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AEP wants rate increase to make up for revenue loss

Remember when Mike Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, said this?

[he] said "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down."

The West Virginia arm of his utility is now asking for a series of rapid rate increases: 18.5 percent this year, 14.5 percent next year and 13.2 percent in 2011.

Why, pray tell?

In part, because:

The company had predicted it would sell $248.5 million in power to other electric utilities between July 2008 and this June, but those sales have almost disappeared. Revenue generated from those sales -- electricity unused by AEP customers -- keeps rates down.

So if AEP's revenues go down, they go down. But then they file a three-year, double-digit rate increase to make up for lost ground. "Not a decoupler" indeed.

Brace yourself

"The turnaround will probably come faster than people expect, and the supply won't be there."

-- Deloitte energy adviser Joseph Stanislaw, on what industry analysts expect to be a sharp rise in oil and gas prices

What is the most unsustainable piece of junk you own?

An unusually unsustainable device that I own (see below).

I'm hoping to expand on the Ponzi scheme discussion in my next Salon piece. So I'm gathering examples of unsustainability at every scale.

In asking what is the most unsustainable piece of crap junk you own, I wasn't really thinking private jet or Hummer, not that I think any of you own that uber-unsustainable stuff.

Nor was I thinking of an electric dryer, since most people (in this country) own that laborsaving device. But that does get us closer to the key question, though: How many of the 10 billion people on the planet post-2050 will be using large amounts of electricity for things that are easily done without electricity -- once we have moved beyond desperation and are actually in the midst of the climate catastrophe.

By junk I was thinking of something closer to a relatively superfluous device that symbolizes the Ponzi scheme we have created. What comes to mind at the moderate cost level is a leaf blower and even a Segway (sorry, Dean Kamen -- your genius is really needed urgently for sustainability, not for electrifying human walking, even if many people find some value in that). I don't own either of those, but I do own a treadmill and a 50-inch flat panel TV (but hey it is Energy Star), which are close to what I have in mind in this post.

And I'd also be interested in hearing about any of the truly pointless low-cost stuff you have, like an electric pencil sharpener. Indeed, what really got me thinking about all this yesterday was my use of a gadget (pictured above) whose pointlessness and unsustainability simply staggers the imagination:

Sweden unveils ‘ambitious’ clean energy strategy

STOCKHOLM — Sweden’s government on Wednesday presented what it described as Europe’s “most ambitious” strategy to improve energy efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions. “As the first industrialized country, we are presenting a concrete plan towards becoming independent of fossil fuels and reducing emissions to a level that the climate requires,” Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren […]

U.S. Senator: Recession wrong time for cap-and-trade

WASHINGTON — The United States should not impose a cap-and-trade system to battle climate change this year because it amounts to a painful tax during a deep recession, a Republican lawmaker said Wednesday. “Now is not the time to put a national sales tax on every electric bill and every gasoline purchase,” Republican Senator Lamar […]

Carbon tax only way to keep planet cool: Hansen

COPENHAGEN — Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut more quickly and deeply than thought only two years ago to avoid dire consequences, and a straight-up carbon tax is the only realistic way to do it, top climate scientist James Hansen said in an interview. New research paints an even gloomier picture of global warming than […]

U.K. Independent and Debategraph collaborate on visual climate policy … doohickey

This is a pretty cool widget:

It's a collaboration between the U.K. Independent and the folks at Debategraph.

It's all open, like a wiki, so if you feel so moved you can add to it or link elements or whatnot. (There's a lot of BS in it at the moment.) Play around!

MIT's uber-hypocritical anti-scientific scientist went from denial to defamation

As an alum, I was happily surprised when a few weeks ago a senior MIT professor directed me to major study by a dozen leading experts associated with their Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change that made clear MIT had joined the climate realists.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just doubled its previous (2003) projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C. Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm. Human civilization as we know it could not survive such warming, such concentrations (see likely impacts here).

But there is one MIT professor who has remained blind to the remarkable strengthening of our understanding of climate science in the past 2 years -- Richard Lindzen. A general debunking of Lindzen's popular disinformation tracts can be found on RealClimate here.

At the Heartland conference of climate-change deniers that began Sunday in New York, however, Lindzen went from denial to defamation as he smeared the reputation of one of the greatest living climate scientists, Wallace Broecker.

Before discussing that indefensible and hypocritical smear, it is worth noting that the Heartland conference is so extreme that even "moderate" deniers, like John Christy won't go, as Andy Revkin reports:

John R. Christy ... said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for "guilt by association."

Now when a guy who has been as wrong for as long as Christy has (see here) is afraid his reputation will be harmed by attending your conference, you are way, way out there!

And indeed, Lindzen chose to abandon what little is left of his professional reputation, as the astonishing report on the conference from Examiner.com makes clear:

The last American jaguar doesn’t have to be the last

Photo: Arizona Department of Game and Fish This piece was submitted by Kieran Suckling, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. The last known jaguar in the United States was killed Monday in what is increasingly looking like a bungled attempt to opportunistically radio-collar one of North America’s most endangered species. The […]

Are we all Bernie Madoffs, and what comes next?

Yes, homo "sapiens" sapiens have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations. Yes, we are all in essence Madoffs (many wittingly, most not) or at least his most credulous clients. What comes next will be the subject of a multipart series.

I had been planning to write something on this for a while when NYT columnist Tom Friedman interviewed me for "The Inflection Is Near?" which appears in Saturday's New York Times:

"We created a way of raising standards of living that we can't possibly pass on to our children," said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks -- water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land -- and not by generating renewable flows.

"You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior," added Romm. "But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, 'This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...' Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy."

A few years ago I thought that aggressive action by governments around the world to push clean energy could spare the public dramatic lifestyle changes in the coming decades, but I have been convinced otherwise by

• the failure of U.S. leadership [thank you George W. Bush and the conservative movement stagnation]
• the remarkable shift in our understanding of climate science in the past two years
• China's decision to join the Ponzi scheme full throttle and emulate our rapaciousness (see here and here), and
• a recent, brilliant talk I heard (a teaser for a future post).

The adults, in short, are not standing up. Sadly, most haven't even taken the time to understand that they should.

And so every generation that comes after the Baby Boomers are poised to experience the dramatic changes in lifestyle that inevitably follow the collapse of any Ponzi scheme.

This global Ponzi scheme is not just a metaphor (see here), but for me a central organizing narrative of how to think about the fix we have put ourselves in.

What exactly is a Ponzi scheme? Wikipedia has a good entry: