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What Obama's green team has to say about coal

Here at Grist, we like to say that coal is the enemy of the human race. But what do Obama's environmental nominees have to say about the dirtiest of all fossil fuels? Here's what we heard at their confirmation hearings:

Steven Chu, nominee for secretary of energy: "I am optimistic we can figure out how to use those resources in a clean way. I'm very hopeful that this will occur and I think that we will be using that great natural resource."

Lisa Jackson, nominee for EPA administrator: "Coal is a vital resource in this country. It is right now the source of generation of about 50 percent of our power. And I think that it is also important for us to say in the same sentence that it is -- the emissions from coal-fired power plants are -- the largest contributor to global warming emissions. So we have to face square-shouldered the future and the issues of coal and then move American ingenuity towards addressing them."

Ken Salazar, nominee for secretary of the interior: "Coal is a controversial subject. The fact of the matter is it powers today much of America, and there are lots of jobs it creates ... The challenge is how we create clean coal ... I believe that we will move forward with the funding of some of those demonstration projects so we can find ways to burn coal that don't contribute to climate change. I will certainly be an advocate of making that happen."

The green films on show this year at Sundance

It's a reel good time in Park City, Utah: The 10-day Sundance Film Festival kicked off there on Jan. 14, and five of the 32 documentaries have environmental themes. An additional 50 eco-related films were submitted but didn't make the cut -- more greenish submissions than in the past two years combined, said a Sundance programmer. It's no wonder that budding eco-filmmakers clamor to get in, as An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? got their starts at Sundance.

Here's a rundown of this year's greenish offerings:

 

The Cove: This eco-thriller exposes the slimy underbelly of the cultural infatuation with dolphins. Activists -- led by Flipper's trainer -- sneak cameras into the cove of a major Japanese dolphin supplier and document the sketchy treatment of the animals. Which probably includes making them pose for neon Lisa Frank merch.

 

 

 

No Impact Man: You may've heard of Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, the New Yorker who attempted to go carless, eat organic and local, and not create any waste (including toilet paper) for a year -- and who made his wife and kidlet go along with him. If his wife is really as "espresso-guzzling [and] Prada-worshipping" as she's made out to be, this could be a tasty greenish slice of Simple Life-esque schadenfreude.

 

 

Automakers parade EVs in Detroit, Ontario Betters itself, and more green auto news

• Detroit: It's still around, and as long as the feds continue to give transit short-shrift, we'll be driving and bailing for years to come. But in honor of our societal shift toward fuel efficiency, the automakers have some brand new electric vehicles and hybrids they have been showing off this week at the North American International Auto Show, Jan. 11-25.

From the third-generation Prius to the Dodge Circuit to the Mini E, talk of fuel efficiency and battery-life replaced praise for horsepower and chrome. Thank goodness for the 505-horsepower Revenge GTM-R or we might confuse ourselves and our cars with those subdued European models.

While electric vehicles stole the auto show, Toyota's executive vice president, Masatami Takimoto, said in an interview with the New York Times that Toyota would produce a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle by 2015. GM's lead engineer on the Volt also thinks Hydrogen is the fuel of the future -- I guess he hasn't read Joseph Romm's opinions on the matter. GM's Larry Burns, vice president of research and development and strategic planning, thinks Toyota has a lock on hybrids and that the Americans need to "change the game," but he didn't specify if that meant a focus on hydrogen.

From Jan. 17-25, NAIAS will be open to the public. If you live in Detroit, don't miss these 10 vehicles of interest, as advised by Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press, and when else will you take an i-Miev for an EcoExperience 10-mph test-drive a la Michigan Economic Development Corporation?

(Side note: Jalopnik nearly ran into the Sen. Bob "I'm against the bailout plan" Corker (R-Tenn.) in their little electric mobile command center. You can -- hee hee -- watch the video here.)

In other news ...

• Like Israel, Denmark, Australia, California, and Hawaii before it, the city of Ontario, Canada, will now be a Better Place.

• Ferrari is now offering research grants for automotive technology that reduces vehicle weight and CO2 emissions.

Grist pulled no punches in covering all of George Bush's dirt

  A movie no one would make.   Imagine that back in 1999 you were a Hollywood studio executive and a movie producer brought you the following pitch: A bumbling, incurious child of privilege wastes his youth on Oedipal rebellion. After stumbling through a series of failed business ventures and an undistinguished stint as governor […]

Sundance goes green as environment takes spotlight

PARK CITY, Utah — Environmental movies with a message are taking center stage at the 25th Sundance Film Festival, with films ranging from vanishing bees and threatened dolphins being screened here. “We are ravaging the earth. We need to think how we treat our resources but more importantly how we treat the people,” said director […]

Eight years of Bush’s environmental actions — the good, the bad, and the ugly

Grist came of age over the past eight years, so it seems only fitting to compile George W. Bush’s environmental legacy in one place. From abandoning Kyoto to censoring climate science, all the bad (and, wherever we could find it, the good) is here. Note: This timeline is based on Grist’s extensive coverage of the […]

IPCC chief challenges Obama to further cut U.S. emission targets

Worldwatch just released its State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, which finds:

The world will have to reduce emissions more drastically than has been widely predicted, essentially ending the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world's climate.

At a kick-off event, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said

President-elect Obama's goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.

Told ya! (see "The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target.")

Pachauri was the guy handpicked by Bush to replace the "alarmist" Bob Watson. But facts make scientists alarmists, not their politics, as I've said many times (see "Desperate times, desperate scientists"). At the end of 2007, Pachauri famously said:

Who's killing the plug-in hybrid?

This East Bay Express story is a must-read article. The same folks who decided the hydrogen highway was the road to the future now very well might kill the plug-in hybrid conversion industry.

I'd say we should send them a copy of Who Killed the Electric Car?, but chances are they only have Betamax.

Eight years of Bush inaction leave Obama with a near-impossible challenge

Given the sheer number of candidates for “worst legacy of the Bush years,” it may seem perverse to pick the hundreds of coal-fired power plants that have opened across China during his administration. But given their cumulative effect — quite possibly the concrete block that broke the climate-camel’s already straining back — I think they […]

The ocean is absorbing less carbon dioxide

Premier among their many unscientific beliefs, deniers cling to the notion that some magical negative feedback will avert serious climate impacts. Sadly, we will need magic to save humanity if we foolishly decide to listen to the deniers and to keep ignoring the one negative feedback that science says can certainly save humanity -- simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientific reality based on actual observations (not to mention the paleoclimate record) is that the climate models are not underestimating negative feedbacks -- the models are wildly underestimating the positive or amplifying feedbacks. Among the greatest concerns is the growing evidence that the major carbon sinks are saturating, that a greater and greater fraction of human emissions will end up in the atmosphere.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters ($ub. req'd), "Sudden, considerable reduction in recent uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ by the East/Japan Sea," finds,

The results presented in this paper indicate that the rate of CO₂ accumulation in the deepest basin of the East/Japan Sea has considerably decreased over the transition period between 1992-1999 and 1999-2007.

The authors explain to the U.K.'s Guardian why this is an amplifying feedback, why warming is diminishing the ability of the ocean sink to absorb CO2:

The world's oceans soak up about 11bn tonnes of human carbon dioxide pollution each year, about a quarter of all produced, and even a slight weakening of this natural process would leave significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere. That would require countries to adopt much stricter emissions targets to prevent dangerous rises in temperature.

Kitack Lee, an associate professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology, who led the research, says the discovery is the "very first observation that directly relates ocean CO2 uptake change to ocean warming".

He says the warmer conditions disrupt a process known as "ventilation" -- the way seawater flows and mixes and drags absorbed CO2 from surface waters to the depths. He warns that the effect is probably not confined to the Sea of Japan. It could also affect CO2 uptake in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.

"Our result ... unequivocally demonstrated that oceanic uptake of CO2 has been directly affected by warming-induced weakening of vertical ventilation," he says ...

Lee adds: "In other words, the increase in atmospheric temperature due to global warming can profoundly influence the ocean ventilation, thereby decreasing the uptake rate of CO2."

This study matches other recent research on ocean sink saturation. In 2007, the BBC reported, "The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced" based on more than 90,000 ship-based measurements of CO2 absorption over ten years. The Global Carbon Project analysis of the "natural land and ocean CO₂ sinks" finds: