An eagle-eyed reader directs us to this new ‘Forever’ stamp  from the U.S. Postal Service.

On Sunday, National Parks Traveler online explained:

Come Monday, you can send Kenai Fjords National Park around the country. At least figuratively, thanks to a new stamp from the U.S. Postal Service.

On Monday the Postal Service releases its Earthscapes stamp series featuring a new perspective on one of Kenai Fjords’ most photographed locations, Bear Glacier.

It is a very photographed glacier. Here, for instance, are a couple of Landsat photos NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have put together in their fact sheet, “A Sensitive Giant: Alaska’s Bear Glacier:”

As the caption from NASA and USGS explains:

Look closely at the massive Bear Glacier shown in these Landsat satellite images and you’ll notice significant changes between 1986 and 2002. As the glacier has receded, many pieces of ice have broken off its end. In the 2002 image, you can see them floating like shards of white glass in the blue water. Bear Glacier is shrinking! From the early 1950s–1990s, Bear Glacier thinned about 2.5 feet (0.75 m) per year. Glaciers are particularly sensitive to climate trends, and widespread glacier recession is considered an indicator of global warming.

Note to Postal Service: Diamonds are forever. Glaciers, not so much.

Finally, the USGS has a series of images of Bear Glacier from 2002, 2005 and 2007 with a full explanation of the recent changes, which include thinning by “about 10 meters (33 feet)”:

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by Bill Becker

The Obama and Romney campaigns are making the point that there are big differences between the positions of the two presidential candidates, and America has a clear choice between two futures.

There are no issues on which those statements are truer than energy policy and its impact on global climate change.  The candidates haven’t said much about climate change so far.  They should be forced to talk about it in one of the upcoming presidential debates, preferably the first of the three mano a mano face-offs on Oct. 3 in Denver.

Every interest group in the country would like to see its issues highlighted in a presidential debate. Why should climate change be at the top of the list?

First, it is no longer an issue we can put off for the future.  When climate scientists began to firm up their conclusions that climate change is real and caused by us humans, most of us thought we wouldn’t experience the impacts for a few generations.  That turns out not to be the case. Climate change already has become a clear and present danger to the American people and to international stability.

Second, climate change has huge implications for the issues the candidates are talking about. For example:

On the economy, consider the impact that drought is having on ranchers, farmers, small businesses and food prices.  Weather-related damages in the United States last year totaled nearly $24 billion. That might boost the GDP – a blunt and uncaring measure of economic activity – but it’s not the kind of economy most of us like, and it’s likely to get much worse.

On public health, the candidates have significant differences on how to pay for health insurance. They haven’t talked, however, about the fact that global climate change will have major impacts on our health and the cost of health care.

Nearly 1,100 Americans died last year and more than 8,800 others were injured, in natural disasters and weather events. The American Public Health Association calls climate change “one of the most serious public health threats facing our nation”.

An interagency group of experts from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, among others, has concluded:

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by Justin Guay, via the Sierra Club

The U.S. Ex-Im Bank and its president Fred Hochberg have never met a coal project they didn’t like.

At times it’s so bad we don’t know what century the institution thinks it is operating in. Now, despite a worldwide uproar over the Bank’s interest in one of the world’s largest coal ‘mega-mines’ in Australia, it has been linked to another Australian mega mine that would bring coal across the Great Barrier Reef. Underwriting this potential destruction of the Great Barrier Reef is an unacceptable use of U.S. tax payer dollars — and it’s time Ex-Im Bank came clean on its involvement.

It’s not surprising to hear over-eager developers link the Ex-Im Bank to these projects because the institution has a long history of supporting fossil fuel projects. And that track record is getting worse. It got so bad that the Sierra Club wrote an open letter to President Fred Hochberg after we witnessed first hand the destruction these projects are wreaking on communities and livelihoods (check out our blog on the Sasan coal project in India).

But our pleas were callously ignored as President Hochberg okay-ed a massive expansion of coal finance in every corner of the globe. From Kusile in South Africa, to Sasan in India, to Xcoal in the U.S., to the recently proposed mines in Australia, it appears that Ex-Im Bank cares little for the environmental damage the institution is causing around the world — not to mention the reputation of this administration.

The problem, however, is that the public does. And that public stretches from Australia where the mining would take place, to India where the coal would be burned, to the U.S. where the financing would come from. This global outcry was captured in part by Avaaz’s petition to #savethereef (consider taking a minute to contact Fred Hochberg personally via twitter: @fredhochberg), but also by media scrutiny in India, the U.S., the UK and Australia. It appears that while President Hochberg may consider designations like “World Heritage Site” pesky obstacles, the global public considers them treasures.

Which is why Greenpeace Australia’s recent report on massive coal export expansion plans that would trample the Great Barrier Reef — and the global climate — was so damning. They found that if underwritten by institutions like Ex-Im Bank, the world would add emissions equivalent to a country the size of Canada while increasing traffic through one of the world’s greatest natural wonders. For an excellent visual representation of this lunacy check out Greenpeace’s short video:

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Mitt Romney’s reversals on almost every substantive issue have been well documented, including on climate and energy. Now we can add another example to the list.

Flush with millions of dollars in campaign cash from the fossil fuel industry, Romney has developed an energy plan devoted almost exclusively to oil, gas, and coal production. Meanwhile, he has mocked climate change in speeches and has called vehicle efficiency targets that would dramatically reduce petroleum consumption “extreme.”

But in 2005, while governor of Massachusetts, Romney’s number one energy priority was to lower oil use through efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy promotion. In a 2005 interview with Hardball’s Chris Matthews, Romney outlined his strong desire to lower oil consumption — including offering government incentives for efficiency measures:

ROMNEY:  It‘s going to be a tough winter, for two reasons.  One, the price of heating oil is going to be high, and number two, we are not going to have as much natural gas as we are used to, and that‘s because of what‘s happened in the Gulf.  As a result, people are going to have to turn down their thermostats, we are going to have to do a lot in terms of insulation and conservation, and we‘re going to have to also have financial support from the state government and the federal government, and we‘ve just put in place a program to put in tens of millions of dollars in support for the poor, for those who are on fixed incomes and that are poor.

Ultimately, however, we have got to learn to use a lot less oil in this country, and that‘s efficiency.  That‘s conservation, that‘s automobiles that use less energy.

Today, Romney has completely reversed course on this position — even while polls show that far more Americans support promoting renewable energy and efficiency instead of fossil fuels.

This dramatic change is not surprising considering the amount of money Romney has taken from the fossil fuel industry. According to a New York Times analysis, pro-fossil fuel groups have donated $13 million directly to the Romney campaign or to political action groups supporting Romney. That compares to just $78,000 for the Obama campaign.

In addition, outside interest groups have spent $153 million on campaign ads promoting oil, gas and coal while criticizing renewable energy.

And so, Romney has tailored his message accordingly, now saying that more oil production is the answer: “The best thing we can do to get the price of gas to be more moderate and not have to be dependent upon the cartel is: drill in the gulf, drill in the outer continent shelf, drill in ANWR, drill in North Dakota, South Dakota, drill in Oklahoma and Texas,” he continues repeating.

In fact, history has shown that more drilling will not necessarily lower gas prices for Americans. An Associated Press analysis of 36 years of data showed no statistical correlation between increased drilling and lower gas prices. Even today, with U.S. oil production at its highest level since 1997, gas prices continue to hover near historic highs.

According to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, the only way to protect Americans from gas price spikes is to use less oil through efficiency and conservation — exactly what Romney wanted to do before he outsourced his messaging to the fossil fuel industry.

(Hat tip to Brad Johnson for flagging).

Full transcript:
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by Andrew Winston

Here’s a surprising new fact about energy in the United States: the percentage of our electricity coming from the greenest sources — that is, the non-hydroelectric renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal and biomass — has doubled in just four years to nearly 6 percent.

This significant win for clean energy has gone mostly unnoticed in the press. If anything, the story has been the opposite: recent reports herald the decline of wind, and for a year the media has made a big deal out of the demise of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra.

Given this negative drumbeat, it’s not surprising that the business world tends to perceive renewable energy as an altruistic, rather than fiscally prudent, investment. But this view is dead wrong. The renewable energy industry is growing very fast… and not because it’s a philanthropic effort.

Let’s look at the plight of solar panel manufacturers again. Every growing industry experiences painful shakeouts driven by rising competition. In the case of solar, vast investments in production capacity in China have quickly brought down the cost of panels — a jaw-dropping 65 percent slide in just 18 months. This is good news for people buying solar, but it’s not great for many manufacturers. By lowering the “China price,” the world’s low-cost manufacturer is doing to solar what it did to the apparel and electronics sectors: driving higher-cost producers (usually in the West) out of business.

Aside from China’s role specifically, all of this should look familiar to any students of business history. Adam Shor studies the solar sector for the Electric Power Research Institute. As he put it to me, “Show me a mature industry with more than five big players.” In the most oft-cited parallel example, a century ago there were hundreds of car manufacturers.

But all of this context misses a critical point that most businesspeople are overlooking: problems for manufacturers do not equal problems for the entire sector.

Jigar Shah, a well-known clean tech entrepreneur and former CEO of the Carbon War Room, gave me this perspective: Solar cell manufacturers account for only three percent of the roughly 100,000 U.S. jobs in the solar sector. Another quarter make other components and the rest, making up a large, growing and local job base, work elsewhere in the value chain. Thus the fastest growing players are young companies that sell, install and service solar: soon-to-be household names like SunEdison (which Shah founded), SunRun, Sungevity, and SolarCity. In a lengthy article on these solar entrepreneurs, The New York Times recently reported that Sungevity, for example, has seen its revenues explode 16-fold in just two years.

So back to this doubling of the share of electricity. Once technologies take off, doublings can happen pretty fast — just ask the investors in the Internet, mobile or social media. Will renewables’ share double every 4 years? As Shah pointed out to me, the solar business is growing 30 percent per year (see the Solar Energy Industries Association site for general info in the U.S. solar market). Here’s a math check: doubling every 4 years requires 19 percent annual growth.

The power of exponential growth and economic tipping points work wonders: in just three more doublings in share, non-hydro renewables would provide nearly half of our electricity needs — more than we get from coal or natural gas today.

The scale and pace of change I’m describing is not a fantasy — it has already happened elsewhere. Portugal transformed its electric grid from 17 percent renewables to 45 percent in just five years (as of 2010). And in the first half of 2012, renewables provided over 25 percent of Germany’s electricity. On one sunny day this past May, Germany set a world record by generating 50 percent of its peak electricity needs solely from solar power. Shah predicts that next spring, the number will be closer to 70 percent.

It was easy to write off renewable energy as a side show at one or two percent of total electricity generation. But it isn’t good business to ignore it now, as the economics get better and better. Making the assumption that solar or all green energy won’t work because one company didn’t pan out is absurd. In 2000, were all technology investments poor bets because Pets.com went under?

The cost of using renewable energy, either through power purchasing agreements that cost nothing up front or through direct investment, is dropping fast. This reality changes the calculus on green energy for homeowners, governments and corporations alike. Upfront costs are falling, which makes the ongoing variable cost of renewables — that is, zero — even more attractive. Better yet, zero is a predictable cost, which CFOs love.

In recent years, several corporate energy managers have told me that when they run the numbers on renewables, the payback just isn’t quick enough.

I’d suggest running the numbers again.

Andrew Winston is the co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of Green Recovery. He advises some of the world’s biggest companies on environmental strategy. Follow him on Twitter at @AndrewWinston. This piece was originally published at Harvard Business Review and was reprinted with permission from the author.

by Whitney Allen

One of the biggest barriers to entry for renewables is dealing with utilities working to maintain control over energy distribution in their given region. These companies often feel threatened by emerging “green” utilities that produce and distribute energy that comes exclusively from renewable sources.

Enter Georgia Solar Utilities Inc, or GaSU. It has just presented a proposal to the Georgia Public Service Commission to begin a utility scale solar project that will allow it to sell clean, renewable energy directly to customers. The kicker? The company says it can deliver the electricity at a lower cost to customers than their would-be competitors.

The claim comes from the company’s energy deployment strategy. The plan is for GaSU to produce electricity from large-scale solar PV farms and then sell that to Georgia Power. The company would then use some of those profits to pay Georgia Power for access to the grid. Any additional profits left over would be offered as rebates to customers. GaSU plans on taking advantage of the Investment Tax Credit to be able to quickly and efficiently establish these large solar projects.

The supply for GaSU’s power will come from a proposed 90 MW facility, which would be three times as large as the Simon Solar Program, the state’s largest approved solar farm. The projected cost of the new farm is $320 million and is said to open up opportunity for “hundreds of jobs” during its construction.

But all this assumes it can get approval from the state to operate as a utility. But a major barrier is the 1973 Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act, which effectively gives the state’s largest utility, Georgia Power, a monopoly on utility services. Previous attempts at changing utility legislation have met strong opposition.

If the law was amended and GaSU was allowed to operate in Georgia, it could open up the state’s tremendous green energy potential. Georgia Power only just brought its first large solar farm online this July with a capacity of 1 MW, enough power for about 300 homes. Georgia Power has bought into three more large solar projects that promise to provide the company with 50 MW by 2015. While this would be a significant step up from the state’s current level of 18MW of solar production, it is still a tremendous under-utilization of a resource that could meet 31% of the state’s energy needs from rooftop solar alone. Currently, about 5% of Georgia’s total energy production comes from renewables.

If allowed to go forward, GaSU’s long term plans are to expand from 90 MW to over 2 GW, enough to provide power to between 330,000 and 670,000 American homes. In its proposal, GaSU stressed that it wanted the PSC to “recognize the value to ratepayers from their supplying solar power under an innovative business structure and to grant GaSU the right to undertake utility scale solar development in Georgia.”

Interestingly, GaSU’s motion may have already had an impact on Georgia Power’s policies. Last Wednesday, just days after GaSU’s proposal, Georgia Power announced that it would be taking steps to increase the state’s solar use. The Georgia Power Advanced Solar Initiative would be one of the largest voluntary steps to increase solar production by any independent utility. The plan is to expand Georgia Power’s current solar generation by 210 MW in three years. It’s an admirable step, but one that SEIA, the national solar trade association, says doesn’t go quite far enough. SEIA praised Georgia Power’s decision, but said that the state could do more to encourage solar growth across the state, including adding more support for small-scale distributed generation projects and, importantly, including policies that “allow for other solar providers to participate in the market.”

by Daniel J. Weiss

In the 2008 presidential debates, moderators Tom Brokaw (2^nd debate) and Bob Schieffer (3^rd debate) asked presidential nominees Barack Obama and John McCain about climate change and reducing American dependence on oil.  Both candidates vigorously supported reductions in carbon pollution, though the means to that end differed.

Since that election, the scientific evidence that climate change is real and human caused has only grown.  The health impact and economic costs of the extreme weather events and record temperatures of 2010, 2011, and 2012 are a 10-alarm warning that climate change poses a real threat to Americans and the world. And unlike in 2008, there is a clear difference between the candidates on whether to slow this looming disaster, let alone how to solve it.

The first 2012 Presidential debate in Denver on October 3^rd is scheduled to cover the economy. Our energy future and response to climate change is as relevant to jobs, taxes, spending, and deficits as any other questions. A coalition of environmental groups just delivered 160,000 signatures to first debate moderator Jim Lehrer to “urging him to ask President Obama and Governor Romney about climate change during the first presidential debate next week.” Hopefully Lehrer will respond to this public view by asking at least one question related to climate change and clean energy.

Since the candidates have very different positions on the issues, Lehrer should pose different questions to them. Below are some suggestions, along with some background information on them.

1. Governor Romney, as governor you acknowledged that climate change was real and human induced.  Since then the scientific consensus behind this finding has only grown stronger, including a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report that determined that the “climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities.”

What scientific evidence led to your recent questioning of the scientific consensus that climate change is real and human induced?  And what evidence led to your current opposition to any carbon pollution reduction program?

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A few months after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was poised to approve hydraulic fracturing in several struggling New York counties, his administration is reversing course and starting the regulatory process over, garnering praise from environmental groups and stirring anger among industry executives and upstate landowners. [New York Times]

In the past five years, the fact that human-generated carbon emissions are making the ocean more acidic has become an urgent cause of concern to the fishing industry and scientists. [Washington Post]

Democrats and independent voters overwhelmingly accept the scientific evidence that human activity is warming the earth’s temperature, while almost two out of three Republicans don’t. [Bloomberg]

A proposal to require that Michigan utilities steadily boost their use of renewable energy sources over the next dozen years is stirring a whirlwind of competing claims about costs, jobs and spinoff issues that could leave voters dizzy with confusion. [Associated Press]

No charges will be brought against the federal scientist regarding his high-profile research on polar bears, despite a two-and-a-half year investigation, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. [PEER]

The Government has been accused of being “reckless and short-sighted” over green policies, as it was warned there were just 50 months to take action to prevent catastrophic climate change. [UK Press Association]

Shell Oil President Marvin Odum says he considers this year’s set backs in the Arctic a temporary impediment in the long-term quest to open a petroleum frontier. [Associated Press]

Nearly half of Yemenis go to bed hungry as political instability compounds a surge in global food and fuel prices, giving Yemen the world’s third-highest rate of child malnutrition, the World Food Program said Sunday. [New York Times]

The Kremlin is watching, European nations are rebelling, and some suspect Moscow is secretly bankrolling a campaign to derail the West’s strategic plans. It’s not some Cold War movie; it’s about the U.S. boom in natural gas drilling. [Associated Press]

I previously dubbed the manufactured political outrage about the Department of Energy’s clean energy loan guarantee program the “Solyndra Standard.” While legislators and candidates hammer away at supposed “taxpayer giveaways,” they completely ignore the billions of dollars in defense boondoggles, fossil fuel subsidies, and agricultural subsidies — all of which dwarf investments like those to Solyndra.

The graphic below illustrates this double standard quite well. Personally, I wouldn’t tell the House to “shut its face,” as Dave Llorens of Solar Power Rocks does. After all, I do believe strongly in Congress doing its job and looking into whether programs like this are working for taxpayers. The problem is that the Solyndra “investigation” has turned into a complete political circus with no proof of any wrongdoing. Rather than an actual investigation, it’s become a messaging platform against Obama during an election year — and even Republicans have admitted they’ll stop after the campaign season winds down.

And so, here’s how that $535 million stacks up with some other major expenditures:

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