by Max Frankel

A  new study released by The Crown Estate and the Offshore Wind Cost Reduction Task Force predicts that the cost of offshore wind generation in the UK will drop by one-third by the year 2020.

The Crown Estate licenses offshore wind projects and the Offshore Wind  Cost Reduction Task Force is a division of the UK’s Department of energy and Climate Change.

The UK wants the technology to account for as much as one-fifth of total electricity needs — about 18GW by 2020. But because of the high cost of the technology and a lack of transmission infrastructure, the pace of adoption has been modest. The European debt crisis has also stalled development.

The current cost of offshore wind energy in the UK is much higher than the current cost of natural gas. This is one reason the conservative Tory party has shifted focus to gas — to the chagrin of some in the wind industry. Despite this emerging conflict, the government report argues that wind needs to play a crucial role:

“Ours is an island nation, blessed with copious wind and shallow seas. If we are to match our clean energy ambitions, we must take full advantage of this potent natural resource.We believe that the offshore wind industry can and must evolve to be more competitive and forward looking. That in turn will boost the security of our energy supplies, create jobs, and attract further inward investment.”

Europe is already the leader in offshore wind development. According to estimates by the European Wind Energy Association, wind energy could account about 14 percent of Europe’s cumulative electricity demand by 2030. The Association also projects that as many as 170,000 Europeans could be employed in the sector by 2020.  The experience of European companies has put the industry on a pathway to continued cost reductions, according to the chief executive of RenewableUK, Maria McCaffery:

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by Andrew Light and Rebecca Lefton

The Group of 20 developed and developing nations will meet Monday in Los Cabos, Mexico, for their seventh meeting since the initial G-20 summit in November 2008, hosted by the George W. Bush administration in Washington, D.C. What will be the role of climate and energy issues at this latest summit?

This is an especially intriguing question since this G-20 meeting, unlike those that came before it, starts a week that will end with the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—more commonly known as the Rio+20 Earth Summit. This once-in-a-decade event brings together thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, and civil society to focus on addressing poverty and sustainable development.

President Barack Obama will attend the G-20 meeting but not Rio+20, and other G-20 leaders are expected to make the same decision. For this and other reasons, some fear that the G-20 could upstage the Rio meeting.

But can the G-20, a relatively closed but highly influential meeting of the world’s largest economies, help set the stage for the Rio meeting, which, at this late date, is suffering from a lack of consensus on agreed goals? Yes. The best thing the G-20 leaders can do to help Rio succeed is to double down on their core climate and energy commitment—phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies—and creating a concrete roadmap to making it a reality. This will demonstrate that what the world needs now is concrete steps to real commitments instead of another series of empty proclamations.

The problem of the expanding G-20 agenda

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By Brad Johnson, campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

Nucor Corporation (NUE), the third largest U.S. steel manufacturer, is defending its support for the Heartland Institute’s climate denial efforts. In a letter to a private shareholder, Nucor chairman and CEO Daniel R. DiMicco embraced the anti-science advocacy group, describing the $502,000 in recent contributions earmarked for Heartland’s climate program as “entirely appropriate”:

Of course, the entire purpose of the Heartland Institute is to prevent people from finding solutions to climate change.

Nucor CEO Daniel DiMicco

In his letter, DiMicco blamed Forecast the Facts, the group mobilizing Americans against corporate support for Heartland, for ruining the organization’s reputation. His letter was written on May 3, just days before the Heartland Institute launched a billboard campaign equating everyone who believes in global warming to the Unabomber and Osama bin Laden. A letter from the shareholder to Nucor about the Unabomber billboard has not yet received a reply. Greenpeace has launched a petition to DiMicco calling on him to end his support for the Heartland Institute.

DiMicco’s annual compensation is more than $8 million a year. He is also on the board of Duke Energy, a major electric utility that supports action on climate change.

Who are the “world’s leading scientists and economists” claimed by Heartland and cited by DiMicco? Heartland president Joe Bast helpfully provided the list. Forecast the Facts has created this table of the supposed experts listed by Bast, alongside representative quotations revealing them to be ideological conspiracy theorists:

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by Max Frankel

Here’s an interesting statistic: Internet users who have email accounts with Yahoo! use about 11% more electricity than users with Gmail accounts from Google, according to the energy efficiency company Opower.

As Opower’s Barry Fischer points out on the company’s new data blog, that difference in energy consumption is equal to the annual electricity consumption of Barbados.

Both email systems have over 1 million subscribers, representing a wide swath of America. So what can differences in users’ energy habits tell us about them as customers?

It’s not differences in geography. If all Yahoo! users were living in one climate and all Gmail users lived in another more moderate environment, that might explain such a wide disparity. But that’s not the case. The 1.1 million users Opower examined for the study were distributed across 23 different states, so environment and climate differences don’t explain the difference.

Age and lifestyle may give us some clues. Opower uncovered some fascinating data on these factors. The typical Yahoo! subscriber is older than the typical Gmailer — 38 versus 34. Yahoo! users are also more likely to live in suburban or rural areas, which, according to a 2009 American Housing Survey, are 7-13 percent larger than the city dwellings that Gmail users inhabit, which explains some of the extra electricity consumption.

But it turns out Yahoo! users also consume as much as 12 percent more energy per square foot.

Gmail users are, on average, younger, more likely to be single, more avid travelers (meaning time out of the house lowers local energy consumption), and up to 30 percent “more likely than Yahoo users to sign up for an in-depth analysis of how they can reduce their energy usage.”

Turns out, Yahoo! users and Gmail users lead fairly different lives. By applying these sociological differences to energy data, we can get a slightly better glimpse into the behavior of consumers.

– Max Frankel is a senior at Vassar College and a CAP intern.

NOAA has released its “State of the Climate Global Analysis” for May 2012. Here are the highlights:

• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2012 was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20^th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). This is the second warmest May since records began in 1880, behind only 2010.
• The Northern Hemisphere land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 0.85°C (1.53°F) above average.
• The globally-averaged land surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 1.21°C (2.18°F) above average.

This warmth is particularly impressive because, as NASA noted earlier in the year, “The cool La Niña phase of the cyclically variable Southern Oscillation of tropical temperatures has been dominant in the past three years” –  and that is normally associated with cooler global temperatures. NOAA points out, “ENSO neutral“ ocean conditions just emerged in May.  It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming … other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

Unfortunately, this record-breaking Northern Hemisphere warmth for May is in the worst possible places, with temperatures as much as 5°C (9°F) above the 1971-2000 base period over large parts of both southern Greenland, home to a fast disintegrating ice sheet, and northern Russia, home to vast stores of frozen carbon in the form of the permafrost (aka permamelt).

Last year, a major study by NOAA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center, found that thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100. Then Nature published a study waring that thawing permafrost could cause 2.5 times the warming of deforestation. We need to act to reduce emissions quickly before this “anomalous” temperature becomes the norm for the tundra.

As I discussed last week, NOAA said there was a “50% chance” an El Niño will develop in the second half of the year, which NASA says would lead to “rapid warming.” This NOAA report underscores that point, and they provide this fascinating chart (which is year-to-date temps for 2012 compared to other very warm years):

The heat is on. Stay tuned.

Related Post:

• Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Deep Oceans — Accelerated Warming May Be On Its Way

Libelul, via FLickr

by Ryan Koronowski, via The Climate Reality Project

We all know oil companies make an amazing amount of money ($33.5 billion in 2012 first quarter profits by the Big Five alone) selling gasoline and other petroleum products to the world. The U.S. government gives billions of our tax dollars back to these companies every year. The oil companies spend big to keep the system running this way.

Not a bad system, if you’re a huge fossil fuel corporation. Unfortunately, the oil companies make a product that warms our planet and disrupts our climate, which affects all of us. So what does the fossil fuel industry do? They fund organizations and people that make the case for denial and inaction. So this is an industry that profits from products that science shows will change the climate, then spends money on cover-up.

Actually, though, it gets even stranger. When it comes to protecting their profits, oil companies explicitly acknowledge that climate change poses a threat to their bottom line.

ExxonMobil tells its investors that “rising greenhouse gas emissions pose risks to society and ecosystems that could be significant.” Chevron says on its website: “[T]he use of fossil fuels to meet the world’s energy needs is a contributor to an increase in greenhouse gases … There is a widespread view that this increase is leading to climate change, with adverse effects on the environment.” ConocoPhillips goes further: “ConocoPhillips recognizes that human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, is contributing to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that can lead to adverse changes in global climate.” BP even cites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on its website. And Shell urges that “CO2 emissions must be reduced to avoid serious climate change.”

But talk is cheap. Are they doing anything concrete to suggest this isn’t just hot air?

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Coal consumption in the U.S. has declined substantially, falling almost 20 percent in the first quarter of this year due to cheap natural gas prices. Environmentalists and climate hawks are championing the transition away from burning coal, hoping it will put the U.S. on a path toward meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

But if we look at the global market, the picture for coal looks entirely different.

According to the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy, coal consumption grew 5.4 percent in 2011 and coal production grew by 6.1 percent, giving the resource a 30 percent share of the global energy market. The steep decline in U.S. consumption was offset by a massive increase in the Asia Pacific region, which accounted for all the net growth in 2011.

That growth in coal consumption was the primary driver of the record levels of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2011, causing a leading energy economist to worry that “the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close.”

And those emissions could be even higher than previously thought. According to peer-reviewed study released this week, there are major discrepancies between China’s national and provincial emissions data. The authors conclude that China’s actual 2010 CO2 emissions could be 1.4 Gt — or the equivalent of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest emitter.

These global dynamics are forcing environmental groups and climate hawks in the U.S. to turn attention to Asian coal exports. While American coal makes up a small chunk of Asian consumption, companies are looking to build new export terminals on the West Coast to increase U.S. shipments to the region.

Speaking about the potential for U.S. coal exports at the Netroots conference last week, lawyer and blogger RL Miller, summed up the situation: “All of this activity in America will come to naught if the coal companies find new markets.”

by Kate Gordon

The past two weeks have brought home this country’s split personality when it comes to our energy policy.

Maybe it’s because I just moved from Washington, D.C. to California that I’m unusually focused on the entrenched differences between national and state policy, but it sure seems like America will never overcome the two separate identities: one that recognizes the need to continue moving toward a more secure, diversified, and sustainable energy future, and one that clings to the status quo.

Here’s an example. Last week the House of Representatives voted to pass the 2013 appropriations bill for energy and water programs, which essentially determines national spending level for key water and energy infrastructure next year. Here’s what the measure does: it cuts $75 million — nearly one-third of the entire program budget — from the popular ARPA-E program, which funds some of the most critical cutting-edge research on new and advanced energy technologies so that they can be commercialized in the U.S. and bring back jobs and profits to U.S. companies. It cuts funding by half a billion dollars for the Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, which provides targeted support for advanced vehicles, advanced manufacturing and other clean energy programs that are revitalizing regions like Detroit, Toledo, and Richmond California. It cuts funding for basic research and scientific data collection from the Energy Information Administration and the Office of Science.

These reductions may seem small in the overall budget debate, but they’re critical for America’s energy future — and, in fact, for our overall competitiveness. We are an innovation-based economy facing one of the world’s greatest challenges in the threat of climate change. We can’t afford to undermine our own universities, labs, and entrepreneurs as they work to find creative answers to that threat, and to turn those answers into profitable, commercializable, exportable products for the global market — a market, by the way, that saw record investments in renewable energy last year. It’s sheer lunacy to gut these programs, which leverage billions in private financing while creating jobs and homegrown industries. That’s why a bipartisan group of 165 House members opposed the bill when it came to a vote last Wednesday, and why the White House has flat out stated it will veto the bill if it comes to the President’s desk in its current form.

But wait: America has a whole other personality that’s forging ahead toward a new energy future. States like California are leading the way on innovative energy solutions. Last week, as Congress was sticking its head in the sand, the Environmental Defense Fund and Collaborative Economics released a report showing that California’s major clean energy sectors have been booming since the 1990s. These sectors, including renewable energy, efficiency, clean transportation, and energy storage, haven’t just grown in the past 20 years — they’ve outpaced growth in the state’s economy as a whole, even during the worst years of the recession: Employment in these sectors has jumped 109 percent since 1995, while employment in the state as a whole grew only 12 percent. And these numbers will only go up once the state implements its program to cap carbon emissions, known as A.B. 32.

Importantly, the largest share of new jobs in California was in firms that mostly do advanced manufacturing, in clean energy and also more traditional industries. The manufacturing sector, as I’ve argued before, contributes more to our overall innovation and competitive edge than any other sector in the American economy.

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A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post additional links below.

“Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration is pursuing a plan to limit the controversial drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing to portions of several struggling New York counties along the border with Pennsylvania, and to permit it only in communities that express support for the technology.” [NY Times]

Republicans and Democrats seem to be living on different planets when it comes to how to meet U.S. energy needs. [Washington Post]

Next month, in naval exercises off the coast of Hawaii, five U.S. warships will make history: They will be the first to use biofuels to power their huge turbines, as well as the jet planes screaming off a carrier’s deck and helicopters hovering overhead. [Wall Street Journal]

Landowners along New York’s southern border who support natural gas drilling are cheered by reports that the Cuomo administration is considering allowing hydraulic fracturing on a limited basis in towns that want it, though opponents call the idea “shameful.” [Associated Press]

Several communities south of Boston have joined a growing trend to turn capped landfills from generators of environmental guilt to generators of green power by installing solar panels. [Boston Globe]

On June 18, environmental campaigners will coalesce for a 24-hour “Twitter storm” demanding that world leaders use Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, to give politicians this simple message: end their amorous love affair with big oil. [Take Part]

Singapore has released a national climate change strategy document which outlines the country’s plans to address climate change through a whole-of-nation approach. [Channel News Asia]

With the global economy at a tipping point, a deeply divided Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting in Vienna wrangled over whether to cut production and prop up crude oil prices. [Washington Post]