Earth Day is April 22, and today is the last day children in Utah can send in their submissions for the state-sponsored Earth Day poster contest lauding fossil fuel production.

This year’s theme is “Where Would WE Be Without Oil, Gas & Mining?”

Last year’s theme was “How Do YOU Use Oil, Gas, and Mining?”

The contest is literally made possible by fossil fuel interests. This year’s sponsors include the Salt Lake Petroleum Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining. Last year’s sponsor list was longer, including Arch Coal, Anadarko Petroleum, and Rio Tinto/Kennecott Utah Copper.

Any child in Utah between Kindergarten and sixth grade is eligible. The contest’s primary objective is “to improve students’ and the public’s awareness of the important role that oil, gas, and mining play in our everyday lives.” Last year’s contest winners made posters that detailed how dependent we have become on fossil fuels. To their credit, the grand prize winner detailed both ways we use products created by fossil fuels and ways we can reduce our consumption.

The children were not asked to make posters about the climate impacts caused by those same fossil fuels: drought, wildfires, and warmer winters.

Some parents are not happy, as this letter to the editor by Colby Poulson makes clear:

Why is the state backing an “Earth Day” contest that celebrates fossil fuels, while completely ignoring the adverse effects that their use and extraction can too often have on our air quality, water quality, public lands and the other organisms we share the world with? Shouldn’t Earth Day be about championing things that can help reverse the negative impact of our dependence on fossil fuels?

Frankly, I’m disgusted that the state is backing propaganda like this in our schools.

Why allow a contest like this to run two years in a row? The state could be taking its cues from its Congressional delegation, one of whom runs the House Science subcommittee and denies the reality of human-caused climate change. Or its state legislature, which in 2010 adopted a resolution doubting the reality of climate change.

Perhaps they missed the Salt Lake Tribune‘s editorial, “A killing climate: Global warming unchecked,” or those Utah scientists who reported:

Based on extensive scientific research, there is very high confidence that human-generated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations are responsible for most of the global warming observed during the past 50 years. It is very unlikely that natural climate variations alone, such as changes in the brightness of the sun or carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes, have produced this recent warming. …

Utah is projected to warm more than the average for the entire globe and the expected consequences of this warming are fewer frost days, longer growing seasons, and more heat waves.

Appropriately, the winners of the Earth Day poster contest will be notified on April Fool’s Day.

Yes, The Modern Instruments Are Right. Just Ask The Coral. Or The Caves. Or The Ice Cores. Or The….

Climate deniers claim you can’t trust thermometers because they changed locations or are too close to warmer urban environments. They have tried and failed to disprove millions of temperature observations all over the world. But the myth still persists.

Here’s some good news for science: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, the University of South Carolina, the University of Colorado, and the University of Bern in Switzerland have found that the warming trend can be revealed using not a single thermometer:

A new compilation of temperature records etched into ice cores, old corals, and lake sediment layers reveals a pattern of global warming from 1880 to 1995 comparable to the global warming trend recorded by thermometers. This finding, reported by a team of researchers from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, the University of South Carolina, the University of Colorado, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, resolves some of the uncertainty associated with thermometer records, which can be affected by land use changes, shifts in station locations, variations in instrumentation, and more.

“Using only temperature-sensitive paleoclimate proxy records, un-calibrated to instrument data, it is possible to conclude that the warming trend in the global surface temperature record is supported by independent evidence,” said David Anderson, head of the Paleoclimatology Branch at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and lead author of the paper. The new research is detailed in “Global Warming in an Independent Record of the Past 130 Years,” published online this week in Geophysical Research Letters.

The thermometer-based global surface temperature record provides meaningful evidence of global warming over the past century, and it is critical to have independent analyses, like this one, to verify that record. For this analysis, the team used environmentally sensitive proxies to compile a temperature record that is independent of thermometer-based records. Proxies such as coral growth layers, shells of tiny marine plankton, lake sediments, ice cores, and caves are biologically, physically, or chemically connected to environmental conditions. For example, coral skeletons and plankton shells record temperature changes in the ratio of oxygen isotopes.

This paleoclimate dataset used 173 independent proxy datasets to draw a record from 1730 to 1995. To ensure the paleoclimate dataset was independent of the instrumental record, the scientists used raw data rather than reconstructed temperatures. Paleoclimate records and trends are affected by multiple environmental influences, not just warming, and the scientists minimized non-temperature influences by averaging together many records.

“The correlation of this paleoclimate dataset with the global surface temperature record has important implications in climate science and provides evidence of the significance of paleoclimate research,” said Thomas Karl, Director NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. “Temperature reconstructions, like this one, continue to play a significant role in understanding the global climate by quantitatively extending the record back in time in an independent, objective way.”

In addition to their shared long-term trend, many smaller-scale features also appear in both the paleoclimate and instrument temperature records. For example, the warm interval of the 1940s in the global surface temperature record also appears in the paleoclimate record. Both records also show that the global warming in the last 15 years of the record (1980–1995) is significantly faster than that of the long-term trend (1880–1995).

This piece was excerpted from a NOAA news release.

Related Posts:

• Recent Warming Is “Amazing And Atypical” And Poised To Destroy Stable Climate That Enabled Civilization
• Koch-Funded Study Finds “Global Warming Is Real” And “On The High End” And “Essentially All” Due To Carbon Pollution

By Ron Pernick

2012 proved to be an unsettling and difficult year for clean energy. High-profile bankruptcies and layoffs plagued many clean-tech companies, overall venture investments retreated in the face of increasingly elusive returns, and the industry was begrudgingly transformed into a partisan wedge issue during the U.S. presidential campaign.

But as we highlight in our just-released Clean Energy Trends 2013 report, the fundamental global market drivers for clean technology remain largely intact. Intensifying resource constraints loom large. Unprecedented climate disruption in the U.S. and abroad is putting resiliency and adaptation front and center. And President Obama has signaled a strong commitment to expanding clean energy and energy efficiency in his second term, calling for another doubling of renewable power by 2020. Similar commitments exist in China, Japan, and the European Union.

The report found that lower prices for many clean-tech goods and services, combined with a renewed focus on scalable projects, resulted once again in record annual solar, wind, and biofuels deployment. Against this continued expansion, however, combined global revenue for solar PV, wind power, and biofuels expanded just one percent, from $246.1 billion in 2011 to $248.7 billion in 2012. This marginal growth was one of the many consequences of rapidly declining solar PV prices.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $95 billion in 2012, up from $83 billion the previous year. From 2011 to 2012, global biofuels production expanded from 27.9 billion gallons to 31.4 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel.
• Wind power (new installation capital costs) expanded to $73.7 billion in 2012, up from $71.5 billion the previous year. Global wind capacity additions totaled 44.7 GW (gigawatts) in 2012, a record year led by more than 13 GW added in both China and the U.S., and an additional 12.4 GW of new capacity in Europe.
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) decreased from a record $91.6 billion in 2011 to $79.7 billion in 2012 as continued growth in annual capacity additions was not enough to offset falling PV prices. While total market revenues fell 19 percent — the first PV market contraction in Clean Energy Trends’ 12-year history – global installations expanded to a record of 30.9 GW in 2012, up from 29.6 GW the prior year.
• Together, we project these three sectors will continue to grow over the next decade, nearly doubling from $248.7 billion in 2012 to $426.1 billion in 2022.



In many ways the shift to cleaner sources couldn’t be clearer. Renewables and natural gas made up more than 80 percent of new electricity capacity additions in the U.S. in 2012, with renewables coming in at 49 percent and natural gas at 33 percent. For the European Union, the renewables number is even higher, with solar in the driver’s seat. In 2012, newly installed solar PV accounted for 37 percent of all added capacity, followed by wind with a 26.5 percent share, and gas at 23 percent. In total, renewable sources represented more than 31 GW of the 44.6 GW of new generation capacity in the EU, roughly 70 percent of all new capacity for the second consecutive year.

Generating capacity is, of course, not the same as actual generation. But even in this regard, clean energy sources have moved past their days as rounding errors and are playing a significant role in meeting electricity demand in a number of global markets. Wind energy in Denmark blew past a 30 percent share of national electricity use in 2012, and an official target is in place to generate half of the nation’s power from wind by 2020. In Germany, clean energy already accounts for 25 percent of energy production — led by wind (9.2 percent), biomass (5.7 percent), and solar (5.3 percent) — and the country is aiming for 35 percent from renewables by 2020.

Clean energy continues to expand as a major economic force, with an increasing focus on deployment of readily available technologies.

Read more

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee has named a climate science denier congressman as the new chairman of the subcommittee responsible for climate change issues. With Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) as subcommittee chair, House Science has no shortage of climate deniers making science their prime target.

Stewart uses familiar Republican tactics to argue against cutting our greenhouse gas pollution: He told Mother Jones he is unconvinced anthropogenic global warming is “based upon sound science” — despite 97 percent of climate scientists saying otherwise — “before we make any long-lasting policy decisions that could negatively affect our economy.”

Stewart also told The Salt Lake Tribune:

“I’m not as convinced as a lot of people are that man-made climate change is the threat they think it is. I think it is probably not as immediate as some people do.” [...]

“What is the real threat? What are the economic impacts of those threats? And what are the economic impacts of those remedies?” he asked, explaining his approach. “Some of the remedies are more expensive to our economy than the threat may turn out to be.”

For more context of Stewart’s views, just look at where he is directing the subcommittee’s attention. At a hearing Wednesday, Stewart knocked the EPA’s extensive review of rules that protect the air and lamented that industry-funded research play too small a role at the agency. Not surprisingly, oil and gas was a top player in funding Stewart’s election to Congress.

Weeks ago, House Science attempted to hold a hearing stacked with climate deniers as witnesses (only to be foiled by bad weather that same day).

Back in Stewart’s home state, The Salt Lake Tribune has urged Utah leaders to take the opposite action. In a strong editorial, the paper pointed fingers at lawmakers for their ignorance, “blind or willful,” that has “transformed climate change into a political issue rather than the global threat it clearly is proving to be.”

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley

By Howard Marano and Michael Conathan

For the moment at least, the U.S. offshore wind industry has a new capital: Annapolis. By an 88 to 48 vote, the Maryland House of delegates handed Governor Martin O’Malley one of his most desired legislative victories — enactment of a bill that would earmark $1.7 billion for development of a wind farm in federal waters off Maryland’s coast, with the funding coming from up to a $1.50 monthly surcharge on consumers’ electricity bills. The bill, which passed the Senate earlier this month now heads to the Governor’s desk for signature into law.

The Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2013 has been one of O’Malley’s top goals for years, as he’s sought to take advantage of Maryland’s expanse of shallow water, its “outstanding” wind resources, and its existing industrial infrastructure — all of which make Maryland an ideal place for offshore wind.

Despite these prime features, development of offshore wind in Maryland, as in the rest of the country, has been a long time coming. In two previous legislative sessions O’Malley attempted unsuccessfully to shepherd his bill though the legislature, demonstrating the political hurdles standing in the way of development even in an environmentally friendly state. At first, opponents were able to torpedo the bill due to its cost. Then when proponents lowered the price cap to $1.50 in 2012, political wrangling sunk the bill as the clock expired on the legislative session.

Since O’Malley’s bill was first introduced in Maryland, the American onshore wind industry has seen tremendous growth. In fact, with the installation of 13,000 megawatts of new capacity, 2012 was a banner year for wind in the U.S. In contrast, not a single wind turbine has been installed off America’s coasts in that time. While the offshore wind industry in the U.S. has struggled to overcome financial, political, and bureaucratic hurdles, offshore wind in Europe and Asia has continued to expand. Maryland’s Offshore Wind Energy Act is meant to help reverse that trend.

Like its predecessors, the current bill would require that, within Maryland’s renewable energy portfolio standard program, a certain percentage of electricity be supplied by offshore wind starting in 2017. In order to protect consumers from excessive rate increases resulting from the higher costs of wind energy production, the bill creates a “window of maximum rate impacts for both residential and nonresidential electric customers.” Currently, this would amount to $1.50 per month for a household and a monthly surcharge of 1.5 percent for businesses. The new law is the first of its kind requiring direct subsidies from ratepayers, and was made politically palatable by a 2013 poll showing 72 percent of Maryland residents would be willing to pay $2 more per month for their electricity bills to develop an offshore wind industry.

The benefits of offshore wind in Maryland would still be substantial. The Governor’s office estimates the project would create 850 construction jobs and 160 supply and operation and maintenance jobs. According to an analysis completed by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, a 200 megawatt project would create $1.3 billion in economic activity over a five year period, generating $5.6 million in state tax revenue. And data from the National Academy of Sciences suggests Maryland stands to gain $17 million in annual public health benefits as a result of reduced fossil fuel use for electricity production.

The return on investment from any first-in-class offshore wind project will be just the tip of the iceberg. The Center for American Progress released a report in February detailing the overall benefits of developing a commercial scale offshore wind industry in the U.S. The report found that the investment required to develop an offshore wind industry would be far less than the federal government has spent on subsidizing fossil fuel industries, and that the cost to ratepayers could be as low as $0.25 per month.

While passage of the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act represents a victory for advocates of offshore wind, substantial obstacles still remain. Concessions made to secure the bill’s passage have caused industry analysts to warn that any project will be reliant on additional tax incentives to become profitable. Even Governor O’Malley has recognized this concern at a press conference, saying “I don’t believe any one state can do this by itself.”

Fortunately, Maryland won’t have to act on its own. Under President Obama, the Department of Energy has prioritized offshore wind, pursuing its “Smart from the Start” program that has already identified wind energy areas off the coasts of several northeast and mid-Atlantic states. And just last week, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced the latest step in granting the Commonwealth of Virgina a research lease for a wind energy area off its coast. Even Congress has gotten into the act, passing a one-year extension of key tax credits that move the industry a step closer to offshore wind production.

From Denmark to China, other countries have already realized the benefits of generating electricity from strong, consistent offshore winds and revitalizing sagging coastal economies. O’Malley’s legislation is an excellent step forward on both counts for his state and for the country.

Howard Marano is an intern with the Ocean Program and Michael Conathan is Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

By Li Shuo

Amid all the news about coal and pollution problems in China you might have missed this one: According to new statistics from the China Electricity Council, China’s wind power production actually increased more than coal power production for the first time ever in 2012.

Thermal power use, which is predominantly coal, grew by only about 0.3 percent in China during 2012, an addition of roughly 12 terawatt hours (TWh) more electricity. In contrast, wind power production expanded by about 26 TWh. This rapid expansion brings the total amount of wind power production in China to 100 TWh, surpassing China’s 98 TWh of nuclear power. The biggest increase, however, occurred in hydro power, where output grew by 196 TWh, bringing total hydro production to 864 TWh, due favorable conditions for hydro last year and increased hydro capacity. In addition, the growth of power consumption slowed down — in Chinese terms a modest increase of 5.5 percent — influenced by slower economic growth, and possibly the energy use targets for provinces set by the Chinese central government.

Coal still accounts for 79 percent of electricity production in China, but fortunately that dominance is increasingly challenged by competition from cleaner energy, as well as government policies and public concerns about air pollution. The Chinese government’s 12th five year energy plan (2011-2015) aims for coal to be reduced from 70 percent to 65 percent of energy production by 2015. In contrast, the Chinese government has ambitious targets for wind, solar, and hydro, and plans to increase the share of non-fossil fuels to 30 percent of installed electricity generating capacity by the end of 2015.

Expansion of the coal industry does not have many friends in China anymore. Major increases of coal power in recent years have created not only record climate emissions, but an unprecedented problem of air pollution and water overuse, triggering increased concern among the Chinese urban population and the central government. The record air pollution in January this year has changed the discussion about coal, and now prominent policymakers and opinion leaders, even vice-ministers, call for capping coal use, especially in the eastern populated and industrial areas of China. The air quality targets the government set for 2016 will require cutting coal pollution. Already last year the government set new strict standards for coal power emissions, requiring costly investments in filters. This year the government set new water use targets for provinces, which do not give much room for increased use of water for coal use in key provinces. Now the discussion is around controlling the total consumption of coal, in addition to emissions trading and resource taxes. The coal industry is surrounded by challenges.

There is another, very sobering side to the story, though: additions to coal power capacity, even if they have been slowing down in recent years, still stood at 50 GW last year, even more than investments in wind. So it seems that some of the total coal capacity was not used last year, due to higher coal and transport costs, and increased costs of environmental protection. The economic slowdown, and slowing growth of electricity use, has forced coal to compete with cheaper hydro and even wind. Companies will push to use that new coal capacity this year, so coal power could see some more growth this year than in 2012, unless there are strong mechanisms to cap the growth.

So while some of the conditions that helped new wind power production pass coal may not repeat this year, it is also clear that the coal industry will continue to be challenged and undermined by clean energy and by China’s new policy priorities to address the air pollution crisis.

Li Shuo is a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace East Asia, Beijing.

A new study finds that living in an energy-efficient home makes you one-third less likely to default on your mortgage. [E&E News (subs. required)]

Could double-pane windows lower your mortgage payments?

One day they might. Along with low-wattage lights, better insulation and smart appliances, living in an energy-efficient home makes you almost one-third less likely to default on your loan payments, according to a study released yesterday from the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. If banks include this factor when deciding on prospects, a home that shrinks your energy bills could also cut your mortgage rate. …

The report controlled for factors like the size of the home, its age, the borrower’s credit score, local unemployment rates, local climate and energy prices. Researchers paid special attention to loans that originated after 2006 and the types of loans disbursed to factor in the housing market collapse.

It turns out that Energy Star homes are 32 percent less likely to go into default. “We were expecting a number like 18 to 20 percent, to be honest,” Sahedi said. In fact, default risks go down as a home’s score on the Home Energy Rating System index goes up. Energy-efficient homes are also 25 percent less likely to prepay their loans, meaning lenders will make more money.

The new Chair of the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on the environment said: “I’m not as convinced as a lot of people are that man-made climate change is the threat they think it is.” [Salt Lake Tribune]

Climate groups are increasing pressure on the President to proceed with greenhouse-gas limits for new power plants, “as the utility industry seeks to weaken the standards before a deadline next month.” [Bloomberg]

A poll conducted in December found that 62 percent of Americans think the Earth is getting warmer, up from 55 percent last spring — and most base their opinions on the weather. [AP]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said clean energy jobs grew from 2010 to 2011 at four times the rate of all other categories combined. [LA Times]

Ceres’ Mindy Lubber outlines the overwhelming support Renewable Portfolio Standards have in the states, and the mystifying opposition they inspire. [Forbes]

White House energy and climate advisor Heather Zichal said that “ANWR’s off the table” when asked if the Administration would trade drilling in the refuge in exchange for passage of the Energy Security Ttrust Fund. [Washington Post]

Los Angeles is accelerating the conversion of its reliance on coal by dumping its interest in an Arizona coal plant and converting one in Utah to natural gas. [LA Times]

Transocean CEO Steven Newman admitted in court that his crew should have done more to prevent the blowout that caused the Deepwater Horizon spill. [New York Times]