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Snippets from the news

• Bush says will veto plan to fund rural schools and libraries with paid-back oil royalties. • Common pesticides linked to diabetes. • Could liquefied-natural-gas project help salmon? • Stop trashing the climate already. • Few are fans of Bush plan for $100 billion cleantech fund. • Norwegian NGO says we can slash emissions 85 […]

Inhofe: Gore wrong 100 percent of the time

“Almost everything in his movie, in fact, everything has been refuted.” — Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth opera to open by 2011, U.S. public transit overwhelmed, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: The Future’s Coming Fast Rough Ridership ‘How Now?’ Frowns Dow

Coal is no longer cheap — so what comes next?

This article first appeared in Spark, and is reprinted here with their permission. It's somewhat long, and it's got numbers and graphs. It helps if you imagine Scarlett Johansson reading it.

When it comes to power generation, coal isn't cheap. Both power plant and fuel costs are up by nearly 300%, and projected to rise farther¹. Even before factoring in the risks of future greenhouse gas legislation, this has conspired to make a bet on coal-fired central station power equivalent to a bet on massive retail power price increases. Increasingly, this is a bet that neither equity nor debt providers are willing to take.

And yet we continue to operate under the assumption that coal is cheap -- to the extent that we have largely framed our greenhouse gas policy conversation as a tradeoff between environmental stewardship and the cheap coal fantasy.

On balance, this is good news, because it means that the perceived conflict at the heart of our current climate change debate is false. We need not quibble about whether or not we can afford to address global warming; indeed, we can lower greenhouse gases and grow the economy. But first, we have to get beyond coal.

The Electric Sector's Role in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In the United States, coal is primarily a power plant fuel, and the electricity sector is our single biggest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, any discussion of greenhouse gas reduction must confront coal-based electricity. Figure 1 shows total US greenhouse gas emissions by sector, and Figure 2 shows how the electric sector has steadily increased its share thereof.

Figure 1: 2005 US Greenhouse Gas Emissions, By Source²

Canadian government offers $300, other incentives to scrap older cars

If you live in Canada and high gasoline prices have you considering whether to ditch your car, consider this winning deal: Turn over your pre-1996 vehicle to be scrapped and you can choose from a variety of attractive offers courtesy of the Canadian government, including a new bike, bus passes, membership in a car-sharing program, […]

Richard Revesz responds to Lisa Heinzerling, defending cost-benefit analysis

This post continues a dialogue with professor Lisa Heinzerling: see Revesz's initial post and Heinzerling's response.

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Cost-benefit analysis, correctly applied to many environmental problems, will show that strong environmental regulation is often economically efficient. Although some environmentalists, including Lisa Heinzerling in a recent post, have expressed reservations about the use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate environmental rules, rejecting cost-benefit analysis instead of seeking to reform it would be a major strategic error for the environmental movement.

Can sustainability survive the recession?

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

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What will the recession mean for sustainability? With the U.S. subprime tsunami still breaking on Britain's shores, house prices in freefall, and several major financial institutions in trouble, it's becoming a hot topic in the U.K. now, with pundits wading in on both sides. Media framing has a tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecy, so it's worrying that there's a fair amount devoted to how rising costs and stagnant incomes will inevitably trample on the green shoots of ethical consumption.

And to be fair, it's not hard to find evidence to support this view. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is, as predicted, getting a good kicking on his planned fuel-tax rises -- to the point that it's a safe bet they'll be abandoned soon. More worryingly, there are signs that some forms of ethical consumption have slowed fairly dramatically in the last few months. With food prices at supermarkets up around 20 percent on this time last year -- equating to around £1,000 (nearly $2,000) per year for the average family -- the squeeze is on.

Snippets from the news

• Strong climate policy would protect 14 million American jobs. • Schwarzenegger declares statewide drought in California. • Asian autos outsell Detroit for the first time. • Law firm forms practice group focusing specifically on climate change. • Bill Gates dumps stake in ethanol company.

World Environment Day is June 5

Thursday is World Environment Day, and you will no doubt celebrate by donating to Grist. (Thank you!) Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can also help out our dear environment by packing a lighter suitcase when you travel, jogging in the park instead of on the treadmill, using a wind-up alarm clock, […]

Mexico City residents losing sense of smell, says research

The air pollution in Mexico City is so bad that it could be harming residents’ sense of smell, researchers say. People who live in the city, which exceeds the World Health Organization’s ozone standards 300 days out of the year, did a worse job identifying common scents like coffee and orange juice than residents of […]