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Landmark ruling halts Georgia coal plant on basis of CO2 emissions

A Georgia coal plant cannot go forward until it receives an air-pollution permit limiting its carbon-dioxide emissions, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore ruled Monday. The ruling marks the first time a judge has used the Supreme Court’s classification of CO2 as a pollutant to regulate emissions from an industrial source. Moore’s […]

VW to join Toyota, GM with 2010 plug-in hybrid

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

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The German government announced it will be helping to fund VW's plug-in hybrid development program with 15 million euros. VM aims for a 2010 vehicle with 31 miles of all-electric range. VW head Martin Winterkorn said that while petrol or diesel powered cars would be around for some time to come, "the future belongs to all-electric cars." According to autoblog, the Twin Drive uses a 82-hp electric motor and a 2.0L turbodiesel producing 122 hp.

VW recently signed a deal with Sanyo, which is aggressively ramping up automotive lithium-ion battery production. It expects the hybrid and plug-in hybrid markets to be 4 to 4.5 million vehicles by 2015, and aims to capture 40 percent of this market. Sanyo uses a mixture of Ni, Mn, and Co for the positive electrode, thereby producing a safer battery that exhibits power retention ratio of 80 percent or higher after 10,000 cycles (10-15 years in a hybrid vehicle).

Last week, Daimler announced it would bring an electric car to market in 2010.

For more on plug ins, see "Turn on, plug in, drop out."

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

15 green books you can actually read at the beach

Green books that are fun to read? What a novel idea. So maybe you’ll finally have a chance to catch up on some reading this summer. But so many of those books about the environment seem kind of … well, homework-y. What’s a vacationing enviro to do? Turn to Grist for advice, of course! Here […]

Maryland Senator pushes for better transit, efficiency

Since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1987, Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has been active on issues such as health care and retirement security. But since making the leap to the Senate less than two years ago, Cardin has emerged as a leader on some of the most nuts-and-bolts elements of policy […]

What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us

No, 450 is not politically possible today.

Okay, that was clear before. But the debate over the Climate Security Act made it clear that it won't be politically possible anytime soon, for two reasons:

1. The vast majority of conservatives have not budged an inch on climate science even in the face of now overwhelming direct scientific observation and a much deeper and broader scientific understanding of the dangerous impact of unrestricted human greenhouse gas emissions on the climate.
2. Equally important, conservatives now have a very potent political issue to beat back advocates of an economy-wide cap-and-trade system -- high gasoline prices. And gasoline prices are probably going to be much higher over the next few years (see "Must read CIBC report: $7 per gallon gas by 2010"). That is one reason I would leave transportation out of an economy-wide cap-and-trade, but that will be the subject of another post.

I live-blogged the debate at the time. Here are the highlights -- or, rather, lowlights -- from the GOP side that make clear just how far conservatives are from understanding climate reality:

White House tries to keep EPA from showing how greenhouse gases could be regulated

The White House is trying to block the U.S. EPA from releasing a document that shows how the Clean Air Act could be used to regulate greenhouse gases, reports The Wall Street Journal. The draft document, a formal response to a Supreme Court decision that greenhouse gases are pollutants and can thus be regulated under […]

Did I say darndest? I meant stupidest

From Deltoid, Tim Lambert provides this exchange between Tim Flannery (climate realist) and Adam Shand (climate skeptic) from an Australian TV show:

Tim Flannery: No one can predict the weather three months ahead, that's absolutely true. But if I asked you if January next year was likely to be warmer than June this year, what would you say?

Adam Shand: I'd have no idea!

TF: You'd say yes because that's what we always see. Summers are warmer than winter. And in terms of predicting general global trends, that exactly the sort of science that we're doing. It's not like predicting the weather on a certain day three months out, it's like predicting whether January is likely to be warmer than June.

AS: But that's just an assumption, we sort of assume that summer is hotter than winter.

An interview with author James Howard Kunstler

Author and social critic James Howard Kunstler, known for predicting our post-peak-oil future in nonfiction works such as The Long Emergency, has also brought his forecasts to life through fiction. His newest novel, World Made By Hand, describes the near future in a small town in upstate New York — not unlike the place Kunstler […]

Umbra on carbon trading

Dear Umbra, I don’t understand carbon credits and how people can buy/sell/trade them. How is this good for our environment? Elizabeth Columbus, Ohio Dearest Elizabeth, I believe you speak of the carbon credit, rather than the carbon offset? The carbon offset is a consumer product that you or I could buy, enabling us to mildly […]

More than half of today’s electricity, more than 16 percent of today’s energy

Enough sunlight strikes unshaded U.S. rooftops to replace all the coal and some of the natural gas we use to make electricity. Backup via ground source heat pumps, and smart grid technology would allow this variable energy source to displace base-load coal with today's technology. Whether this is the most cost effective way to displace coal is another question. Also rooftop solar is a silver BB rather than a silver bullet: Even after massive efficiency improvements we will need to get many times the power from non-rooftop sources than from rooftops.

According to a 2003 study by the Energy Foundation (PDF), solar PV that converts 15 percent of sunlight to electricity could produce 710,000 Megawatts on rooftops that will be available in 2050. Doug Wood thinks that with concentrating PV using advanced aerospace quality cells we could convert solar at 30 percent rather than 15 percent efficiency. Scaling back to rooftops available today (using 2003 numbers from the same study and extrapolating forward) we could produce around 1.05 billion megawatts today. We normally assume 22 percent capacity factor (PDF) for PV. So that would give us about 2.3 billion megawatt hours, or around 56 percent of today's electrical production -- more than coal provides.

Further, waste heat from this process could provide much of our heating and cooling needs as well. The EF study I cited suggests that about 65 percent of commercial roof space is unshaded compared to about 22 percent of residential roof space. Since some commercial scale chillers run on low to medium temp heat today, with enough storage solar CHP could provide close to 100 percent of commercial heating and cooling. But that much storage takes a lot of capital for a small incremental gain. So more realistically, we would put 16 to 24 hours of low temp Phase Change Material storage and use ground source heat pumps to provide the other 15 percent of low temp needs. As a side effect, the overnight storage would let us run those heat pumps when the electricity was cheapest -- which will prove more important than it might appear at first glance.