Silicon Valley becoming driving force for electric vehicles
Tuesday’s scheduled stock market debut for Palo Alto-based Tesla Motors Inc., the first by a U.S. automaker since Ford Motor Co.’s in 1956, is the highest-profile sign of the region’s role as a vibrant hub of the growing electric-vehicle industry.
But Silicon Valley is also home to some of the top companies working on the infrastructure needed to keep the cars charged up and on the road, including Better Place of Palo Alto and Coulomb Technologies in Campbell, Calif., which have established early leads in creating battery-swapping stations and public charging networks.
Other companies here are quietly working on creating more powerful batteries for the cars. One is Amprius Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif., start-up that is developing advanced lithium-ion batteries. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt is one of its investors.
“Tesla is catalystic,” said Chelsea Sexton, an electric-vehicle marketing expert who worked on the EV1. “Venture capitalists have become willing to enter the transport space, beginning with vehicles and now transitioning into components, batteries and energy management systems. Silicon Valley has the potential to be a center of the industry.”
Transportation was the leading clean-tech sector for venture capital dollars in the first quarter of 2010, with 24 deals globally that totaled $729 million, according to data from Cleantech Group in San Francisco. Leading the pack was Better Place, which raised $350 million, making it one of the largest clean-tech investments in history.
And even though the industry is still in its infancy, electric-car-related companies are adding jobs at a time when unemployment in Silicon Valley is at near-record highs.
Calif. Greenhouse Gas Law Could Be Suspended Until Unemployment Improves
A citizen’s ballot initiative approved Tuesday could suspend AB32, the state’s landmark 2006 law mandating a 25 percent reduction in industrial greenhouse gases by 2020.
Backed by manufacturers and Texas oil companies Valero Energy Inc. and Tesoro Corp., the ballot initiative would halt enforcement of the law until California unemployment, now at over 12 percent, sinks to 5.5 percent for at least a year. The “California Jobs Initiative,” as it is called, is necessary to protect Californians from financial hardship at a time when they can ill afford it, its backers say.
“AB 32 will impose billions of dollars in higher utility rates and fuel prices on California families when they can least afford it,” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and co-chair of the initiative campaign told the Los Angeles Times.
Al Gore: The hottest May ever shows need for Senate to pass climate bill
Al Gore is trying to translate new federal data on global temperatures into political momentum for climate change legislation.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that worldwide temperatures for May and the January-May period were the warmest on record.
“Every month we delay work, the planet continues to warm. The Senate needs to take action on the climate bill immediately,” Gore wrote on his website Thursday afternoon.
G20 urges phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies
Leaders of the world’s biggest economies will pledge on Sunday to phase out subsidies for “inefficient” fossil fuels, in a statement toughened at the last minute at the urging of the United States, Group of 20 sources said.
The G20 communique in Toronto calls for the “phase out over the medium term of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption, taking into account vulnerable groups and their development needs,” said the sources, who provided the language to Reuters.
The leaders also said they would review progress toward that goal at future summits. The sources said the United States had pushed to removed watered-down language from an earlier draft.
An earlier version of the statement referred to “voluntary, member-specific approaches” to getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies but made no mention of a review of the progress.
Environmentalists viewed that as a weak commitment compared with promises made at the previous G20 summit in Pittsburgh last September.
At that gathering, hosted by President Barack Obama, leaders also vowed to phase out the subsidies. They said that jettisoning them by 2020 would reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming by 10 percent by 2050. The G20 had cited data from the International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
G8 leaders stand still on climate; will G20 backtrack?
It was a tale of two cities Saturday in Toronto for this climate activist. One of hope and the other of boredom.
Saturday morning, I joined Greenpeace, Oxfam, the Canadian Labor Congress, and about 5,000 activists at a peaceful rally calling on G8 and G20 leaders to take stronger leadership on a variety of progressive issues. Signs amidst the crowd were pushing issues ranging from climate and poverty alleviation to Tibetan freedom and bank reform. It was an impressive mix of progressive activists all coming together to speak with one voice for global change.
Despite the rain and nearly oppressive police presence, the spirit at the rally was ebullient and hopeful, and I walked away feeling excited as one often does from these rallies.
But then I walked into the International Media Center downtown to do some media work … and immediately felt all of that energy being sucked out of me in the gray, cavernous center. Inside, journalists and NGOs were busy scrutinizing the just-released G8 Muskoka Summit declaration. Climate-minded scrutinizers were hard pressed to find anything of interest — or anything new, in fact. It appears that the only accomplishment for G8 leaders this year when it comes to climate is that they managed not to backtrack on their previous commitments from past summits and Copenhagen.
They reiterated their support for a “comprehensive, ambitious, fair, effective, binding, post-2012 agreement,” but didn’t say a word as to how they play to achieve it after the failure in Copenhagen. They continued to acknowledge the science calling for warming to stay below 2 degrees, but made no mention of the gaping hole between this upper limit and the reality of the emission-reduction targets they’ve put on the table. They pledged to support climate resilience and adaptation efforts, but gave no details on how they’d do so.
Battle for climate change in cities
When comes to the battle against climate change, the war will literally be won — or lost — in our cities.
For the first time in human history, more than 50% of the Earth’s population lives in cities. According to the International Energy Agency, cities consume 67% of the world’s primary energy and contribute 71% of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
A new report by the University of Toronto’s Sustainable Infrastructure Group and the Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) confirms that cities must play a key role.
“Not only do cities produce enormous amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, but the density of people and infrastructure makes cities very vulnerable to the effects of climate change.”
The report, Getting to Carbon Neutral: A Guide for Canadian Municipalities, clearly shows that cities have both the resources and the economies of scale to play a significant role in the fight against climate change. Achieving carbon neutrality means balancing a city’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions against projects that either sequester or offset carbon.
Hong Kong air pollution blamed on political system
Democracy activists are not the only ones unhappy with a slow pace of electoral reform in Hong Kong.
Environmentalists blame the city’s political setup “” which guarantees a strong voice for business “” for stymieing efforts to clean up Hong Kong’s increasingly dirty air.
“The city’s dysfunctional political system is holding back environmental reform,” said Joanne Ooi, head of the Clean Air Network.
China has allowed limited democracy in the territory of 7 million people since taking control of the former British colony in 1997. Voters elect only half of the 60-member legislature. The other half is selected by various interest groups that tend to be pro-Beijing “” mostly industries and professions such as lawyers and doctors.
The legislature agreed this week to add 10 elected seats for the next election in 2012, increasing the body’s size to 70. It also expanded the selection committee for Hong Kong’s leader to 1,200 people.
Democracy activists criticized the moves as too incremental, and the changes aren’t expected to tip the balance on environmental issues either.
India Says Global Climate Accord Must Include Carbon Budget
A global climate accord must include the principle of a climate budget that is shared between nations based on their historical emissions.
“In the next six months in the run-up to Cancun, India will take the leadership role on the issue of a global carbon budget,” Jairam Ramesh, the country’s environment minister, told reporters in Mumbai today, referring to an overall limit on emissions of greenhouse gases.
World leaders should devise a treaty that limits temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) since the 1800s, protects tropical forests and creates a “revolution” in energy infrastructure, scientists including 20 Nobel Prize winners said last month. A carbon budget is needed to measure greenhouse gas output in 2020 and 2050, the scientists said. Developed countries should aim to cut emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020, they said.
How much countries are entitled to emit within that budget should be determined “equitably” and account for what they’ve historically already released into the atmosphere, Ramesh said.
“India cannot and will not accept any international agreement in which equity is absent, in which equitable access to global atmospheric space is absent,” he said
A Solar Bulb May Light the Way
Nearly 130 years after Thomas Edison created the first marketable incandescent light bulb, nearly two billion people around the globe still live their lives without a steady supply of electric light. The problem is not light bulbs, of course, but living off the grid.
To generate light, these people do what those without electricity have always done: burn something, mostly kerosene. But kerosene is a dirty fuel: studies show that breathing fumes from indoor kerosene use is the equivalent of smoking two packs a day.
The cost of producing light, when compared to electricity from the grid in any American city, is also astronomical: $3 to $11 per kilowatt hour. Aggressively expanding the electric grid in Africa, Asia and South America would solve the problem, but that is unrealistic, at least in the near future. Yet there is another solution: decentralized renewable electricity systems. For lighting, solar panels can charge batteries and power conventional lamps. But there are other solutions, too, like a solar light bulb recently unveiled by Nokero, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer.
Concerns raised over carbon capture
A new study claims there are unanswered questions about carbon capture and storage (CSS) and the impact of leakage on global warming.
CSS, or carbon sequestration, is being promoted as a way to remove growing levels of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Governments around the world are investing billions of dollars over the next decade developing carbon capture and storage systems to extract CO2 at power plants and other combustion sites and store it underground.
Professor Gary Shaffer from the Danish Centre for Earth System Science examined a range of CCS methods to determine their effectiveness and long-term impacts.
Reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience, Professor Shaffer says there are still questions over which sequestration process is best and which is least likely to leak carbon.
Time to get moving on high-speed rail
The need for high-speed rail in this country is real and urgent.
As airport delays increase, traffic on our roads and highways slows to a standstill and our current rail system’s highest-speed train chugs along at a pace slower than most cars, a high-speed-rail system would provide a welcome, convenient and safe alternative for American travel.
Over the course of many pieces of legislation, billions of dollars have been directed toward the intention of implementing a high-speed-rail infrastructure. But most of the money has gone to subsidizing the subpar system already in place.
When I was chairman of the. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, high-speed rail was a priority for me. So I ensured that money was set aside for the development of these systems on both the East and the West coasts.
Billions in stimulus fund grants were to be directed toward the same goal but have gone, instead, to the operation and maintenance of the existing system.
A nationwide high-speed-rail system would reduce highway and air congestion, expedite the shipment of goods (as freight rail would no longer have to share tracks with passenger rail) and promote economic development “” and is more energy efficient.
MIT Researchers See Natural Gas as the Choice for Lower Carbon Emissions
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are encouraging U.S. policymakers to consider the nation’s growing supply of natural gas as a short-term substitute for aging coal-fired power plants.
In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.
“Because national energy use is substantially reduced, the share represented by gas is projected to rise from about 20 percent of the current national total to around 40 percent in 2040,” said the MIT researchers. When used to fire a power plant, gas emits about half of the carbon dioxide emissions as conventional coal plants.
6 groups file first suit to halt wind farm
A legal challenge to the federal approval of Cape Cod’s proposed offshore wind farm was filed yesterday, the first of an expected flurry of lawsuits attempting to stop the construction of the 130-turbine project in Nantucket Sound.
Six groups, from California to Cape Cod, filed the suit in federal district court in Washington, arguing that the controversial project will “exact a terrible toll’’ on federally protected migratory birds and possibly whales. The 30-page lawsuit says federal officials failed to collect data on the project’s impact on bird migration and whales and refused to adopt protective measures for the rare roseate tern and piping plover.
“If there is a tinge of green on projects like mass transit or alternative energy, [people often] have a knee-jerk reaction it is all positive and this is simply not true,’’ said Kyla Bennett, a biologist and lawyer who is New England director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, one of the plaintiffs.
Plans for Colorado’s new-energy economy get tangled in “green tape”
More than 50 locals are erupting “” emotions are high as they pepper their county commissioners with questions and concerns about a proposed nearby uranium mill that not only would fuel the national push for alternative energy, but could resuscitate neighboring towns.
“Do you have the courage to protect people like me?” says businessman Dan Chancellor, who lives 60 miles west of the proposed Pi±on Ridge uranium mill near Naturita.
If it is built, Pi±on Ridge would be the first new uranium mill in the U.S. in 25 years. But the project is one of several alternative-energy development projects in Colorado mired in intense regulatory review, local opposition, lawsuits and a weak investment economy that threatens to derail the heard-everywhere promise of the New Energy Economy.
Politicians have been quick to pledge increasing use of clean energy and set ambitious production goals for solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and nuclear. Colorado lawmakers last spring upped the state’s goal for renewable energy to 30 percent by 2020. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff promises 50 percent by 2030.
But when land managers and investors float plans for building wind farms or tapping geothermal energy or stringing new transmission lines or processing uranium for nuclear power, the potential impacts to neighbors stir passionate resistance, the regulatory maze lengthens, lawsuits stack up and the lofty talk of a brave new economy falls flat.
Little done to prevent polar bear extinction, climate change, feds say
Polar bear policy in America can be summed up succinctly: The iconic bears are threatened with extinction, and so far nothing much is being done.
Two years after they were listed under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has taken no major action in response to their principal threat, the loss of sea ice habitat due to climate change.
Federal officials have declared that the Endangered Species Act will not be used in the attempt to regulate greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming and melting ice in the Arctic Ocean.
That leaves Rosa Meehan, the Fish and Wildlife Service marine mammals manager in Alaska, with few tools to protect the great bears of the Arctic. She hangs on to the hope that the scientists are wrong about the bears’ future.
“Our crystal ball is not perfect,” Meehan said last week.
She spoke between public hearings on whether the federal government should designate critical habitat for polar bears. Her agency has proposed designating 187,166 square miles of U.S. territory — 95 percent of it in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas — as polar bear critical habitat.
Breaking a promise to protect D.C.’s tree canopy
In 2002, the D.C. Urban Forest Preservation Act, also known as the Tree Bill, was enacted. The law’s primary purpose was to stop canopy loss by planting trees whenever healthy large trees were removed. The costs would be paid through a “Tree Fund” created by collecting fees from those removing trees for construction or other reasons. Now, the District’s proposed fiscal 2011 budget would strip $539,000 from the Tree Fund, redirecting the money to the general fund.
Before this proposal emerged, significant questions already lingered about how the law was being implemented. There are no publicly available records to confirm where replacement trees have been planted and whether those trees are still alive. Now, with the Tree Fund depleted, the hope of replacing lost trees is gone. The loss of $539,000 equates to about 2,000 replacement trees.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and many D.C. Council members have touted their “green” goals, promising green jobs, green neighborhoods and a fishable, swimmable Anacostia River. Mr. Fenty also set an ambitious and attainable tree canopy goal to cover 40 percent of the city, for which he deserves credit. With this budget action, however, we must ask whether these promises are serious initiatives backed by sustained funding, or empty promises.
House panel investigating water contamination at Camp Lejeune
A congressional oversight committee has begun looking into new details about the history of water contamination at the Marines’ Camp Lejeune.
Investigators from the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee have requested hundreds of documents from the state of North Carolina, where the base is, that include details about underground storage tanks buried across Camp Lejeune in past decades. The tanks contained fuel, trichloroethylene and other chemicals.
Some of the storage tanks leaked into the groundwater, including some that were buried about 300 feet from a drinking well. The well was found in 1984 to be contaminated with benzene, a fuel component and a human carcinogen, and it was closed in December of that year.
McClatchy Newspapers obtained the state of North Carolina documents and reported Thursday that federal scientists have learned of the leaking fuel tanks near the well as they, too, work to understand the health effects of decades of contamination across Lejeune.
If scientists want to educate the public, they should start by listening
Whenever controversies arise that pit scientists against segments of the U.S. public — the evolution debate, say, or the fight over vaccination — a predictable dance seems to unfold. One the one hand, the nonscientists appear almost entirely impervious to scientific data that undermine their opinions and prone to arguing back with technical claims that are of dubious merit. In response, the scientists shake their heads and lament that if only the public weren’t so ignorant, these kinds of misunderstandings wouldn’t occur.
But what if the fault actually lies with both sides?
We’ve been aware for a long time that Americans don’t know much about science. Surveys that measure the public’s views on evolution, climate change, the big bang and even the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun yield a huge gap between what science tells us and what the public believes.