Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

The Center for American Progress Action fund had a recent event on clean energy jobs keynoted by Van Jones, who is not the President’s “green-jobs czar,” but “the green-jobs handyman.”

Besides being the administration’s point person on clean energy jobs, he is is the best speaker on the subject — because he studies rhetoric and persuasive speechmaking (see “Van Jones and the English Language“).

So he is worth hearing, and for the video click here, which is where the rest of this post was first published.

“[The report] ‘Green Jobs/Green Homes New York’ looks at the big picture [of retrofitting homes for energy efficiency] and all the dynamics that are impacted and influenced. It speaks to the boldest and greenest terms of community, making sure that those who are the weakest amongst us will have that hope of growing out of poverty,” said Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) at CAP Action’s Friday event “Green Jobs/Green Homes New York: Expanding Home Energy Efficiency and Creating Good Jobs in a Clean-Energy Economy.”

Keynote speaker Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, also addressed the new report from the Center for American Progress, the Center for Working Families, and Half in Ten. CAP Action Senior Fellow Bracken Hendricks moderated a follow-up panel discussion with New York State Laborers Local 10 Community Affairs Officer Lavon Chambers, Half in Ten Campaign Executive Director Lisa Donner, Conservation Services Group Senior Vice President Mark Dyen, and Center for Working Families Director of Green Policy Emmaia Gelman.

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Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank

Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.

It projects that increasingly severe heat waves, floods, storms and forest fires will be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year by 2030, making it the greatest humanitarian challenge the world faces.

Economic losses due to climate change today amount to more than $125bn a year — more than the all present world aid. The report comes from former UN secretary general Kofi Annan’s thinktank, the Global Humanitarian Forum. By 2030, the report says, climate change could cost $600bn a year….

Civil unrest may also increase because of weather-related events, the report says: “Four billion people are vulnerable now and 500m are now at extreme risk. Weather-related disasters … bring hunger, disease, poverty and lost livelihoods. They pose a threat to social and political stability”.

If emissions are not brought under control, within 25 years, the report states:

• 310m more people will suffer adverse health consequences related to temperature increases

• 20m more people will fall into poverty

• 75m extra people will be displaced by climate change.

Climate change is expected to have the most severe impact on water supplies . “Shortages in future are likely to threaten food production, reduce sanitation, hinder economic development and damage ecosystems. It causes more violent swings between floods and droughts. Hundreds of millions of people are expected to become water stressed by climate change by the 2030. “.

The study says it is impossible to be certain who will be displaced by 2030, but that tens of millions of people “will be driven from their homelands by weather disasters or gradual environmental degradation. The problem is most severe in Africa, Bangladesh, Egypt, coastal zones and forest areas.”

See also “Memorial Day, 2029” and The Lancet’s landmark Health Commission: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”

Global warming must stay below 2C or world faces ruin, scientists declare

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Okay, I don’t know if it is a scoop, heck, I don’t know for certain it is true, but  very reliable source tells me that speaker Pelosi wants the climate bill on the House floor the last week in June.

That is consistent with what Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said (see “House Majority Leader says climate bill will see fast action“).  But it will require a lot of speedy deal-making.  Still, it suggests the speaker does not see any deal breakers in the path to House passage, even though, as Wonk Room reports, “Brown Dogs Poised To Block Green Economy Legislation.”

And Sen. Boxer (D-CA) can certainly get something close to the Waxman-Markey bill out of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee by the fall.  And let’s assume for now it doesn’t get mired in any other committees

And that brings me to the climate politics question of the week:

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Climate change and peak oil mean nothing to the blinkered, bloated oil behemoth.

Exxon Mobil Says Transition From fossil fuel Is Century Away

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest refiner, said the transition away from oil-derived fuels is probably 100 years away.

Petroleum-based fuels including gasoline and diesel, as well as hydrocarbons such as coal and natural gas, will remain the dominant sources of energy for factories, offices, homes and cars for decades because there are no viable alternatives, Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson told reporters today after Exxon Mobil’s annual shareholders meeting in Dallas.

No surprise that the oil giant spends bupkis on renewable energy — and that, as a different article reports, “Shareholders of Exxon Mobil rejected proposals on Wednesday to prohibit its chief executive from serving as chairman and to increase spending on renewable fuel.”

And here’s another non-shocker.  Tillerson says:

“If we’re going to place a price on carbon, let’s do that in the most efficient way. A carbon tax is more efficient than a tax that’s applied by way of a cap-and-trade mechanism.”

Carbon politics makes strange bedfellows!  see Nobelist Krugman strongly endorses Waxman-Markey: “The claim that carbon taxes are better than cap and trade is, in my view, just wrong.”

And here’s yet another non-shocker from the leading funder of climate denial advocacy over the past decade:

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The flaw in the Waxman-Markey bill is not the too-many offsets that domestic polluters are (potentially) allowed to purchase in lieu of actually reducing their own emissions. The flaw in Waxman-Markey is the too-mild 2020 target — a 17% reduction from 2005 levels — which will be so easy to achieve with various low-cost clean energy strategies that it’s hard to see why polluters would avail themselves of the higher-cost offsets option.

Yes, my thinking on rip-offsets has evolved, primarily because I have spent the last few months talking to leading experts, domestic and international, including the chief climate negotiator for a major European country.  Also, I’ve actually started to look closely at the international offsets market — and at how Waxman-Markey would dramatically change the domestic rip-offset market — something that the journalists and think tanks who have written critiques of the offset provisions do not appear to have done.  And I’ve looked closely at the lowest cost clean energy strategies — again, something the critics don’t appear to have done.

Since Waxman-Markey is the vehicle by which President Obama and Congressional Democrats have decided to pursue action on clean energy and global warming — and since it will take all of our efforts just to ensure it is not substantially weakened by the time it reaches the president’s desk — I think progressives need to understand exactly what they are getting here.  More importantly, we need to understand what is worth fighting hardest to preserve or change in the bill, and what is not worth expending significant political capital on.

As I think will become clear, trying to curtail the quantity of offsets allowed in the bill is simply not a high priority (or even medium priority) activity.   Keeping the 2020 target as strong as possible is.

As I wrote back in January, a U.S. climate bill should set a target of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020 (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 8: The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target“).  I won’t repeat that science-based analysis here, since, if anything, the science has only gotten more urgent (see recent posts in “Uncharacteristically Blunt Scientists“).  One point I will elaborate on is the assertion from that earlier post that the United States has the technology and resources to reduce its emissions levels substantially below 1990 levels by 2020.

After all, if a much tougher target was straightforward to achieve, then the relatively mild target of Waxman-Markey, which takes us just a tad below 1990 levels by 2020, must be pretty damn easy.  And when you throw in the huge clean energy push in the stimulus, Obama’s aggressive fuel economy standards decision, peak oil, the provisions of Waxman-Markey that accelerate clean energy into the marketplace, and the apparently much greater domestic supply of natural gas than anyone thought even a few years ago — suddenly the target because very easy to meet indeed.

The analysis that I am going to present is not something that any major economic/energy model can reproduce because none of them — including EPA’s — model clean energy well nor are they designed to look at things like the full impact of peak oil or how the electric grid’s dispatch order will change  with even a modest carbon price.  These models have historically overestimated the cost of reducing pollution and are doing so again.  Because there is no reliable model, my analysis is necessarily approximate, and it will take a number of posts to spell out exactly how the U.S. energy and economic systems will respond to Waxman-Markey.  This post will serve primarily as an overview of the key issues of how we will meet the 2020 target.  Later posts will explore individual issues — such as fuel switching from coal to natural gas — as well as what I think will happen in the 2020s and beyond.

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GE eyes $1.5 billion in cleantech research by 2010

General Electric Co aims to boost its investment in clean-tech research and development to $1.5 billion a year by 2010, the largest U.S. conglomerate said on Wednesday in its annual “Ecomagination” report.

The maker of products ranging from electricity-producing wind turbines to energy-efficient compact-fluorescent lights, wants to grow green-business revenues to what it called a “stretch” target of $25 billion next year, up from $17 billion in 2008 and $6 billion in 2004….

GE said it expects stimulus spending in the United States, China and elsewhere around the globe to create about $400 billion of new demand for green technologies and clean-energy products, including wind turbines and solar panels.

The company earlier this month said it was building a plant near Albany, New York to build a new generation of high-capacity batteries that would power its upcoming hybrid railroad locomotive. Last month, it said it was working with Florida utility company FPL Group on the roll out of a “smart grid” system intended to encourage homeowners to lower their electricity consumption during peak demand times.

Global CEOs back greenhouse gas cuts, carbon caps

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I have been pushing white or reflecting roofs as the lowest cost climate strategy (see “Geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation, Part 2: White roofs are the trillion-dollar solution“).  Indeed, it is almost certainly the single cheapest of the 12 to 14 wedges needed to stabilize near 2°C total warming — the equivalent to taking the world’s approximately 600 million cars off the road for 18 years, while quickly paying for itself in direct energy savings!

[100 m2 (~1000 ft2) of a white roof, replacing a dark roof, offsets the emission of 10 tonnes of CO2.]

So I was delighted when a reader sent me this amazing Agence France-Presse story from Tuesday:

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Part 1 discussed why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav.  This post looks in more detail at Katrina and Gustav, and why they weren’t as strong and hence as devastating at landfall as they could have been.

My key point here is one that is rarely discussed in the literature dealing with global warming and hurricanes: All things being equal, if a storm taking the same track of Gustav (or Katrina) occurred in 2050, then, rather than weakening before making landfall, it would probably have strengthened considerably, creating far more havoc.

Let’s look at the region in 2050, assuming BAU (business-as-usual) warming, or no effort to reverse current emissions trends.

Now that is bad news for New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and the South Atlantic. The average warming in the Gulf, Caribbean, and coastal Atlantic is 1°C to 2°C, but this model has an enormous body of very warm water 2°C to 3°C over much of the typical storm path for a hurricane like Katrina or Gustav. There are two relevant points to recall:

1. The National Climatic Data Center 2006 report on Katrina notes that the surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Gulf of Mexico during the last week in August 2005 “were one to two degrees Celsius above normal.“
2. In the case of both Katrina and Gustav, they hit colder water before hitting the coast — a key reason they were far weaker at landfall than they might have been, as these pictures make clear:

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When Waxman-Markey passed out of committee on Friday 33-25, only three Democrats voted no, along with every Republican but Bono Mack [see "House committee approves landmark (bipartisan!) clean energy and climate bill"].

One of those Democrats was Jim Matheson of Utah.  The state’s largest newspaper, The Salt Lake Tribune, wrote a strong editorial Sunday criticizing that decision, “Vital energy bill deserves support“:

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The U.S. economy is incredibly energy inefficient, a key reason even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.

This inefficiency is summed up best in one remarkable statistic that I first learned at the U.S. Department of Energy and then reprinted in my 1999 book, Cool Companies:  How the best businesses boost profits and productivity by reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

The average fossil-fuel electric power plant converts only one-third of the primary energy it burns–coal, oil, or gas–into electricity.  More energy is lost distributing it from the power plant to the end user.  The energy lost by U.S. electric power generators equals all of the energy that the entire country of Japan uses for all purposes:  buildings, industry, and transportation.  Most of this lost energy is in the form of waste heat that is literally thrown away by electric utilities:  Thus, more fossil fuels must be burned in your company’s furnaces and boilers to generate the heat and steam needed to run your business.

The key to reducing most of that waste is the simultaneous generation of electricity and heat, called cogeneration, combined heat and power (CHP) or recyled energy. You can read the basics here.

I have included CHP as one of the 12-14 “stabilization wedges” we need to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm (here). Some people, like my friend Tom Casten, Chairman, Recycled Energy Development, think it could be multiple wedges.  In an interview I recommend all readers watch (here) or read (here), Casten asserts that in this country alone:

We could take the 42 percent of carbon dioxide that comes from electricity and cut it in half and save $70 billion.

For more details on the U.S. commercial and industrial CHP potential — estimated to be some 160,000 MW (!) — and the policies needed to achieve it, see “Recycled Energy — A core climate solution.“  For a September profile on Casten with a fascinating case study of recycling energy, see this Forbes article.

The rest of this post excerpts the second half of the introduction to Cool Companies, which presents numerous case studies of manufacturing companies that have cost-effectively employed CHP and other low-carbon strategies to boost profits and productivity — strategies that are still available to the overwhelming majority of US companies, strategies that will become the norm once the nation is committed to strong climate action.

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