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NASA scheduled to launch carbon observatory early Tuesday

  Editor’s Note: The rocket carrying NASA’s Carbon Observatory into orbit failed early Tuesday morning, destroying the satellite. Updates to follow. NASA hopes to start solving one of climate science’s most vexing mysteries Tuesday morning when it launches the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), its first spacecraft dedicated to measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide. The satellite is […]

If Obama stops dirty coal, as he must, what will replace it? An intro to biomass cofiring

Biomass cofiring will be the focus of a couple of posts since, although rarely-discussed, it is probably the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way to provide new renewable baseload power without having to build any new transmission lines.

I first started analyzing the carbon benefits of cofiring biomass with coal in 1997 when I was overseeing a study by five U.S. national laboratories that examined what an aggressive technology-based strategy built around energy efficiency and renewable energy could achieve in terms of emissions reductions. (See full study here and some history on it by California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld here [PDF].) With supporting analysis done by the Electric Power Research Institute, the Five Lab Study concluded that biomass cofiring was the single biggest potential contributor to near-term greenhouse gas reductions of any renewable energy strategy.

Cofiring is a well demonstrated strategy with multiple benefits. From a practical perspective, most of the existing coal plants are mostly paid off. Plus they are fully permitted and have all the necessary transmission plus they are connected to freight train lines and water supply. Plus this is baseload power. So you avoid all of the problems associated with citing new renewables in the Midwest or Southwest. Cofiring is thus a key near-term strategy for meeting climate goals -- and renewable standards -- in the Midwest and Southeast.

Reid to introduce a new bill granting more authority to feds for electricity transmission

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today signaled that energy policy will be a major focus for Congress in the next months, announcing plans to introduce a bill later this week that would give the federal government greater authority in siting electrical transmission lines around the country. “What we’re talking about doing is making it […]

Some thoughts on economists and climate and so forth

The other day in a somewhat tossed-off post I expressed unease at the influence mainstream economists have on climate policy, particularly within the Obama administration. Elsewhere on the green beat you've got people like Chu, who comes out of the science and technology worlds, or Browner, who's been deeply involved in the mechanics of environmental policy implementation for decades -- they are unusual both for their expertise and their ambition around climate and energy. Contrast that to the economic team, which is populated with conventional Rubinites, veterans of the Clinton administration. Their avatar is Larry Summers, who spent Clinton's term pushing back against Browner on climate policy and who has popped up on green radars thus far mainly as the guy who had a hand in cutting back transit funding in the stimulus package. Geithner is basically cut from the same cloth.

It was with all that in mind that I found the notion of a Treasury Dept.-based climate policy team a less-than-thrilling prospect -- my presumption, absent other evidence (and I made it very clear I was just noodling), is that it will be a Summers-esque force for go-slow incrementalism. I probably shouldn't have used the term "mainstream economists," since that's rather imprecise, but anyone who's watched the Obama team take shape knows what I mean.

Anyway, this prompted some substance-free snark over on Common Tragedies, followed by more substance-free snark on Environmental Economics, followed by some substance-free mutual high-fiving in the comments. (This kind of cliquishness will surely help spread the proper respect for the social sciences.)

Still, Adam Stein -- a guy who knows how to mix substance and snark in proper proportion -- is concerned about what he sees as sporadic and inconsistent attacks on economists from environmental quarters. So this is as good an occasion as any to write a post on that subject I've been meaning to write forever. I want to try to get at a few things that bug me about economists the way (some!) economists and economics (often!) tend to manifest themselves in public debates over climate change.

Umbra on the digital conversion

Dear Umbra, I’m awfully concerned about this switch to digital televisions, and it’s not because I’m worried about getting a converter box. I’m anxious at the prospect of millions of old televisions finding their way into the landfills in one mass trashing of old technology. Already at my small apartment complex I’ve seen three big […]

Is the New York Times coverage of global warming fatally flawed?

Two dreadful, tunnel-vision articles in the New York Times suggest the "paper of record" must rethink how it covers the most important issue of our time.

Yes, the NYT has the biggest climate team, but their reporting by stovepipe (rather than by team), renders that staff largely useless. Indeed, it may be less than useless, as these articles make clear.

Let's start with today's front-page story "Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California" on the state's record drop in snowpack and rainfall. Even though there is abundant science that both impacts are precisely what we would expect from human-caused climate change, reporter Jesse McKinley never mentions the subject at all. Quite the reverse, he opens the piece:

The country's biggest agricultural engine, California's sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.

So not only does McKinley ignore a likely contributor to the drought and snowpack loss, he attributes the whole damn thing to "an unlucky strike of nature."

No wonder the public is not terribly concerned about global warming and fails to understand that humans are changing the climate now. The only surprising thing is that the NYT itself is surprised that the public is under-informed (see here).

The NYT did not make this mistake when it reported on Australia's drought -- because it used team-based reporting (see here). I will return to this point at the end.

Moreover, the impacts California is experiencing are not some obscure or distant prediction of climate change -- they are so well-known and well accepted that even that bastion of climate denial, the Bush administration, not only acknowledged them in a December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report, Abrupt Climate Change, but warned they may be just around the corner (see here):

In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.

Indeed, these impacts in California should be incredibly well known to the media now that Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has spoken out about them (see here):

Biosphere still being fed to our cars, threatening rainforests

The battle between science and the profit margin is heating up. In case you missed it, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Chicago a few Saturdays ago (Al Gore was one of the speakers). This is the same group that publishes the journal Science. Following is an excerpt from a blog post by Erik Stokstad titled Fill 'Er Up With Rainforest [$ub. req'd.]:

Update [2009-2-23 14:46:46 by biodiversivist]: Erik Stokstad just informed me that you don't need a subscription to read the blog.

USDA's People's Garden may not be all it's cracked up to be

US Department of Agriculture chief Tom Vilsack may not deserve that recently awarded Grist green thumbs-up after all. Obamafoodorama (blissfully abbreviated as ObFo) has an amusing and edifying (and lengthy) disquisition on Tom Vilsack's much ballyhooed "People's Garden." When Vilsack took a jackhammer to a slab of concrete in front of USDA headquarters in honor of Lincoln's Birthday (the USDA was founded under Lincoln and referred to by him as "the People's Department"), he thought he was demonstrating the USDA's commitment to sustainable landscaping. But he did it without, it appears, much forethought.

The planning process seems to have consisted of one step: "Dig a hole." There's no design for an actual garden to go in its place -- and it certainly was not intended, as many have presumed and now demanded, to be a food garden. The landscape plan that Vilsack brandished in a USDA photo was, according to USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service spokesman Terry Bish, a prop. When ObFo asked about it, Bish said "Oh, that's old. Those are the plans from when [former Ag] Secretary Schafer was planting a tree in the ornamental garden to honor a USDA employee who was killed in Iraq."

In fact, the whole thing was a photo op that got out of hand.

But the goal of the garden changed when it became apparent that there was a groundswell of public interest in a food garden at USDA headquarters.

"Suddenly there was all this interest from the public about vegetables," Mr. Bish said. "It was a sleeper. Sometimes we do these things, and they get really big." He repeated: "There's actually no timeline for the garden. It was all about the Bicentennial. But now we have to come up with ways of maintaining it and to see how we can use it ..."

USDA sees a food problem, but not the solution

Albert Einstein once said, "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."

The same can be said of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's newfound commitment to "get Americans to eat more healthful foods while also boosting crop production to feed a growing world population." As he notes, "These two goals have often been at odds."

Two real financial thinkers venture into CNBC fantasy world; comedy ensues

Okay, this is priceless -- and anyone who wants to understand not only our economic calamity but also why we're still screwed has to watch it. Oh, and don't worry -- it's also absolutely, laugh-out-loud hilarious (in a bittter sort of way).

Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb are two of our most trenchant and learned commenters on finance. It's time to start listening to them -- if Obama is serious about running a centrist administration, it's a scandal that he tapped Robin Rubin acolytes Summers and Geithner, not Roubini and Taleb, to run economic policy.

For years, the two men have been making the point that the U.S. economy is way too hinged on debt, speculation, obsession with short-term gain, and philistine optimism -- the very things raised to the level of fetish by the Rubin crowd. Roubini and Taleb predicted a cataclysmic tumbling of the house of cards built on that shaky foundation. They gained a small following, but were widely ignored -- particularly by the TV financial media, which became a craven, self-parodying machine for turning Wall Street and corporate hucksters into folk heroes.