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Greenish phone from Motorola underwhelms

It's not as cool as talking into a tin can, but thanks to Motorola, soon you can talk into recycled water bottles. Or at least a phone partially made of them. The Moto W233 Renew, which was unveiled in Vegas last week at the Consumer Electronics Show, features a faint lime hue and the delicate, lingering scent of greenwashing.

In case you'd like a side of token eco gestures with your heavy metals, Motorola invested in carbon offsets and printed the important advertising messages instructions on 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper. The company is also providing a postage-paid envelope so you can return your old phone for recycling. (And if that rings a bell -- snap! -- it's because groups like Inform also provide pre-paid mailing labels so your old phone doesn't have to join the 80 percent of discarded cell phones that sleep with the trashes.)

Lou Dobbs leaves CNN viewers dumber about climate change

"Yes," you say, "I know Lou Dobbs is a knuckle-dragger when it comes to immigration and Latinos. But is he similarly idiotic when it comes to climate change?"

Here's your answer:

A mild reminder in the Gaza chaos that war is not green

It's been challenging to keep my brain on green issues when there's this huge social justice issue called "Israel's great adventure into Gaza," for which I struggle to find the best indignant word, happening. Instead, a fine reminder that war is the opposite of sustainable: Corporate Watchdog Radio's recent podcast [mp3] on efforts to green the war machine -- an idiotic concept.

U.S. coal supply may last only 10-20 years

The imminent reality of peak oil production should be clear to all by now.

Now some very serious people are suggesting that there is a lot less accessible coal out there than most folks believe. If we are nearing peak coal (and peak oil), then we would need to embrace the rapid transition to a clean energy economy almost as urgently as we need to embrace it to avoid destroying the climate.

Let's start with the U.S. Geological Survey's stunning 131-page analysis from December, "Assessment of Coal Geology, Resources, and Reserves in the Gillette Coalfield, Powder River Basin, Wyoming" [big PDF]:

The Gillette coalfield, within the Powder River Basin in east-central Wyoming, is the most prolific coalfield in the United States. In 2006, production from the coalfield totaled over 431 million short tons of coal, which represented over 37 percent of the Nation's total yearly production.

The "total original coal resource in the Gillette coalfield" without applying any restrictions, "was calculated to be 201 billion short tons." Then USGS subtracts out the inaccessible coal, and then mining and processing losses, which leaves 77 billion tons, and finally:

Coal reserves are the portion of the recoverable coal that can be mined, processed, and marketed at a profit at the time of the economic evaluation. With a discounted cash flow at 8 percent rate of return, the coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total) for the 6 coal beds evaluated.

Ouch! And this analysis was done at a time of soaring coal prices.

Arianna Huffington clarifies editorial policy around climate skepticism

The other day Andrew Dessler and I wrote about a piece of climate skeptic hoo-ha that somehow got published on Huffington Post. There was nothing particularly notable about the piece itself -- just the usual recycled confusions and distortions -- but it was somewhat remarkable that it appeared on a progressive news site whose proprietor has strongly criticized mainstream journalism for its pathological and misleading "balance" even on settled issues of fact.

Now, via email, Arianna Huffington clarifies:

Harold Ambler reached out to me about posting a critical piece on Al Gore and the environment. We are always open to posts that present opinions contrary to HuffPost's editorial view -- and have welcomed many conservative voices, such as David Frum, Tony Blankley, Michael Smerconish, Bob Barr, Joe Scarborough, Jim Talent, etc., to the site. We have featured also countless posts from the leading lights of the Green movement, including Robert Redford, Laurie David, Carl Pope, Van Jones, David Roberts, and many others -- and I myself have written extensively about the global warming crisis, and have been highly critical of those who refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence.

When Ambler sent his post, I forwarded it to one of our associate blog editors to evaluate, not having read it. I get literally hundreds of posts a week submitted like this and obviously can't read them all -- which is why we have an editorial process in place. The associate blog editor published the post. It was an error in judgment. I would not have posted it. Although HuffPost welcomes a vigorous debate on many subjects, I am a firm believer that there are not two sides to every issue, and that on some issues the jury is no longer out. The climate crisis is one of these issues.

This, shall we say, casts a new light on a comment that Ambler left on our piece over on HuffPo:

Again, my full response will be a couple of weeks from now. In the meantime, there is a second factual error in your piece regarding how I got posted on HuffPo. My only contact with the site prior to being published was Arianna Huffington herself, who read my piece, accepted it, and directed her staff to post it.

Sure she did, Harold.

Anyway, kudos to Huffington for taking responsibility and clarifying her site's editorial approach.

Now we can all get on with our lives ... until the next skeptic fruitcake resurrects the same zombie lies on some other unsuspecting site. Then we start all over again. It never gets old!

White roofs are the trillion-dollar solution

Part 1 introduced urban heat island mitigation (UHIM). It discussed how lighter colored (or reflective) roofs and pavement, plus urban trees, can save energy, cut CO2 emissions, cool a city, and reduce smog.

But a global "cool roofs" strategy can achieve far bigger benefits -- the equivalent of several trillion dollars worth of CO2 reductions -- since it can increase the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet, thereby directly reducing the absorption of incoming solar radiation and hence planetary warming. The strategy proposed below "is equivalent to taking the world's approximately 600 million cars off the road for 18 years."

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

This is technically geoengineering, although I'd call it geoengineering-light or geo-reverse-engineering, since we are mostly undoing the albedo decrease caused by all the dark roofs and dark pavement we have covered the planet with.

A forthcoming article in Climatic Change, "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2," [PDF] provides the detailed calculations. A two-page non-technical summary, "White Roofs Cool the World, Directly Offset CO2 and Delay Global Warming," [PDF] has been written by two of the country's leading UHIM experts: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Hashem Akbari and California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld (coauthors with me on "Paint the Town White -- and Green"). I have reprinted it below:

More on Jones and green jobs in the New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert waxes New Yorker-ish over Van the Man. You know, in case you've been busy under that rock.

They affect consumers the same either way, and upstream is simpler and more transparent

In his post on conservatives and carbon taxes, David said:

First, we have to remember all the places the price signal created by an upstream tax can be diluted or stymied on the way to consumers -- i.e., those who can change their behavior in response to prices. Not every industry or business will pass an increase in operating costs directly on to the next link in the chain. Information failures and split incentives abound. Price signals that begin strong, catholic, and clear become fragmented and faint downstream. For all the hype, an upstream carbon price will deliver fairly little incentive to where the carbon is used.

There are two problems with this: It is overstated, and it places blame in the wrong place, i.e., the fact that the tax is levied upstream.

An open reply to James Hansen's open letter

Dear Dr. Hansen:

An old engineer's dictum says "fast, cheap, good: pick two." Unfortunately, and I'm sure completely contrary to your intention, your solution to global warming favors "cheap" over fast.

Energy efficiency, renewable energies, and a "smart grid" deserve first priority in our effort to reduce carbon emissions. With a rising carbon price, renewable energy can perhaps handle all of our needs. However, most experts believe that making such presumption probably would leave us in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide. Such a result would be disastrous for the planet, humanity, and nature.

Fourth generation nuclear power (4th GNP) and coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at present are the best candidates to provide large baseload nearly carbon-free power (in case renewable energies cannot do the entire job).

OK, this begs the question of why depending on efficiency, carbon negative forestry and agriculture, and renewables would leave us "in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide."

We certainly have the physical capacity to build wind and solar generators that could provide all our power. Archer and Jacobson, perhaps the world's leading experts on wind potential, estimate that wind energy at 80 meters in commercially developable sites alone could could supply [PDF] five times the world's current energy demand. Note the emphasis: That is not five times world's current electricity consumption, but five times total world energy consumption, including cars and factories and non-electric heating¹. Similarly, solar thermal power plants of the type already running in U.S. deserts² can provide the world's entire energy needs [PDF] from less than 1 percent of total desert land³. Those are only two possibilities, albeit the ones with the biggest potential with today's technology.

Chinese power production plunges

On DotEarth, Andy Revkin brings us this amazing graph:

(Credit: Richard K. Morse, Stanford University. Data from China's National Bureau of Statistics)

Says Revkin:

Researchers at Stanford University who closely track China's power sector, coal use, and carbon dioxide emissions have done an initial rough projection and foresee China possibly emitting somewhere between 1.9 and 2.6 billion tons less carbon dioxide from 2008 to 2010 than it would have under "business as usual" if current bearish trends for the global economy hold up.