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Umbra on commuting choices

Dear Umbra, I have three choices in how I travel the 15 or so miles between my house and my job: car, light rail, and ferry. Each one, depending on the time and the day, has its advantage in terms of time, convenience, practicality, and enjoyability. If we assume that all the logistical factors are […]

Bush's last marine protection area isn't so much with the protection

On Tuesday the Bush administration announced plans to create the world's largest marine protection area in the Pacific Ocean.

It's a big deal. Huge even. Progressives like Jonathan Stein are rightly shocked and excited.

Remember though, an attitude of utter cynicism toward the Bush administration has served as an unfailingly accurate guide for eight years now. Let's not be too quick to give it up.

After all, there's this:

Two years ago with fanfare, President Bush declared a remote chain of Hawaiian islands the biggest, most environmentally protected area of ocean in the world.

It hasn't worked out that way.

Cleanup efforts have slowed, garbage is still piling up and Bush has cut his budget request by 80%.

And one wonders just how a cash-strapped federal government plans to police this brand new marine sanctuary. Turns out, Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was asked just that earlier this week during a press briefing:

Q: Two questions. One, you mentioned monitoring. You also mentioned how remote this area is -- and I have actually fished this area quite a bit. And my question to you is, monitoring is one thing, but enforcement is an entirely different issue. And I don't honestly see how you can enforce any of this out there with the amount of government-based traffic that you have in the area. How do you plan to enforce these laws?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Well, let's begin -- first, this is our experience -- these are challenging areas to get to, so there's an embedded enforcement of just the difficulty of getting to these areas. Two, we operate from the presumption that most people who care about the resource, including your constituency, are law-abiding citizens, and so we expect that there will be a fair amount of increased awareness of the importance of the resource, and certainly that the boating community is very good about staying up to date on charts, especially the adventurous boating community, and staying up to date on -- just for safety purposes -- the conditions with respect to these remote areas.

Now, is there the potential for some Chinese commercial fishing fleet to come in and intrude the area? The answer to that is yes. And so one of our goals is through the management planning, and through several years of building out capacity, to also build out our capability to enforce.

So, the president's plan is to someday get around to have better enforcement. As to monitoring, Connaughton had this to say:

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!

Pelosi promises mass transit and energy investments, not just roads and bridges

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed today that the stimulus package Congress is working on will do more than just invest in traditional projects like roads and bridges. "Make no mistake: this is not your grandfather's public works bill," said the Speaker.

The package, which she said must be passed "no later than mid-February," will have significant investments in transit, energy, and other technological advancements.

"Thanks to the leadership of our Chairmen on the Science Committee, Mr. Bart Gordon, and especially on Infrastructure, Mr. Oberstar, this is a smart, 21st century plan that will create new jobs by investing in a cleaner energy future. Mr. Waxman is working on that; strengthening high-tech infrastructure to bring the power of renewable energy and broadband to communities across America; and rebuilding our bridges, and modernizing our schools," said Pelosi.

The remarks came at a Democratic Steering & Policy Committee forum this morning on the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan." Also attending the forum: Dr. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodyseconomy.com; former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich; Harvard economist Martin Feldstein; Norman Augustine, author of Rising Above the Gathering Storm and the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin; and Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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:

Former TVA head rips coal, coal ash, coal industry, kids on his lawn

On Monday Living on Earth did a priceless interview with former utility exec David Freeman, ex-head of the TVA (and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the New York Power Authority), about the massive Tennessee coal ash spill.

Freeman's a crusty old coot (in a good way!) and he minces no words. Hard to pick my favorite bit, but this is a gem:

CURWOOD: Now it seemed to me though that there must be some kind of alternative to just dumping the stuff in a big pile. I mean, what alternatives, if any, are there out there?

FREEMAN: Well, the best one is to stop burning the coal and shut the plant down and use solar power and wind power. I am not gonna suggest that there is a clean way to control the filthy stuff that's left over when you burn coal. It's time that we outlawed new coal-fired plants and start systematically by age, shutting down the old ones.

Or this:

VRB's long-life flow battery was a reliable electricity storage alternative for renewable energy

VRB Power applied for insolvency in November [PDF]. A combination of a bad economy and a product that was more suited for future markets than today's electricity generators dealt VRB the final blow. This is bad news for the green energy community.

VRB built flow batteries -- utility scale batteries that could last for over 10,000 full charges and discharges. Cost was from $650 per kWh for small-scale systems to as a little as $300 per kWh for large-scale systems.

Admittedly the latter price was for larger systems than anyone ever ordered. It was the perfect utility-scale battery: too heavy for automobile use, but rugged and tolerant of cold, heat, and shocks. It required minimal operations and maintenance.

Even at current costs, these flow batteries could have played a key role in an energy grid based on variable sources. In today's world, it found a niche market at UPS for remote systems where maintenance was difficult, and for telecom use. Unfortunately its greater reliability could not make up for its higher cost. It was an excellent product, unfortunately mostly suited to a electric system that does not yet exist.

We can only hope the battery does not end up in patent hell -- owned by somebody who neither licenses it nor develops it themselves.

'Plan B' efficiency and conservation measures drop energy demand by 2020

Projections from the International Energy Agency show global energy demand growing by close to 30 percent by 2020, setting the stage for massive growth in the carbon dioxide emissions that are warming our planet. But dramatically ramping up energy efficiency would allow the world to not only avoid growth in energy demand but also actually reduce global demand to below 2006 levels by 2020.

We can reduce the amount of energy we use by preventing the waste of heat and electricity in buildings and industrial processes and by switching to efficient lighting and appliances. We can also save an enormous amount of energy by restructuring the transportation sector. Many of the needed energy efficiency measures can be enacted relatively quickly and pay for themselves.

Buildings are responsible for a large share of global electricity consumption and raw materials use. In the United States, buildings account for 70 percent of electricity use and close to 40 percent of total CO2 emissions. Retrofitting existing buildings with better insulation and more-efficient appliances can cut energy use by 20 to 50 percent. A U.S.-based group of forward-thinking architects and engineers has set forth the Architecture 2030 Challenge, with the goal of reducing fossil-fuel use in new buildings 80 percent by 2020 on the way to going entirely carbon-neutral by 2030.

A legacy-making move for the outgoing prez

President George W. Bush deserves praise from ocean lovers for his creation of three new marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean. This action protects some of the few remaining pristine coral reefs in the world by prohibiting all forms of commercial fishing and severely restricting recreational fishing.

These are among the last places on the planet where you can still see sharks and other top predators in something like a healthy state. President Bush -- and the Pew Environment Group, Marine Conservation Biology Institute and Environmental Defense Fund, who worked so hard for these monuments -- can be justifiably proud of the results.

It's easy to point out that the protected areas around the 10 islands could have been 16-times larger if Bush had included the full 200-mile exclusive economic zone in the monuments. As National Geographic scientist Enric Sala points out, there's no magic scientific line at 50 miles. It looks more like a political line to me.

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.