New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out an ambitious plan today to fortify the city against the extreme weather and storms we can expect thanks to a changing climate. “This is a defining challenge of our future,” Bloomberg said in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The plan, estimated to cost $20 billion, includes 250 recommendations in all, covering everything from erecting bulkheads and levees to retrofitting old buildings to protecting the city’s power infrastructure. (Fifty-three percent of NYC’s power plants currently sit within the 100-year floodplain, and by the 2050s, 90 percent could be in that danger zone.)

The New York Times reports:

The plan covers so many different parts of the city and calls for such a wide array of proposals that the estimated price tag could change – and given the history of large infrastructure projects, that means the cost is likely to grow.

The price estimate also does not include some of the more ambitious projects envisioned in the report that require further study, like the construction of a so-called Seaport City, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, modeled after Battery Park City, which would protect Lower Manhattan but cost billions.

The administration said that roughly half of the currently estimated $20 billion cost of the next decade would be covered by federal and city money that had already been allocated in the capital budget and that an additional $5 billion would be covered by expected aid that Congress had already appropriated. Most of that money was allocated, through a variety of programs, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, according to the report.

While a $20 billion price tag sounds staggering, Bloomberg pointed out that Hurricane Sandy alone did $19 billion in damage to the city, and that a future storm could cause as much as $90 billion worth of destruction.

The world is driving itself into a future of climate hell, but experts say it's not too late to take the off-ramp.

Despite declining greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and other developed nations, global emissions broke a new record last year. They were pushed 1.4 percent higher than the year before by rapid growth in China and India, and by Japan turning to fossil fuels instead of nuclear power.

During U.N. climate negotiations held in Copenhagen in 2009, most of the world agreed to aim for a post-Industrial Revolution temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius. But if the world keeps traveling along its current path, the International Energy Agency warns in a new report that long-term average temperature increases of between 3.6 and 5.3 degrees C are more likely.

Climate negotiations are underway to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which could help stem the tide of rising emissions. But no new agreement is expected to come into force until 2020 -- and who knows if it would even be strong enough to make a difference.

So it would be easy to conclude that we're royally fucked.

But in its new report, the IEA outlines four strategies that countries could pursue during the next seven years to help spare us the "royally fucked" scenario of skyrocketing temperatures -- all at zero net economic cost.

Mother Nature Network has a somewhat appalling post title: “No, we can't burn people for electricity.” Wait. Was someone suggesting that? WHO WANTS TO SET PEOPLE ON FIRE? Oh. Dead people. Well, that's a little more ... NO. Don't burn dead people!

Passing the mic to Mother Nature Network:

The concept of using humans as an alternative energy source serves as a plot point in the novel "Agenda 21" by conservative commentator Glenn Beck, but the notion is fiction. The human body is about 65 percent water and it requires a tremendous amount of heat to vaporize the water and get the corpse burning.

Oh. Glenn Beck. OK then.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is trying to figure out how to meet sequester cuts demanded by Congress -- without upsetting Congress by furloughing the agency's weather forecasters.

One proposed solution might sound fine if you just want to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, but it's not so fine if you care about improving the accuracy of such forecasts in the coming years.

An earlier proposal from NOAA that would have required employees of the National Weather Service to take some furlough days this year was recently nixed amid tornado-induced horror at the thought of meteorologists being kept away from work.

The agency's new plan would see funds drained instead from the COSMIC-2 satellite program, the second phase planned in a joint U.S.-Taiwan project that aims to improve weather forecasting. From Politico:

“The beauty of this program is it generates an extraordinary amount of useful data and we don’t have to pay the whole freight,” said Clifford Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

“It is an extraordinary mistake to take away the money,” he told POLITICO. “This will be really controversial in the discipline.” ...

I've now written, oh, it seems like a kabillion posts on what's wrong with electric utilities and how they might be adapted for the 21st century. All of my thinking on this subject has been informed by smart work from other folks, but I didn't include a lot of links or block quotes or charts'n'graphs, because I was struggling to make the posts compact and readable by normal humans.

So here, then, is some further reading on the subject. I'm sure I'm leaving a ton of stuff out, so please email me or leave a comment if there's something else you think should be included.

The Political Economy Research Institute published this list of greenhouse gas emitters. It's based on the 2011 data from the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The three top polluters on the list are power companies -- American Electric Power, Duke Energy Corp., and Southern Co.

The fourth is the U.S. government, responsible for more than 1 entire percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Part of the reason the government ranks so high is that it's also a power company. Top on the list of its polluting properties is the TVA's Paradise Fossil plant, a coal-fired power plant. And the government is trying to clean up its act, it really is:

States have begun introducing taxes on not using gasoline.

As the number of electric vehicles on the roads starts to climb, a number of states are introducing new fees to offset the projected losses in gas-tax revenues.

The AP reports that at least 10 states have considered or passed legislation that would impose such fees on electric or hybrid cars.

The new charges could help governments build and maintain the roads and bridges upon which the new generation of vehicles are being driven. But it seems that owners of gas-free cars are also being eyed to plug holes left in government budgets by the improved efficiency of traditional vehicles.

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

Gas taxes are one of the main sources of funding for bridges and roads. But people are driving more fuel-efficient cars, and many states’ tax rates haven’t kept up with inflation during the past decade. That’s left less money available for repairs. Nationwide, gas tax revenue declined every year from $40.7 billion in 2004 to $37.9 billion in 2010, according to inflation-adjusted data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group in Washington.

That’s a big reason Virginia and Washington State are levying green-car taxes and New Jersey, North Carolina, Indiana, and at least four other states are considering doing the same. “The intent is that people who use the roads pay for them,” says Arizona State Senator Steve Farley, a Democrat who wrote a bill to tax electric-car drivers 1¢ for every mile they log on state highways under a yet-to-be-devised tracking system. “Just because we have somebody who is getting out of doing it because they have an alternative form of fuel, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pay for the roads.”

Come the end of this month, New Orleans may lose its one and only ferry, thanks to a state uncommitted to keeping it financially afloat and a city even less sure about who’s responsible for keeping it from going under. This is the ferry that since 1827 has crossed the Mississippi River, transporting “West Bank” residents to jobs downtown. It’s the ferry featured in the HBO series Treme that carries the populist scold Creighton Bernette, a hopeless romantic for New Orleans, to his death at the end of the first season. Now, with its original funding stream dammed off for good, the ferry’s own ending is imminent.

Funding for public transit is pretty shallow across the nation, no matter whether we’re talking buses, rail, or otherwise. As the nonprofit Transportation for America recently reported, last year’s federal transportation bill surfaced with less funding than normal, leaving states to look for creative ways to cover yawning budget shortfalls. But ferry service gets stepchild treatment even during prosperous years.

In Louisiana -- a state not historically friendly to expanding public services -- transit has taken a backseat to issues like health care and coastal restoration. The endangered ferry species, meanwhile, is having a tough time getting any government agency’s attention.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) loves fracking -- he once even drank fracking fluid to prove it -- but other elected officials in the state are not so gung ho. A handful of Colorado cities are trying to limit or ban the practice -- and are finding that it's not so easy to do.

Boulder is the latest Colorado municipality to take on the frackers. Last week, its city council unanimously passed a one-year moratorium on fracking within city limits and on city-owned open space, and council members are considering options for a more long-term policy. From the Boulder Daily Camera:

Hydrofluorocarbons, the climate-changing twins of ozone-ruining chlorofluorocarbons, had best watch out. The world's two most powerful countries have agreed to join forces to prevent the harmful chemicals from entering the atmosphere.

Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping spent Friday and Saturday talking in California. They couldn't find much middle ground on cyberespionage, or on a handful of other security issues. But they agreed that their two countries will work together to tackle one of the world's greatest climate threats.

"[N]either country by itself can deal with the challenge of climate change," Obama said at a press conference with Xi.