Inaction (“No Policy” via M.I.T.) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances. Hitting even 4-5°C (7-9°F) global warming post-2050 (with much higher warming over most of U.S.) is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Kevin Anderson, director of Britain’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change (see here) — Joe Romm.

by Jonathan Koomey via his blog

In a blog post published on April 12, 2012, Dan Lashof of NRDC makes it clear that we’ll run out of the earth’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases long before we run out of fossil fuels.  In this blog post I’ll show why he’s exactly right.

In Cold Cash, Cool Climate, I explore this question quantitatively, using the latest fossil fuel resource estimates from IIASA’s Global Energy Assessment.  To do that, I estimate lower bounds to global fossil fuel reserves and resources (which together make up what’s called the “resource base”, our best estimate of how many fossil fuel resources we have, not including exotic supplies like methane hydrates and other occurrences of hard to extract deposits).  Reserves are well known deposits that can be extracted at current prices and technologies, while resources are somewhat more speculative, but resources become reserves over time as exploration advances and technology improves.

I focus here on the lower bounds to make an important point:  Even with estimates of the fossil fuel resource base at the low end of what the literature says, the amount of carbon embodied in just the conventional sources of these fuels is vastly larger than the amount of fuel assumed to be burned in the MIT no-policy case (which is a reasonable assessment of our “business-as-usual” future, assuming no major efforts to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels).

Figure 1:  Lower bound estimates of fossil fuel reserves compared to fossil carbon emissions in the MIT’s no-policy case

As shown in Figure 1, the lower bound estimate of the amount of carbon contained in all fossil fuels excluding exotic resources like methane hydrates is almost 10,000 billion metric tons of carbon, or roughly 6 times the amount that would be emitted from fossil fuel burning in the MIT no-policy case from 2000 to 2100. Just the resource base for conventional gas, oil, and coal would cover the fossil emissions in the no-policy case more than five times over.  And if we were to consume the conventional oil and gas resource base plus the coal reserves, we’d only need to use about 10% of the coal resources to reach the emissions in the no-policy case.  “Peak oil” won’t help much with this problem, as coal reserves are so vast.

I conclude from this comparison that there’s virtually no chance that resource constraints would provide a brake on carbon emissions in this century, and the emissions in the MIT no-policy case are below what could be expected if we were to burn even a quarter of our entire conventional resource base in the next ninety years.

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by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

We expect forward-looking sustainability planning from places like Portland, Vancouver and Copenhagen.  Los Angeles?  Not so much.  Southern California is a region much better known for environmental problems than solutions, which is precisely why its new, 25-year Sustainable Communities Strategy, adopted unanimously last week by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), is so significant.

SCAG is the nation’s largest metropolitan planning organization, representing six counties:  Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial.  Its planning area covers an astounding 38,000 square miles, including 191 cities and more than 18 million residents.  If southern California were a state, it would be the 5th most populous in the nation.  If it were a country, it would have the world’s 16th largest economy.

In an area renowned for clogged freeways and sprawl, the region’s sustainability challenges are immense.  Riverside-San Bernadino, for example, claimed the number one spot as the nation’s most sprawling metro area in Smart Growth America’s definitive 2002 study, Measuring Sprawl and its Impact.  In a separate index, the southern California area was identified by the Brookings Institution (using 2006 data) as having the nation’s highest rate of driving per person.  The transportation analysis firm INRIX, which issues an annual “National Traffic Scorecard,” ranks the region as also having the nation’s worst traffic congestion, based on sophisticated measurements of travel delays.  Indeed, five of the nation’s ten most congested freeway corridors, INRIX reports, are located in Southern California.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the region’s air quality is notorious:  it is the worst in the country for pollution by ozone smog, which can impair breathing function, according to the American Lung Association.  It is the second worst for particle pollution, which causes heart and lung disease and premature death.  In addition, two southern California counties – Los Angeles and Orange – are among the nation’s 20 riskiest for developing cancer from breathing toxic air pollution, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.  The region is fifth worst for per capita carbon emissions from transportation (though its mild climate and resulting low residential energy demands help keep overall emissions relatively low).

While the environmental facts are daunting, the good news is that the region is doing something about it.

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Ten cyberpennies for your thoughts.

And how about crowd-sourcing some real pennies for cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, who has kindly given me permission to reprint her cartoons. She notes that “cartoonists are struggling and economically collapsing along with the newspapers that used to be our living.”

So I said I’d post the link to Paypal where you can donate to her if you like her cartoons.  CLICK HERE (then click where it says DONATE).

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