Again, in the spirit of Oscar week:
10. Fahrenheit 451 — in the Shade
9. All the President’s Men were Wrong
8. To Kill a Mockingbird is Impossible Because they went Extinct
7. Independence Day [Sorry, that was a Top Global Warring Movie]
6. The Producers of Greenhouse Gases
5. Emission: Impossible
4. The Hypercane
3. An Underwater Streetcar named Desire
2. Some Don’t Like it Hot
1. The Rains of Kilimanjaro
More ideas for top global warming movie are welcome!
I try to keep the off topic stuff limited to the weekend, and since this website is hilarious, and it is a Saturday….
… no, it’s not Toyota (but don’t get me started). And no, it’s not Wal-Mart (I’ll be doing a piece on them later). No, it’s not GM, though they are trying hard, really hard. No, the winner, which has all the others over the proverbial barrel, is British Petroleum.
This was pretty clear when they invested in the tar sands last year, the “biggest global warming crime ever seen.” The Guardian provides more details, explaining that the new CEO Tony Hayward, is taking the company back to the past: “The shift to renewables has been ditched for a carbon intensive future.” They write:
BP appears to be dropping a central plank of [Lord John] Browne’s strategy, the green promise to go “beyond petroleum”, in favour of going back to petroleum – a move which many believe has riled the former boss. In what some saw as a thinly veiled criticism, Browne argued at a recent conference that some energy groups were “in denial” over the need to clean up their carbon output.
Browne understands the future for “carbon billionaires” and renewable power “majors,” even if Hayward doesn’t:
USA Today reports on an important review article:
The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era….
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”
Now this isn’t really news to readers of Climate Progress or Real Climate (here and here) or William Connolley, but the global cooling nonsense is still the most common way people dismiss global warming to me. Michael Crichton repeats this attack in his novel State of Fear, when he has one of his fictional environmentalists say, “In the 1970′s all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming.“
This clever and popular attack tries to make present global-warming fears seem faddish, saying current climate science is nothing more than finger-in-the-wind guessing. This attack appeals especially to conservatives who want to link their attack on climate scientists to their favorite attack against progressive presidential candidates — that they are flip-floppers. But it just isn’t true, and it’s good to see this analysis is going to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). [I'll link to the study when it is up.]
Interestingly, USA Today gives famed denier Pat Michaels a chance to respond, but he makes a bizarrely lame argument, which, for anyone who understands the subject (or has read my book), should make one more worried about catastrophic global warming, not less:
A major new study in Science by a dozen water experts, concluded humans are the primary cause of changes in Western river flow, winter air temperature and snow pack in the past 50 years — and things will only get worse if we don’t act soon. The abstract of the study, “Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States” (subs. req’d), led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, states:
Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.
The study’s conclusion is stark:
Nothing is worse for the climate than large scale coal-to-liquids. Not even the tar sands. In September, the Chinese news agency said it would rein in liquid coal plants. A Guardian story yesterday puts the lie to that claim:
Nazi fuel. Has such an inviting ring to it.
The Chinese facility, operated by Shenhua Corporation, will be the first of its type in the world….
A study last year by the Chinese Academy of Sciences said: “Production of liquid fuels from coal is practically the most feasible route to cope with the dilemma in oil supply.”
I agree — if by feasible you mean, “will just about guarantee the end of the planet’s livability by 2100.”
Shame on the schizophrenic Chinese Academy, which in 2005 signed the Academies statement (along with the U.S., Russia, India, Brazil, and major European countries) that called for “substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions” — something that would be quite impossible with widespread use of Nazi fuel liquid coal.
At least two more commercial scale coal-to-liquids plants are under construction in China, although the Chinese government has expressed concern about the possible environmental impact of uncontrolled expansion, and has taken steps to limit the number of smaller facilities.
Oh, why didn’t you say that to begin with: The Chinese government “expressed concern” about environmental impacts and is limiting the number of “smaller” facilities. That almost restores my faith in the wisdom of their leaders. Almost. Significant production of liquid coal would officially make their climate policy as immoral as ours. I fear that the figurative “U.S.-China Suicide Pact on Climate” I describe in my book is starting to become a literal one.
Capturing the carbon dioxide from liquid coal would reduce the negative consequences, though “would still produce at least 20% more carbon dioxide than petrol and diesel made from oil.” But, in any case, the Chinese plants are not designed for capture, even if they had some large, certified repository to put the carbon dioxide in, which they don’t. So the life cycle emissions will be “almost twice the carbon pollution as using conventional diesel.”
And putting this in dry Inner Mongolia doesn’t strike me as a terrific idea given that “the energy-intensive conversion plants also require massive amounts of cooling water to stop them overheating.”
I thought the Chinese were supposed to be wise and holistic, what with Confucius and Tai Chi and the I Ching and yin & yang and acupuncture, and inventing paper, movable type, the compass, silk, and porcelain, and all that. Turns out they are as dumb as us. Or maybe dumber. I mean, we would never go for something dubbed Nazi fuel … would we?
Related Posts:
That would be the title of An Inconvenient Truth, if it had been produced by the Coen brothers — since young men (and women) are poised to suffer through the worst consequences of our immoral short-sightedness. (This is not such an odd pairing of movies, considering that No Country star Tommy Lee Jones was the Harvard roommate of Al Gore).
I do think No Country for Old Men deserves the Oscar this Sunday for best movie of the year because it is brilliantly constructed and acted — and delivers a powerful, coherent message to all of us from the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy.
Yet this is easily one of the most depressing and nihilistic major movies ever made. On the nihilistic/life-affirming story scale, where Hamlet is a 1 and It’s a Wonderful Life is a 10, No Country is easily a zero, and perhaps deserves negative numbers.
Normally I do not like movies with an unhappy ending, and this movie arguably has about the unhappiest ending a movie of its kind could possibly have — but the movie did seem to me a perfect metaphor for modern American politics and global warming.
[You can read the basic plotline here. Since Wikipedia is untroubled by spoilers, with nary a warning, why should I be? Note to people who haven't seen the movie 1) I'm assuming you have figured out that when a film is titled No Country for Old Men, you can be sure it does not end well, and 2) this post will not make much sense to you.]
Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, in a career-relaunching role) stumbles upon a drug-deal gone bad and walks away with a case containing $2 million (and a transmitter). Let’s say he represents humanity, taking and burning the fossil fuel resources of the world. He is more ingenious than he at first seems, like humanity, but over the course of the movie he slowly realizes just what a terrible mistake he has made, how he has set himself on a path toward destroying himself and everyone he loves.
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in a chilling Oscar-nominated performance) is the relentless, consciousless killer who pursues him. Let’s say he represents both modern American politics and the consequences of global warming, both of which respect neither person nor place.
The local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, another terrific performance), though jaded by the mystery of modern evil, seems to be as smart as Chigurh, and the only one who can save Moss. Now I bet you’re thinking I’m going to say he represents Al Gore [don't worry, I know you're really thinking Joe has gone off his meds -- again]. But no!
Al Gore is, in fact, symbolically represented by Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) a bounty hunter who shows up briefly in the middle of the movie. Like Gore, he explains to Moss/humanity that Chigurh/warming is relentless and will prove fatal if Moss/humanity stays on its current path. Like Gore, Wells offers M/h a way out. And like Gore (so far), M/h chooses to ignore Wells until it is too late. [Okay, Gore hasn't been killed heartlessly by warming, but he is (or was) metaphorically killed by modern American politics -- if you're still with me and not, say, filing papers to have me committed.]
So who — or what — does Sheriff Bell represent? Here is where things get interesting….
Seven votes short of over-riding a veto, the Kansas House has passed legislation allowing two new coal-fired power plants in western Kansas. This is quite possibly the latest answer to that whiny question I usually hate – “What’s the matter with Kansas?”
What’s the matter is that bloody Kansas has again become a battleground between those looking forward and those stuck in the past – those who see an inevitable cap on greenhouse gas emissions and the possibility of a clean energy future versus those tangled up in dirty habits with deep pockets.
So deep in fact that the plants developers have cut a deal with Kansas State University for a 10-year, $2.5 million energy research program if the coal plants are built. (I can already imagine the Peabody Coal Co. blimps floating over the Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium the day of the big game. Oh wait, no, I can’t… there’s something dirty in the air obstructing my view and my breath, and oddly, I had to cut the sleeves off my favorite KSU sweatshirt – it just got unusually warm for this time of year…)
Shameless yet shameful, to even bribe education. Now if you ask me, that’s a hefty insult to the Midwestern values I grew up to pride.
The bottom line is, these plants are no good for Kansas. At this point, it almost seems symbolic that coal and anti-coal advocates continue this fight. For Kansans, it’s not difficult to see that there are better options for energy, job creation, economic development, etc.
First of all, the energy demand is simply not there – not in Kansas, and while Kansas would house these plants, Colorado would receive 85 percent of their generated electricity. (It’s also worth noting that Colorado has adopted a renewable electricity standard, meaning even the consumer of these coal plants is ahead of the curve in terms of cleaning their energy sources and dampening demand for dirty coal.)
Plus, the job creation potential of coal is dwarfed by the wind and solar industries‘ economic stimulation potential.
On top of that:
The only people behind the proposed coal-plants are the utilities and industry reps who would make money off of them. Nothing about this legislation and nothing about these plants is in the best interest of Kansans, and most know that intuitively, despite the propaganda being thrown at them and other voters.
Next, the Kansas House and Senate will try to conference legislation to win those additional seven votes. Not to say they would have worthwhile legislation afterwards. So I am stuck here desperately convincing myself that something about a ‘Lucky 7‘ will keep Kansas clean…
The conservative operative and wife of James Carville explained on CNN today why conservatives don’t like McCain’s views on global warming: It’s “a largely unscientific hoax.” Oh, well, then never mind.
Her husband takes a different view (duh): “What we need to do, as a party, is try our best to focus on those two issues, energy independence and global warming, above the other environmental and energy issues out there.”
So to him, global warming is the top environmental issue. To her it is a hoax. If they can be married, why can’t the Sunnis and Shiites live in harmony???
Okay, not only was the “Share This” button NOT causing any of the terrific people who read this blog (don’t be shy, you know who you are!) to send any of my posts to the social networking sites for popular consumption — but apparently some spammer was using it and the Mail feature for nefarious purposes. That was also artificially inflating my page view statistics, which I did not like.
So I decided to go with the Digg button plus counter. Please patronize this button!
If you like ClimateProgress and appreciate the daily content and would like more people to see it — now I sound like NPR during a pledge break, but hey at least I’m not asking for money — Digg the posts you like. The most popular stories rise to the top of the Digg page where millions of viewers will see them, becoming informed on global warming and ultimately saving the planet from general destruction. One does need a lot of Diggs to get noticed on, say, their environment page — but if Desmogblog can do it, why not ClimateProgress?
Once you sign up to Digg, it is incredibly easy — plus you will be able to enjoy all the benefits of Digg, including being able to meet people with similar interests and read blog posts others like.
Also this will give me instant feedback on how many people like a given article, so I can deliver better content.
In addition, I (or rather the brilliant web folks here) have also improved the Feed — and added an explanation of what that is — and even added a way to subscribe to the feed by e-mail, as some had requested.
More improvements will be coming.
I see no point whatsoever in passing a climate bill this year that includes a safety valve. I have blogged on this before, but it bears repeating as we appear to be getting to the endgame negotiations in the Senate on the Lieberman-Warner bill. Bottom line:
If you want to get a 60% to 80% greenhouse gas cut in four decades, you just can’t waste time with safety valves. We need to get to a price of $30 to $40 a ton for carbon dioxide as soon as possible — and if it needs to go higher than that because conservatives block the progressives and moderates from legislating aggressive technology deployment strategies that would keep costs low, well, as the saying goes, “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
If you just want to pass a bill that makes it seem like you’re doing something while in fact doing little, then go for it! But surely a year’s delay (waiting for a somewhat wiser Congress and an infinitely wiser President) is better than a pointless bill.
In an article, titled “Sponsors of Senate emissions bill seek compromise on cost provisions,” Greenwire (subs. req’d) reports today:
Senate sponsors of a major global warming bill are trying to find compromise on the vexing question of how to cap U.S. emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases without damaging the economy….
Electric utility companies, labor groups and several senators who hold critical votes on the measure still want to set some type of price ceiling on the annual price of a carbon credit….
“There’s a really serious conversation going on in a lot of venues about how this doesn’t become that last issue standing, and it’s a take-it-or-leave-it for environmentalists,” said Tim Profeta, a former senior aide to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)….
Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) opposes the inclusion of a “safety valve” in the climate bill originally drafted by Lieberman and Sen. John Warner (R-Va.)….
The safety valve is a favored concept among economists and business types who maintain that a set carbon ceiling gives them enough certainty that the new global warming program would not sink their businesses. They insist it can also help to assure nervous lawmakers about the limited economic effects of the legislation.
It is favored among people who simply don’t get how dire the situation is. You know, maybe 10 or 15 years ago we could have given a safety valve a chance, but you just can’t ignore scientists for three decades and then think it is going to be peaches and cream. We need the full dose of anti-biotics now, not some watered down dosage that allows the fever to fester.
In one bill introduced last year from Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), carbon prices in the cap-and-trade system would not go above $12 per ton in the first year. After that, the ceiling would rise 5 percent per year above the rate of inflation.
I believe it was $12 per ton of carbon dioxide – $12 per ton of carbon would be utterly meaningless. If you doubled that safety valve, $24 per ton of CO2 and 10% rise per year above inflation, that would probably be the lowest safety valve that could be tolerable — but again, waiting a year would still be better than a safety valve.
Yes, as Greenwire notes, “Three Republican senators — Specter and Alaska’s Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski — crossed a major threshold by signing up as cosponsors for the bill in part because of the safety valve,” but as I blogged earlier:
Last week, NYT climate Andy Revkin blogged about a federal laboratory that says it can take atmospheric carbon dioxide and turn it into gasoline:
One selling point with Los Alamos’s “Green Freedom” concept, and similar ones, is that reusing the carbon atoms in the captured CO2 molecules as a fuel ingredient avoids the need to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas.
The only problem with that exciting statement is that it is almost certainly not true, a point I will come back to.
Now the NYT has published an article on the subject that also overhypes the technology:
There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.
To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos scientists say they have developed a number of innovations….
Even with those improvements, providing the energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale — say, 750,000 gallons a day — would require a dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.
Hmm. Let’s see. Problem one: Motor gasoline consumption in this country is almost 400 million gallons a day. So we would need more than 500 nuclear power plants … just in this country … and just for gasoline (you’d have to more than double that to displace all the other petroleum products we consume, like diesel fuel). And that would probably require another 5 Yucca mountains just to store the waste, although I’m not sure the word “another” is right ’cause this country can’t even agree on one friggin’ storage site in the middle of nowhere.
Problem two: According to the Los Alamos “Overview of Green Freedom,” each 750,000 gallon a day plant (with accompanying nuclear reactor) costs $5 billion. So cutting under half of all petroleum use in this country would cost over $2.5 trillion (not counting this cost of uranium or disposal)!
This supposedly yields a gasoline price of $4.60 a gallon, though the authors say with a couple more technological breakthroughs, that could drop to $3.40. How about if instead of assuming more breakthroughs, which hardly ever happen in the energy sector, we apply Romm’s Rule of Costs for Future Energy Sources.” Romm’s Rule says that for any new energy technology that is not yet commercial (and in this case we have a “concept” for which the patent was still pending in November), take the inventor’s highest projected cost and double it. Also flip a coin and if it comes up heads, the technology will never be commercialized — think fusion. And that’s generous — in reality, if the coin comes up head or tails (i.e. doesn’t land and balance on its edge) it will probably never be commercialized — remember the fuel cell was invented in 1839 and commercial fuel cells are just a tad more common than time machines. [Please note this rule does NOT apply to technologies that are already commercial.]
Problem three: Romm’s Rule of Energy Transformation. This rule, developed for analyzing hydrogen cars, says: You can probably make a sow’s ear from a silk purse if you try hard enough, but why would you do that? Zero-carbon electricity is arguably the most premium energy carrier you can make in a carbon-constrained world in part because electric motors are so efficient. Electricity can directly run a motor to move your electric car or plug in hybrid for under $1.00 a gallon, even using expensive nuclear power. You lose maybe one-fifth of the original electricity in the process. The entire Green Freedom process is so inefficient it probably throws away more than three-fourths of the original nuclear power (if not much more). Basically, after spending all that money and wasting all that premier power you are stuck with a low-grade (but conventional) fuel that has to be run through an inefficient gasoline motor. Why would you do that?
[Yes, we don't quite yet have commercial plug ins, but they are straightforward extension of already commercial hybrids, we don't need any technology breakthroughs, and multiple manufactures will almost certainly be selling them within three to five years. EVs will be common in other countries within the same time frame, as I've written. All of this will happen decades before "Green Freedom," assuming it even proves feasible.]
Before coming to the last problem, let me complain about the NYT article, which, while skipping happily over the myriad problems with Green Freedom, bizarrely says of other alt fuels:
In a bizarre twist, the conservative Washington Times, which would normally be critical of fuzzy environmental strategies like carbon offsets, is actually attacking the candidates for not offsetting all their campaign emissions. Opening with an absurd headline, “Green Crusades lot of talk,” the Times writes:
How does not taking (dubious) voluntary actions carry any implications about one’s commitment to serious mandatory limits? Advocating mandatory limits is based on an understanding that two decades of the voluntary approach has not reversed emissions trends. And again and again we’ve seen how offsets provide at best a limited environmental benefit (click on “offsets” category on right hand column).
Surely the WT can find more things stories to write about … I’ve heard it said Senator McCain has called for carbon limits that are in fact mandatory, but he refuses to call them mandatory … nah, no story there….
Anyone interested in oil should see There will be Blood, since it is a great film that tells a fascinating and detailed story of the early days of the oil industry in California.
Okay, it’s Oscar week. I try to see all the Best Picture nominees, which is much tougher now that I have a one-year-old daughter. I missed Atonement [so far], but my wife read the book, so half credit. And lord knows after seeing No Country for Old Men, I don’t need to see another downbeat movie — uhh, sorry for the spoiler but if you thought a movie titled No Country for Old Men (or Atonement) was upbeat, you get out even less than I do these days.
I don’t think “There will be Blood” is the best picture of the year — but it is very good. Certainly the performance by Daniel Day-Lewis should take the Oscar, and the cinematography and music are fantastic.
But as a depiction of the grueling work of producing oil, it has no equal. Assuming you’ve read The Prize by Daniel Yergin, this is a must see. Just leave five minutes before the end and you’ll be happy….
Andy Revkin of the NYT has a good blog post on one of the main problems with climate messaging by scientists, environmentalists, and the like. In short, it sucks!
One problem is the name “global warming” or “climate change.” It sounds like a vacation, not a crisis.
Indeed, one of the main reasons I titled my book Hell and High Water is that I thought it was a better term — more accurate of what is to come if we don’t act, more descriptive, more visceral — and I hoped (faintly) it might become more widely used. But other than being projected onto the Washington Monument by Greenpeace, nada!
Names do matter. As conservative message-meister Frank Luntz wrote a few years ago in an infamous memo that explains precisely how a politician can sound as if he or she cares about global warming but doesn’t actually want to do anything about it:
“Climate change” is less frightening than global warming. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.
So you should probably use “global warming,” but probably not waste a lot of effort trying to rename something that is deeply embedded in both scientific and popular usage. Also, I don’t think the name is the main problem. Revkin cites a marketing expert who said,
If the problem were called “Atmosphere cancer” or “Pollution death” the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.
But if that were true, how did the incredibly unsexy and unscary name “ozone depletion” drive international action to proatively ban chlorofluorocarbons, even winning the support of Ronald Reagan, nobody’s idea of an environmentalist? The answer is that “ozone depletion” actually leads directly to cancer and not in the distant future (and Reagan had had skin cancer).
Global warming was always going to be a tough sell, given its long timescale and mostly indirect impacts on human health, even without the incredibly effective disinformation campaign that has been waged for the past decade. Words do matter, though, and I will be publishing a detailed article later in the week that will delve into one of the biggest language mistakes I think scientists and climate activists have made….
It is always worth remembering what we are fighting for: the next generation!
For some reason I can’t embed this video, so you’ll just have to watch it at YouTube.
I actually am an American Idol fan, but It’s Academic and Jeopardy it ain’t.
Okay, so that is a rhetorical question, thanks to today’s business story, “Silicon Valley Starts to Turn Its Face to the Sun.” Perhaps people will stop claiming that blogs are the place where information is presented with no context. Some day.
Anyone reading the NYT article would be left with the decided impression that solar power has been waiting on the sidelines for Silicon Valley to make it a success:
… some of the valley’s best brains are captivated by the challenge, and they hope to put the development of solar technologies onto a faster track.
A faster track? As BP notes, the “Ten-year average annual growth rate was 31%” for photovoltaic capacity. Growth exceeded 40% in 2004 and 2005. The only power source with growth that is even comparable is wind power.
I have great hopes that Silicon Valley can help keep PV on this fast track, but solar is already le train a grande vitesse, n’est-ce pas? Pardon my French.
While technology development is critical — and the US Federal Government has played an important role here for decades — most of the PV generation capacity growth has been in Japan and Germany, driven primarily by government incentives that are scarce in this country.
The article, which is somewhat informative for solar newbies, unfortunately ends by saying
The fear of a solar bubble is legitimate, but … solar energy may gain traction [!] because of a simpler rule than Moore’s Law: where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Yeah, solar may gain traction … some day … if people have the will….
NOTE to NYT: Solar has gained traction already. And futher growth won’t be driven by “will,” it will be driven by, uhh, the growing consensus on the need to price carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming and, uhh, record high energy prices that will no doubt be even higher in a decade, coupled with technology improvements and mass production techniques, some (but probably not most) of which will come from Silicon Valley. But I guess the real story is not sexy enough for the Gray Lady.
Investors Eye Climate Role at UN - Associated Press. “Hundreds of investors controlling $20 trillion in capital were set to gather Thursday for talks on financial risks and opportunities from limiting carbon emissions that scientists blame for global warming.”
Exchanges merge to create spot market for carbon – Reuters. “Two European carbon trading exchanges are merging their platforms to offer spot trading in European Union and United Nations credits, they said on Thursday.”
Asia’s tigers eye nuclear future – Asia Times Online. An interesting regional review of nuclear power’s growth in East and Southeast Asia – the only part of the globe where the nuclear power industry really is rapidly growing to meet energy needs. This article is mostly historical (not political), but notes some difficulties with nuclear we don’t face as regularly – like safety breaches caused by earthquakes.
Late last week the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), made up of over 500 organizations (including Fortune 500 companies like Google, universities, non-profits, etc.), presented a letter to Congress encouraging them to extend the Production Tax Credit and Investment Tax Credit for renewable energy.
As we’ve noted, the tax credits are at risk to lapse, which would just be a generally bad idea – for the economy, for renewable industries, for the potential job creation, and for the greenhouse gas reductions that the impacted projects could be making.
Pulling a few points from their letter:
That in addition to the 116,000 wind and solar jobs at risk.
ACORE points out in its article an invasion I’d also like to emphasize – the first week of March, Washington, DC hosts WIREC – the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference. The utility and attendance of the event I could hardly begin to describe. DC will be flooded with information and opportunity on renewables, and there will be so much to do (between panels, exhibits, side events, etc.), I don’t know how one could begin to create a schedule.
That is the same feeling our Congress should feel – overwhelmed by the interest and opportunities of the future. Hundreds of companies and utilities have expressed their desire to see regulatory global warming legislation. And now hundreds more have signed on to encourage the solutions. Yet we still can’t seem to extend these credits – not even pass something new, just extend something that’s been around the last 7 years of this administration and beyond!
It is no joke that the missing ingredient is political will, and it’s spoiling untold amounts.
– Kari M.
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