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Myanmar cyclone is a portent of disasters to come

At least 10,000 people lost their lives when a tropical cyclone struck the nation of Myanmar, in Southeast Asia. Perhaps the jury is still out on the extent to which storm intensity can be related to climate change. What is clear is that sea-level rise will make future storms, more intense or no, much more […]

Monday bummer blogging

Damn, one of the more promising ideas, biochar, seems to be a little less promising than hoped:

... a new study ... suggests that these supposed benefits of biochar may be somewhat overstated.

... They found that when charcoal was mixed into humus ... charcoal caused greatly increased losses of native soil organic matter, and soil carbon ... Much of this lost soil carbon would be released as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Therefore, while it is true that charcoal represents a long term sink of carbon because of its persistence, this effect is at least partially offset by the capacity of charcoal to greatly promote the loss of that carbon already present in the soil.

Oh, and you know that thing Al Gore talked about, where birds would emerge from their eggs only to find that their usual food had already peaked and declined because the changing climate had disconnected formerly co-evolved species? Well, caribou go next:

Monday links

As promised, here’s yet another bunch of links for your leisurely perusal: Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky has a great round-up from the Brainstorm Green conference. My only beef is with this, about Lomborg: Even if you believe that global warming is an abject crisis, I simply reject the argument that it’s a bad idea to […]

The longer we wait to move away from gasoline, the more high gas prices will hurt

Like Americans, Europeans are generally not fond of rising fuel costs. Unlike Americans, they’re much better at handling them. It isn’t difficult to understand why; they simply planned ahead. Geoffrey Styles writes: A big part of our problem is that most Americans are still driving cars that were purchased when gasoline was under $1.50/gal., to […]

How communities can choose renewable electricity, part 1

Recently, I had an opportunity to talk with Paul Fenn, who has written or helped write several pioneering pieces of legislation which allow communities to aggregate their electricity purchasing power in order to choose renewable energy. This policy framework is called community choice aggregation, or CCA (of course, if I mangle any of the specifics, it will be from my own lack of understanding).

When a CCA is created, the city or town or county can contract with an energy service provider (ESP) to provide the power for all residents of the area, if the residents so choose (so far, only about 5 percent of residents haven't signed up with various CCAs).

In the case of the San Francisco CCA, the electricity service provider (ESP) will produce 360 megawatts over three years: 103 from distributed renewables, mostly PV on buildings; 150 from a wind farm; and 107 from conservation and efficiency. That should constitute 51 percent of San Francisco's electricity needs (up to 20 states are pursuing CCAs). The utility still provides the transmission lines, billing, and electricity backup.

In 2001, San Francisco voters also passed a proposition to allow for "solar bonds" to be issued by the city (with an assist from Adam Browning's VoteSolar Initiative). These bonds will be used to construct the wind and solar electricity generating equipment and "smart grid" equipment which will be paid back by the revenue from the electric bills of the San Francisco residents who are part of the CCA. This mechanism gets around the biggest problem we've had with building wind and solar electrical generating capacity -- the lack of upfront capital.

Washington Post reporter not allowed to say what he knows about climate legislation costs

Steven Mufson’s a good reporter, but I swear to God, something about the conventions of traditional journalism just drives people to do things that might as well be deliberately designed to obscure the truth. Take Mufson’s recent piece on the costs of climate legislation. In particular, look at this bit: Listen to John Engler, former […]

Pollution may influence baldness, study says

Pollution may be one factor in the onset of baldness, says a new study from researchers at the University of London. Genetic factors are believed to play the largest role in bringing about baldness, but men who live in heavily polluted areas may experience hair loss sooner or more dramatically than those in less polluted […]

Lieberman-Warner criticism, Part 5

This is the fifth in a five-part series exploring the details of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

I close out this series with one small, specific thing that Lieberman-Warner gets wrong -- not necessarily because it's the biggest or most important thing it gets wrong; rather, because it illustrates the challenge faced by big and complicated legislation: it's really hard not to mess up the little stuff. Not out of malice, necessarily, but simply because it's hard to get that much right. And sometimes -- as in this case -- the little things you get wrong can have big consequences.

When all is said and done, good government policy isn't that much different from good human resources policy. If your employer makes it clear to you how your actions convert into your salary, you tend to work well together. On the other hand, if your employer gives you a 10-page incentive compensation plan with individual, department-wide, and corporate-level targets, bonus points for how many team-building sessions you go to, credit for attending various training seminars ... you get my point.

In a nutshell, that's the crux of the problem with Lieberman-Warner. Rather than starting simple and adding on complexity only as needed, it starts really complicated and virtually ensures that lots of those little details are wrong, misdirected, and/or in conflict with one another. In this final post, I'll look at just one of those details: utility decoupling.

Why should gardeners worry about lead?

Lead may no longer be in gasoline, but it's still a major issue.

Obama wins Guam; nation forgets island even exists

Weekend election update: Barack Obama won the tiny island territory of Guam by seven votes on Saturday, with 2,264 to Hillary Clinton’s 2,257. They’ll split the four delegates alloted in this primary evenly. More importantly though, doesn’t anyone else wonder why Guamanians get to vote in the primary but not the general?