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Georgetown Law opens new climate center with support from governors

Georgetown Law celebrated the opening of its Climate Resource Center on Monday with an event featuring several green luminaries. Govs. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.) and Chris Gregoire (D-Wash.), as well as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Council on Environmental Quality chief Nancy Sutley were on hand for the inauguration of the center, created to help connect […]

China’s environment problems serious: minister

SHANGHAI — China’s environmental problems remain serious with local governments not putting enough pressure on businesses to control pollution, the nation’s environment protection minister has said. Efforts to toughen environment laws have not done enough to fix the widespread problems for China’s air, lakes and rivers, Zhang Lijun said Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua […]

The problem with climate-model criticism

I have a paper [PDF] in this week's Science discussing the water vapor feedback. It is a Perspective, meaning that it is a summary of the existing literature rather than new scientific results. In it, my co-author Steve Sherwood and I discuss the mountain of evidence in support of a strong and positive water vapor feedback.

Interestingly, it seems that just about everybody now agrees water vapor provides a robustly strong and positive feedback. Roy Spencer even sent me email saying that he agrees.

What I want to focus on here is model verification. If you read the blogs, you'll often see people say things like "the models are completely unvalidated." What they mean is that no one has produced a 100-year climate run with a model, then waited a hundred years, and evaluated how the model did. There are many practical problems with doing this, but the biggest is that by the time you determine if your model was right or not, it would be too late to take any meaningful action to head off the problem.

Louisiana governor talks energy in his response to Obama’s address

America needs a comprehensive new energy plan, and that plan should include more drilling for oil and gas. That’s the message Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal delivered in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night. “To strengthen our economy, we need urgent action to keep energy prices down,” said Jindal, […]

Obama puts climate and energy atop his priorities list in his first address to Congress

President Barack Obama devoted a significant portion of his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night to energy and environmental concerns, talking up the need for energy investments and calling on legislators to send him a cap-and-trade bill this Congress. “To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet […]

Let's mend, not end, ag subsidies

"It's a dead end to try and eliminate subsidies, because then you get all of America's farmers, who have political power out of all proportion of their number, unified against change. Right now the incentives are to produce as much as possible, whatever the costs to the environment and our health. But you can imagine another set of assumptions, so that they're getting incentives to sequester carbon. Or clean the water that leaves their farm, or for the quality, not the quantity, of the food they're growing."

-- Michael Pollan, reflecting a growing consensus

Despite lower gas prices, driving is still down — but perhaps not for long

I keep looking for signs that the collapse in gas prices has started to have an impact on how much people drive. In a normal economy, you'd expect that as gas got cheaper, people would drive a bit more -- the reverse of the trend we saw last summer, when gas prices were reaching record highs and people were cutting way back on car travel.

But this simply isn't a "normal" economy. Just as gas prices fell, family incomes started taking a beating too. So, sure, it costs a lot less to fill a tank now than it did last summer, but people also had less money to spend on gas. And the two contradictory trends leave me scratching my head: will gas consumption continue to dip, stay flat, or start to trend upwards again?

The latest federal numbers on vehicle travel may offer some hints. As the Contra Costa Times notes, gasoline consumption fell in December 2008, compared with the previous December. But looking at the numbers, the year-over-year decline was actually the smallest since the previous February -- suggesting, perhaps, that low prices are beginning to subtly boost driving.

Senate finally confirms green-jobs advocate Hilda Solis

From the about damn time files: Senate confirms Hilda Solis as labor secretary. Now, to get to that green jobs work you’ve promised …

In our latest tasting, organic beer comes of age

Imagine Norman Bates, twisted hero of Hitchcock’s Psycho, stumbling into a funhouse of mirrors and finding Mother at the center, her image reflected on a thousand surfaces surrounding him. He might freak out, right? That’s a bit how I feel when I walk into Carrboro Beverage Co., a small and extremely well-stocked beer store in […]

Producing a true green 2010 budget

I perused the Green Budget 2010 released last week by a large group of U.S. environmental organizations, including EDF, LCV, NRDC, NWF and WWF. Unable to find a total cost figure for the wish list of federal programs it includes, I assumed this omission stemmed from hesitancy to draw attention to a hefty price tag. After toting up the numbers, this seems not to be the case.

The total cost of the Green 2010 budget is $74 billion, just $4 billion more than the FY 2008 Bush administration budget reference. This is a diddly amount, not even a small down payment on returning environmental programs to parity with pre-Bush administration levels, let alone commensurate with the scale of the terrible risk before us.

The Green 2010 budget deals almost entirely in environmental line items, parsing each federal program as if it were operating in isolation, never addressing the fundamental question of what is required of the federal government. Incremental policy being our raison d'être, this is not a surprise, but the failure to propose obvious budget solutions, such as shifting all fossil fuel subsidies to renewables (what ever happened to Green Scissors?) is perplexing. Nor do important political questions, such as the degree to which particular governmental agencies are beholden to given interests, seem to enter the equation.

I took a whack at constructing a "true green" 2010 budget (using a spreadsheet available here), coming up with a total of $273 billion, which still seems a little light, but in the right the ballpark.