The American Legislative Exchange Council is a “stealth business lobbyist,” according to the New York Times. It has been bleeding corporate and business members over the last year due to controversial legislation it has promoted on issues ranging from voter suppression to minimum wage laws.

ALEC often acts as a kind of factory for template legislation enacting right-wing policy priorities, and the bills then show up in state legislatures — often pushed by state-level lawmakers who are themselves ALEC’s members. They’ve included bills to repeal minimum wage laws, dismantle unions, undo capital gains and estate taxes, get rid of paid sick days, increase obstacles to voting, and even push the “stand your ground” laws made infamous by the death of Trayvon martin.

Thanks to bad press over the last two efforts in particular, companies as prominent as General Electric, Amazon.com, Coca-Cola, and Walmart have abandoned the group, for a total of at least 37 departures as of August 2012 — though others such as ExxonMobile and Koch Industries remain loyal.

Now, as E&E News reports, ALEC’s oppositional stance on renewable energy policy has lost it two big names in renewable energy as well. The Solar Energy Industries Association allowed its membership to expire last fall, and the American Wind Energy Association dropped out earlier this month:

The American Wind Energy Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association joined the industry-backed coalition for a year because they wanted a “seat at the table” to discuss hot energy issues, said AWEA spokesman Peter Kelley.

But the groups decided to drop out after ALEC adopted the “Electricity Freedom Act” model bill in October, which would end requirements that utilities generate a set amount of electricity from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. SEIA allowed its one-year membership to expire last fall, and AWEA dropped out earlier this month.

SEIA’s decision to drop out was also fueled by ALEC’s refusal to take up a SEIA proposal to ease permitting costs for distributed generation, said Carrie Cullen-Hitt, a senior vice president for the solar industry group. “We didn’t get very far with that,” Cullen-Hitt said.

Now, AWEA is warning state lawmakers not to be taken in by ALEC’s message, one that Kelley said is driven by fossil fuel companies. He pointed out that conservative think tank and climate skeptic Heartland Institute told The Washington Post last year that it had joined ALEC to write language to revise state renewable energy mandates in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

The state renewable energy standards the Electricity Freedom Act would undo require utilities to produce a defined portion of their energy from wind, solar, and other renewable sources. Those requirements have driven the advancement of clean energy economies and lower carbon emissions throughout the United States, resulting in cost savings, new investment, and new jobs.

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1) Concentrated Solar Power 2) Saltwater greenhouses 3) Outside vegetation and evaporative hedges 4) Photovoltaic Solar Power 5) Salt production 6) Halophytes 7) Algae production

The first pilot plant in a program of installations that can sustainably produce crops, electricity, biofuels, and even plants for re-vegetation efforts in a desert environment is now up and running in the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar.

The Sahara Forest Project, which brings outfits from both Qatar and Norway together, uses desert air, sunlight, and saltwater as inputs for a system that aims to be environmentally sustainable, beneficial for local human development, and financially viable over the long term. As the project’s CEO, Joakim Hauge, puts it: “The Sahara Forest Project is all about taking what we have enough of, like saltwater, CO2, sunlight, and deserts, to produce what we need more of: sustainably produced food, water, and energy.” The hope is that the pilot project can be scaled up to installations in drier and desert climates around the world.

Essentially, the plant takes multiple sustainable technologies and integrates their inputs and outputs into a single multistage system, thus minimizing both waste and ecological footprint:

• Standard solar power and concentrated solar power: Arrays of mirrors create concentrated solar power by aiming sunlight to superheat seawater into steam. That steam can then drive turbines to create electricity, and the heated seawater is then used throughout the greenhouse system. Additional sustainable electricity is generated from arrays of standard solar photovoltaic panels.
• Saltwater for fresh water and cool air for greenhouses: Hot desert air is pulled through a flow of seawater as it enters the greenhouses. This both cools and humidifies the air, creating optimal growing conditions for the agricultural crops within. At the far end of the greenhouse, the air is heated by flows of sun-heated seawater and then encounters pipes of cooled seawater, which causes the humidity to condense into fresh water that is then used for crop irrigation.
• Outdoor vegetation: Outside the greenhouses, the seawater passes through further evaporators to create humidity for vegetation sheltered outdoors. These include trees for desert reforestation, local vegetation, various forms of crops and livestock feed, and specific forms of plants naturally adapted to salt water which serve as feedstocks for bioenergy production and other uses. At the end, remaining seawater is collected into evaporation pools for the production of salt.
• Algae biofuel production: Lab-grown algae, which have been shown to generate up to 30 times more biofuel per acre than other plants, are grown in saltwater pools to create biofuels without taking up agricultural land or crops that double as food for humans.

The basic advantage of the Sahara Forest Project is that it doesn’t use any fundamentally new or experimental technology — it merely recombines established technologies in creative ways.

At the same time, at least one of its goals — growing plants for reforestation — may be overly ambitious. “Trying to grow trees in the Sahara desert is not the most appropriate approach,” Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told National Geographic back in 2010. “I can imagine that this scheme and type of technology in limited cases might work in certain areas like Dubai, where they’re used to making palm-shaped islands and 160-story-tall buildings.”

But for the more modest goal of returning a desert to its natural former ecosystem, “it would be more effective, but less flashy, to work with local people on community-based natural-resource management.”

Al Gore’s new book, The Future, isn’t mostly about climate change. In fact, global warming is only one of the “Six drivers of global change.”

Others drivers include globalization, the internet (surprise, surprise) and “the reinvention of life and death” from the genomic, biotech, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions.

Any Gore book is worth reading — Our Choice is one of the best books on climate solutions — and The Future is no exception. Let me cut to the chase on climate and energy.

In his discussion of why the climate bill failed after passing the U.S. House, Gore takes a different view of one recent academic essay and slams the White House:

… the obsolete and dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate empowered a minority to kill it in that chamber. Senators in both parties said privately  that passage of the climate plan might have been within reach but it seemed to them that President Obama was not prepared to make the all-out effort that would have been necessary to build a coalition in support of the plan. Earlier, he had chosen to make healthcare reform his number one priority, and the badly broken U.S. political system produced a legislative gridlock on his health plan that lasted until the midterm campaign season began, leaving no time for even Senate discussion of the climate change issue.

By then, Obama and his political team in the White House had apparently long since made a sober  assessment of the political risks involved in states where the power of the fossil fuel industries would punish him for committing himself to the passage of this plan.  So, instead, when his opponents in Congress took up the cry “drill, baby, drill,” the president proposed expansion of oil drilling–even in the Arctic Ocean–and opened up more public land to coal mining. For these and other reasons, the positive impacts of the energy and climate proposals with which he began his presidency were nearly overwhelmed by his sharp turn toward a policy that he described as an “all of the above” approach–one that has contributed to the increased reliance on carbon-rich fossil fuels.

Precisely.

Gore has a long discussion on one new source of fossil fuels in particular, natural gas from fracking. The whole discussion is thoughtful and well worth reading.

Here is what the Nobel-Prize winning former VP concludes:

Years ago I was among those who recommended the greater use of conventional natural gas as a bridge fuel to phase out coal use more quickly while solar and wind technologies were produced at sufficient scale to bring their price down even more. However, it is increasingly clear that the net effect of shale gas on the environment may ultimately be inconsistent with its use as a bridge fuel. Global society as a whole would find it difficult to make the enormous investments necessary to switch from coal to gas, and then turn right around and make equally significant investments to substitute were nubile technologies for gas. It strains credulity. In other words, it may be a bridge to nowhere.

Again, precisely.

So many recent futurist books ignore or downplay the polar bear in the room, which isn’t a mistake Gore makes. I highly recommend The Future as one of the most comprehensive and readable books on the subject written in recent years.

Related Post:

• Bridge To Nowhere? NOAA Confirms High Methane Leakage Rate Up To 9% From Gas Fields, Gutting Climate Benefit

Without significant new steps to reduce carbon pollution, our planet will warm by 7 to 11°F by the end of the century, with devastating consequences for wildlife.

National Wildlife Federation executive summary and news release for new report, “Wildlife in a Warming World.”

Our nation’s plants, fish, and wildlife are already facing a climate crisis.

Pine trees in the Rocky Mountains are being jeopardized by beetle infestations, while new forests are encroaching on the Alaskan tundra. East coast beaches and marshes are succumbing to rising seas, especially in places where development prevents their natural migration landward. Polar bears, seals, and walrus are struggling to survive in a world of dwindling sea ice, which is their required habitat. Birds and butterflies have had to shift their breeding season and the timing of their seasonal migrations. Fish are dying by the thousands during intense and lengthy droughts and heat waves. Many plant and wildlife species are shifting their entire ranges to colder locales, in many cases two- to three-times faster than scientists anticipated.

Now is the time to confront the causes of climate change.

Without significant new steps to reduce carbon pollution, our planet will warm by 7 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, with devastating consequences for wildlife. America must be a leader in taking swift, significant action to reduce pollution and restore the ability of farms, forests, and other natural lands to absorb and store carbon. This means rapidly deploying clean, renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal and sustainable bioenergy, while curbing the use of dirty energy reserves. And it means reducing the carbon pollution from smokestacks that is driving the climate change harming wildlife.

Wildlife conservation requires preparing for and managing climate change impacts.

Because of the warming already underway and the time it will take to transform our energy systems, we will be unable to avoid many of the impacts of climate change. Our approaches to wildlife conservation and natural resource management need to account for the new challenges posed by climate change. We must embrace forward- looking goals, take steps to make our ecosystems more resilient, and ensure that species are able to shift ranges in response to changing conditions. At the same time, we need to protect our communities from climate-fueled weather extremes by making smarter development investments, especially those that employ the natural benefits of resilient ecosystems.

Only by confronting the climate crisis can we sustain our conservation legacy.

The challenges that climate change poses for wildlife and people are daunting. Fortunately, we know what’s causing these changes and we know what needs to be done to chart a better course for the future. As we begin to see whole ecosystems transform before our very eyes, it is clear that we have no time to waste.

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As of the end of 2011, China was burning nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined. [WaPo]

China’s coal use grew 9 percent in 2011, rising to 3.8 billion tons. At this point, the country is burning nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined.

Coal, of course, is the world’s premier fossil fuel, a low-cost source of electricity that kicks a lot of carbon-dioxide up into the atmosphere. And China’s growing appetite is a big reason why global greenhouse-gas emissions have soared in recent years, even as the United States and Europe have managed to curtail their coal use and cut their carbon pollution.

Millions of people worldwide are fleeing their homes because of environmental disasters. But the conditions in which the refugees have to take up residence in neighboring countries isn’t regulated by international law. [DW]

A new study by the National Wildlife Federation has concluded that climate change in the United States is happening much faster than many of its animal species are able to respond and adapt. [USA Today]

With its carbon cap-and-trade system now up and running, California — the most populous state in the U.S. and the ninth biggest economy in the world — is ahead of the rest of the country in taking action on climate change. [Time]

While air travel only accounts for an estimated 5 percent of global carbon emissions, that share is expected to grow as air travel becomes cheaper and more accessible. [The Economist]

According to a study by researchers at the Zoological Society of London and others, a mangrove forest shared by India and Bangladesh that’s home to possibly 500 Bengal tigers is being rapidly destroyed by erosion, rising sea levels and storm surges. [The Guardian]