blog founded by CNN contributor Erick Erickson, claims that the scientific fact of man-made climate change is “liberal orthodoxy,” a “pseudo-religion,” and the “litmus test” of “radical environmentalism”:

Of all the GOP candidates, I am the only one who has not bowed, and will never bow, to this liberal orthodoxy. I did not pander when global warming seemed cool to the press and to Hollywood. We know that climate changes over time, that the earth warms and cools over time. This debate is about whether human activity plays a role, and whether U.S. emissions cuts can have any effect when China and India refuse to go along. The apostles of this pseudo-religion believe that America and its people are the source of the earth’s temperature. I do not.

I believe in conservation and good stewardship of our environment. It is our duty as Americans to combat industrial pollution and make sure our air and water are clean. But we can do that without hurting the American worker. Like most Americans I treasure our natural beauty and national treasures, our national parks, and wildlife refuges. I also appreciate the value of working the land, creating jobs, and strengthening opportunities for all American families.

In contrast, radical environmentalism has a blind devotion to the promotion of a radical agenda that ignores the interests and property rights of people. Global warming became the litmus test of this movement.

“Left to the wisdom of individual Americans, our economy can and will prosper,” Santorum concludes his screed against scientific wisdom.

The weirdly warm winter — overheated by hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution — is leading to a veritable plague of insects, the Washington Post reports:

This eerily warm winter might soon get creepy. Awakened from hibernation underground, in rotting wood and the cracks of your house, bugs are on the rise. Ants, termites, mosquitoes, ladybugs and ticks are up early and looking for breakfast. Orkin, the pest control company, recently said its agents nationwide are reporting a 30 percent increase in calls to treat ant infestations compared with this time last year. Termite swarms do not normally show up until the end of March, but Orkin received 85 termite-control calls in February. An Orkin branch in Montgomery County, which serves the District, has already responded to mosquito sightings this year. And the National Pest Management Association, based in Fairfax, issued an early warning of ticks, possibly carrying Lyme disease, lurking in back yards.

Some insects, like honeybees that rely on nectar-filled flowers, are expected to suffer from consequences of the hot, dry winter.

Scientists have long warned that global warming would increase the spread of insect-borne disease as winters grow shorter and the planet becomes hotter and wetter.

Wall Street Journal: “U.S. gasoline prices, like prices throughout the advanced economies, are determined by global market forces. It is hard to see how Mr. Obama’s policies can be blamed.”

Cato Institute: “Is President Obama responsible for spiraling price of gasoline? Republicans say yes, but the facts say no.”

How obvious is it that oil prices, set on a world market, are all but impervious to government policies? So obvious that even Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ and the Koch-fueled Cato Institute feel compelled to make the case.

The WSJ was responding to Newt Gingrich’s claim, “The price of gasoline when Barack Obama became president was $1.89. All of this gigantic increase came from his policies.” In its debunking of “Gingrich’s Gaseous Argument,” The Journal offers an especially telling statistic:

Mr. Gingrich ignores the basic fact about U.S. gas prices: They are largely fixed by the price of crude oil, which is determined by global supply and demand.

When Mr. Obama was inaugurated, demand was weak due to the recession. But now it’s stronger, and thus the price is higher.

What’s more, producing a lot of oil doesn’t lower the price of gasoline in your country. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Germans over the past three years have paid an average of $2.64 a gallon (excluding taxes), while Americans paid $2.69, even though the U.S. produced 5.4 million barrels of oil per day while Germany produced just 28,000.

Duh?

In an essay that appeared in U.S. News & World Report earlier this month, “It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Crude Oil Prices Have Increased,” Cato scholars lay out their case:

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The death of the legendary Nobel prize-winning chemist F. Sherwood Rowland reminds us of the value of “alarmism” and the scientific duty to speak out in the face of impending disaster.

As UC Irvine physical sciences dean Kenneth C. Janda wrote in an e-mail to faculty Sunday:

“He saved the world from a major catastrophe: never wavering in his commitment to science, truth and humanity, and did so with integrity and grace.”

Rowland is one of the true scientific heroes of our time — both for his research and for what he did with it:

Nearly 40 years ago, Rowland and post-doctoral student Mario Molina made a shocking discovery: a single chlorine atom byproduct from aerosol hair sprays, deodorants and other popular consumer products could chew up 100,000 ozone atoms in the stratosphere. The stratospheric ozone layer, 12 to 30 miles above Earth, protects life on the planet from harsh solar radiation.

“Mario and I realized this was not just a scientific question, but a potentially grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer,” Rowland said later. “Entire biological systems, including humans, would be at danger from ultra-violet rays.”

They decided they had to advocate for a ban on consumer products that were earning billions annually. Industry representatives fought back: At one point Aerosol Age, a trade journal, speculated that Rowland was a member of the Soviet Union’s KGB, out to destroy capitalism. Even some fellow scientists grumbled that he was going overboard with a hypothesis.

Sound familiar?

Of course, even in the face of industry attacks, we lived in a different political time and within just a few years of Rowland’s finding, many US aerosol spray-can manufacturers reformulated their product and the federal government put in place a ban for ozone-destroying gases in spray cans. Eventually, a hole in the ozone layer was discovered and the world (including the Reagan Administration) agreed to mandate sharp cuts in chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) use — a mandate that drove the “crucial technological advances” needed to address the problem.

The Nobel Committee noted in 1995, “It was to turn out that they had even underestimated the risk.”

By 2008, Rowland was warning that given humanity’s apparent inaction on climate, “his best guess for the peak concentration of carbon dioxide” was a staggering “1,000 parts per million.” That would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions and the end of modern civilization as we know it today, according to the recent scientific literature.

While many in the mainstream media pooh-pooh or ignore scientists like Rowland who have been warning of the climate crisis today — even as the right-wing media and fossil fuel industry continue their assault on the science and the scientists — it was good to see even the Washington Post today acknowledge the value of sounding the alarm:

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As Alaska’s North Slope oil fields get tapped out, oil companies are demanding a tax cut of more than $2 billion a year. Last week, executives from BP and Conoco Phillips told the state senate that their companies would only increase investment in drilling if state taxes on their companies are gutted. They supported the language of House Bill 110, which would cut over $2 billion a year in oil company taxes as oil prices soar:

BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. and Conoco Phillips Alaska told the Senate Resources Committee there are projects the companies could do on Alaska’s North Slope to increase oil production, but those projects will have trouble attracting capital investment because of high state taxes. . . . Conoco Phillips spokeswoman Natalie Lowman said the company “has committed to spending $5 billion in the next 3 to 5 years jointly with our co-venturers if there is a tax change similar to what HB 110 proposed.”

BP and Conoco Phillips testified against SB 192, which would only cut oil company taxes by $200 million a year.

Gov. Sean Parnell (R-AK), formerly the director of government relations for ConocoPhillips, supports House Bill 110.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported on Friday:

… coal’s share of monthly power generation in the United States dropped below 40% in November and December 2011. The last time coal’s share of total generation was below 40% for a monthly total was March 1978. A combination of mild weather (leading to a drop in total generation) and the increasing price competitiveness of natural gas relative to coal contributed to the drop in coal’s share of total generation.

It’s a tad ironic that warming weather, driven in part by coal-fueled emissions, contributed to the drop in coal use.

Another reason for the steady decline in coal power is that the Sierra Club, with the support of centrists like Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, is working to shut down all U.S. coal plants in the Beyond Coal campaign.

Sadly, America’s wildly successful energy efficiency standards have fallen victim to politics in recent years. Despite being used over the decades as a way to encourage innovation, increase customer choice, and reduce pollution, efficiency targets have been bizarrely branded as a government tool to control people’s lives.

Well, here’s more evidence that energy efficiency standards for equipment and lighting actually help consumers: A new report from the American Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy shows that these standards reduced energy consumption by 7% in 2010 — and could help consumers save $1.1 trillion in energy costs by 2035.

Assuming that 11 new standards being considered for computer equipment, electric motors, fans, and pumps get established, the U.S. could see a 14% reduction in annual electricity use by 2035 compared with current projections. According to the ACEEE report, assuming household appliances are updated every 15 years through 2040, the average American household could save 180 megawatt-hours of electricity and over 200,000 gallons of water. Translated into understandable figures: Roughly $30,000.

Here are some other interesting factoids on energy savings from these standards:

• Annual natural gas savings in 2035 of about 950 trillion British thermal units (TBtu), or enough to heat 32% of all natural-gas-heated U.S. homes.
• Peak demand savings in 2035 of about 240 gigawatt (GW), saving about 18% of what the total generating capacity projected for 2035 would have been without standards.
• The CO2 savings from existing standards in 2010 were 203 million metric tons, an amount equal to the CO2 emitted by 51 coal-fired power plants. By 2025, the CO2 savings grow to 448 milion metric tons, an amount equal to the emissions of 112 average-sized coal-fired power plants.
• Annual emissions reductions in 2035 of around 470 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), an amount equal to the emissions of 118 coal-fired power plants.

Since they were established in the 80′s, efficiency standards have clearly worked. They are a no-brainer for helping reduce peak demand, save consumers money and reduce global warming pollution. They also help drive innovation in business through consistent national standards.

Why would such common-sense measures get dragged into politics?

by Ann Mesnikoff, via the Sierra Club

When it comes to fuel economy and emitting greenhouse-gas pollution vehicles are moving in the right direction, but it’s time for the auto industry to move into high gear. Today, the EPA released a delayed fuel economy trends report for 2010 and gives a look at 2011 (pdf).

The newly released data from EPA shows the fleet of new vehicles sold in 2010 averaged 22.6 miles per gallon and emitted 394 grams per mile of carbon pollution. For those keeping track, since the fuel economy program kicked off in 1975 this is a new high point. EPA hasn’t finished crunching all of the data for 2011 vehicles, but the agency projects that 2011 vehicles will improve over 2010 vehicles, averaging 22.8 mpg and spewing less CO2 pollution.

First we need a little translation. EPA’s trends report uses what the agency notes are “adjusted” values for fuel economy and carbon pollution. EPA provides a handy explanation that the “adjusted” values used in in the trends report differ from those that are used in setting the actual fuel economy standards –those are the “unadjusted” numbers. EPA notes that the “unadjusted” numbers are 25 percent greater than the “adjusted” ones.  Yes, it’s confusing and you can learn more here (pdf).

To put the 2010 and 2011 average mpg into the world of standards — think of numbers more like 28.25 and 28.7 mpg. Progress has been made, and now it is clearly time to put improvements on the fast track — as gas prices rise and consumers need relief.

This year, 2012, marks the first year of the Obama administration’s new National Program that is slated to increase the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to a 35.5 mpg and 250 grams per mile of carbon pollution by 2016. Automakers are slated to improve fuel efficiency by 5 percent per year to hit that target — a rate of improvement much higher than we’ve seen over the past two years.

Other stories below: Climate Change And Food Pressures Adding Challenges to World Water Supply; Use of Public Transit Grew in 2011

Ken Cuccinelli’s climate-change witch hunt

If Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) needs examples of official waste and abuse as he runs for governor, he could cite the harassment that he conducted against climate scientist Michael E. Mann, a costly episode of government overreach that is finally over.

This month, after nearly two years of legal proceedings, the Virginia Supreme Court halted the attorney general’s investigation of Mr. Mann, who used to teach at the University of Virginia. Twisting a law designed to root out embezzlement of state funds and the like, the attorney general had demanded oceans of documents — including Mr. Mann’s e-mail correspondence — from U-Va. But, along with some technical legal problems with his demand, Mr. Cuccinelli didn’t offer any reasonable suspicion that Mr. Mann had committed anything resembling fraud — even as the attorney general proposed violating scientists’ sacrosanct freedom to conduct research without political pressure. Multiple independent reviews of Mr. Mann’s record have found that the professor did little more than participate in the normal push-and-pull of scientific inquiry.

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