Historically supplying the majority of America’s electricity, the coal industry has long been called “King Coal.” But this king’s throne is now under threat.

For the first time in U.S. history, natural gas electricity generation equaled coal generation, according to preliminary April figures from the Energy Information Administration:

EIA provides more context to the preliminary data (which is subject to change):

Recently published electric power data show that, for the first time since EIA began collecting the data, generation from natural gas-fired plants is virtually equal to generation from coal-fired plants, with each fuel providing 32% of total generation. In April 2012, preliminary data show net electric generation from natural gas was 95.9 million megawatthours, only slightly below generation from coal, at 96.0 million megawatthours.

As shown in the chart above, there are strong seasonal trends in the overall demand for electric power. In April 2012, demand was low due to the mild spring weather. Also in April, natural gas prices as delivered to power plants were at a ten-year low. With warmer summer weather and increased electric demand for air conditioning, demand will increase, requiring increased output from both coal- and natural gas-fired generators.

As the agency points out, there are a variety of factors that contribute to the changes in generation such as seasonal variability, changes in prices, age of infrastructure, and rising or falling inventories. But looking at the chart above, we can see a clear longer-term trend: use of coal is declining steadily and natural gas is filling in the gap.

In fact, recent data from the EIA showed that generation from coal dropped 19 percent between the first quarter of 2011 and first quarter of 2012 — moving from 44.6 percent to 36 percent. If this preliminary data is correct, that means that coal generation fell another 4 percent between March and April of this year.

This is a mixed blessing from an emissions perspective. The fall in coal generation means we’ll likely see a decline in CO2 emissions from the fossil fuel sector by 3 percent this year, according to EIA. That will add to the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2011.

However, a large-scale switch to gas is no environmental panacea. Along with local air and water-quality concerns from natural gas fracking, scientists and environmental regulators are increasingly warning about lifeycle methane emissions from gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. While there is still no definitive study on the methane intensity of natural gas, recent research suggests that leakages in the drilling and transport of gas could make it more harmful than coal.

Reacting to the concerns about methane leakages, a group of investors worth $20 trillion in assets recently penned a letter to the oil and gas industry calling on companies to proactively address the problem. Craig McKenzie, Head of Sustainability for the Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, told Climate Progress that his organization believes natural gas does play a role in the current energy transition — but not without controls on methane:

Read more

American citizens and political leaders are increasingly drawing the connection between climate change and extreme heat, drought, fires and floods. That seems like a good thing. Until we see what that really means.

It’s people like Colorado resident Hani Ahmad facing the brutal reality of extreme weather who are making that connection. After losing his home to the Waldo Canyon fire — the most destructive fire in Colorado’s history — Ahmad asks if people will start paying attention: “It bothers me when people say this is junk science. I’m convinced that this planet is warming and that this is part of the result of that. The west is a tinderbox and it’s so early in the season. I’m terrified for everybody in the west.”

Ahmad’s story comes from the Climate Desk, a fabulous outfit covering the impact of climate change on the ground level. Check out the short film below to see how Ahmad and others are reacting to the destructive wildfire season:

by Max Frankel

The toll from record high temperatures across the United States is mounting. As triple digit temperatures and an intense drought spread, conditions for wildfires continue to get worse, livestock suffers, and corn crops are under threat. Even the mighty Mississippi River is seeing its waters recede.

St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Chicago are just some of the Midwestern cities with record high temperatures this week. In St. Louis, a record high high temperature of 105 was followed up by a record high low temperature of 83. Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin also set records with their low temperatures.

The heat wave isn’t limited to the Midwest. Here in Washington DC, we’re experiencing our record ninth consecutive day over 95 degrees, with at least two more days in the 100′s on the way.

Compounding the issue are massive power outages still seen in parts of the country — a consequence of severe storms that hit last week. In Michigan, around 300,000 residents are still without electricity.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, over 4,000 daily heat records have been broken in the last 30 days, including 224 all-time heat records. Tomorrow, the expected high in Washington, DC is 106, which would be the highest recorded temperature since 1930.

The heat and associated drought are wreaking havoc on the nation’s corn crop. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of corn and 2012 was supposed to be a banner year. Farmers planted 96.4 million acres of corn, a 5 percent increase over last year. But the heat and drought have already caused much of it to shrivel and die. “We’re talking five-feet-tall corn with no ears, no shoots and no tassels,” said Randy Anderson, a farmer from Illinois. “It wears on your nerves to even look.”

Temperatures soared in places like Jefferson County, Missouri, where the high hit 111 and parts of five corn producing states are now suffering from drought conditions. Almost all of Ohio is now officially in drought. Columbus, Ohio had only 2.01 inches of precipitation in June, a full 2 inches below normal — and experts believe that between 5 and 10 inches of rain is necessary to fully end the problems.

As the corn crop now enters a crucial pollination phase, it is even more vulnerable to the heat and lack of rain: “This is a very narrow window for corn, and there’s little room for error,” said Brad Rippey, an agricultural meteorologist for the United States Department of Agriculture. “Whatever happens in that window, it is what it is — that cob is made or broken.”

“This is a moving target,” said Darrel L. Good, a professor emeritus of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “But what we know is this: There’s been some permanent and substantive yield reduction already, and we’re on the cusp, depending on the weather, of taking that down quite a bit more.”

The Mississippi River is also being impacted by the extreme weather conditions. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the river is 4.79 feet deep, more than 38 feet below its flood stage depth. Some boats, such as the American Queen — one the largest paddle boats ever built — can’t access Vicksburg’s docks.

According to Robert Latham, the director of Mississippi’s Emergency Management Agency, the drought conditions, in conjunction with the lack of northern runoff from melting snow pack due to the mild and dry winter, have contributed to the low water level.

“When you look back at this past winter, one of the things that impacts us is the snow pack and the melt that causes the fluctuation in the river levels,” he said. “We didn’t have that snow pack that we had over a year ago.”

Although this is the time of year when the Mississippi sees its lowest water levels, depths are usually closer to 20 feet.

According to NOAA, El Niño conditions may be starting this summer. Though this may bring some much needed immediate relief to much of the country, it sets the stage for even higher temperatures next year.

As drought conditions worsen, climate scientists warn about the role of man-made climate change in intensifying the problem.

Speaking about last year’s devastating drought in Texas and Oklahoma, Texas A&M, climate scientist Andrew Dessler said last August that “there is absolutely no way you can conclude that climate change is not playing a role here.”  Texas climatologist Katherine Hayhoe also recently explained that “our natural variability is now occurring on top of, and interacting with, background conditions that have already been altered by long-term climate change.”

In addition, NASA climatologists, including James Hansen, released peer-reviewed research concluding that the Texas heat wave was “a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.”

Max Frankel is a senior at Vassar College and an intern at The Center for American Progress.

by KC Golden, via the GRIP Blog

Al Gore tried to invoke the moral imperative for climate action.  “It’s not about right and left;” he said, “it’s about right and wrong.”  Climate deniers cynically pounced on Gore’s leadership as an opportunity to assert the exact opposite.

(Really, it’s about both, but we’ll get to that later.  See footnote if you can’t wait.)

Why don’t Americans accept the climate challenge as a moral imperative?  University of Oregon researchers Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff tackle the question in Nature Climate Change.  Markowitz blogs their conclusions here.

Their analysis draws insights from broader research on “the moral judgement system – the set of cognitive, emotional, social, and motivational mechanisms responsible for producing our perceptions of right and wrong.”  They describe why our moral discriminators have a hard time grokking climate disruption, and offer potential strategies for activating moral intuition.  It’s interesting stuff, worth a look.  Their blog post is a good summary; I’ll just poke at couple of themes that seem to need poking.

The Guilt Trip - Climate disruption is like my (dear) Jewish mother; it makes people (and especially Americans, say the authors), feel guilty.  From the Nature Climate Change paper:  “To allay negative recriminations, individuals often engage in biased cognitive processes to minimize perceptions of their own complicity.”  From my adolescence:  “I can’t hear you Mom!”

This makes sense (we are guilty!), but it downplays the importance of efficacy in the development of moral responsibility.  Bob Doppelt makes the case that motivating big changes in human behavior requires dissonance, efficacy, and benefits. Lack of efficacy often seems like the bottleneck when it comes to moral engagement on climate.  The strategies within any actor’s scope of effectiveness are not scaled to the problem.  No use accepting guilt, let alone responsibility, if you can’t do anything about it.  “May I be granted serenity…,” etc.  Moral intuition finds no traction where there is no efficacy.  (This is why we do what we do at Climate Solutions.)

The Co-benefit Conundrum – This cartoon is a staple of climate advocacy:

To build support for climate solutions, we focus on “co-benefits” – often going so far as to shun discussion of climate altogether (which, as I’ve harangued, is a big strategic mistake.)  There’s no denying the effectiveness of this approach in building bridges to new constituencies for action.  Air quality, economic opportunity, and transportation choices are intuitively positive, accessible, tractable.  Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs is not, not, not.

Read more

One of America’s top science officials says the current onslaught of extreme weather in the U.S. is raising awareness of climate change among Americans.

Speaking at a university forum today in Australia, Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Americans are increasingly connecting the dots between climate change and the severe heat, drought, wildfires, and storms hitting the country. The Associated Press reported on her comments, made at the University of Canberra:

“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.

“People’s perceptions in the United States at least are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change,” she said.

Lubchenco’s comments are backed up by actual research. According to a recent poll conducted by the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, an increase in extreme weather has increased Americans’ understanding of climate change — bringing public acceptance of the problem to the highest level since 2009.
Read more

by Kate Gordon

It’s been a hard couple of weeks for those who deny the existence of climate change. As storms rage on the East Coast, cutting out power to hundreds of thousands of consumers, and as wildfires threaten huge swaths of the Western states, new evidence has emerged that sea levels are steadily rising and will continue to — albeit more slowly — even if we take strong action to cut emissions.

With these facts at hand, it seems like folly to continue denying that the planet is warming and that we need to do something about it. You’d think the country would be running, not walking, toward a smart energy strategy — a new course that diversifies our energy base, reducing the impact of blackouts, and produces energy with far fewer carbon emissions so we’d at least begin to address the long-term impacts of climate change.

Unfortunately, as I wrote in my last blog post, many of our national politicians have yet to hear the call to action, even as their D.C.-area homes are battered by heat waves and thunderstorms.

But the fact that Congress is reluctant to curb climate change today doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from Washington when it comes to smart energy policy. Three years ago, Congress did move forward with an historic bill to cap carbon emissions, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES.

Those of you who follow the ins and outs of energy legislation know that ACES, which passed the House in an historic vote on June 26, 2009, failed to get traction in the Senate, and we haven’t seen an alternative climate bill in Congress since. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned from the work that led to the final House vote.

Now that California is moving forward to implement its own historic climate bill, known as AB32, it’s the perfect time to look back to the lessons learned in 2009 and see how those might play out in California. Of particular importance in California is the question of how to spend the anticipated revenue from the program, which will be anywhere from $660 million to more than $3 billion in the 2012-13 budget cycle alone. For guidance, we need some idea of how the federal bill allocated revenues to different sectors of the economy, including consumers, carbon-intensive industries, and innovators.

With this in mind, I went to D.C. last week to meet privately with some of the critical negotiators on ACES from the political, advocacy, and business worlds. I wanted to get a sense of how those negotiations played out — what alliances were made, what surprised the negotiators, and what lessons could be gleaned for our work implementing AB32.

What ensued was a spirited discussion of the best way to use AB32 revenues to ensure implementation of the law that’s efficient, smart, equitable and effective. Here’s what I learned:

Read more

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago and several other Midwest cities already have set record highs this week or are on the verge of doing so. And with even low temperatures setting heat records, residents are left searching for any relief. [Associated Press]

Record-breaking heat across the U.S. and catastrophic wildfires in Colorado are giving environmentalists a rare opening to regain the political offensive on climate change. [The Hill]

Hundreds of thousands of people remained without power Thursday after a line of deadly storms struck last Friday. [New York Times]

A unique ice-class barge designed to clean up any oil spills that might result from Shell Alaska’s upcoming operations in the Arctic Ocean has so far failed to acquire final U.S. Coast Guard certification. [Los Angeles]

Global grain markets are being transformed by extreme heat and dryness in a key U.S. growing region. Fields in the Midwest are baking under relentless sunshine, raising concern over crops in the country’s corn belt. Led by corn, grain prices have soared. [Wall Street Journal]

The government is under intensifying pressure over its wind energy policy with a lobby group threatening legal action and a key investor warning that a planned £200m facility could be at risk. [Guardian]

Five rural energy programs will end while others will be slimmed down if a draft version of the 2012 farm bill released Thursday becomes law. [The Hill]

There are only a little over 500 deployed energy storage projects in the world, according to Pike Research. So what’s the hold up? [Earth2Tech]