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Preventing dirty coal plants is the most urgent climate policy

A livable climate can (probably) survive the burning of almost all of the world's conventional oil and gas -- but not if we also burn even half the coal (see here [PDF] and figure below).

So the top priority for any climate policy must be to stop the building of traditional coal plants -- which is why that has become the top priority of NASA's James Hansen (see here). The next priority is to replace existing coal plants with carbon-free power, which could include coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), as fast as possible. And that means a related priority is to encourage the introduction of CCS as quickly as possible, to see if that is a viable large-scale solution.

A climate policy that does not start by achieving at least the first goal, a moratorium on coal without CCS, must be labeled a failure. By that measure, the cap-and-trade system currently being employed by the Europeans looks to be a failure, as we'll see.

How to get people to pay attention to peak oil

I can’t decide if this is horribly crass or effing genius, or both:

What will London’s new mayor, Boris Johnson, do for the environment?

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

Boris Johnson is mayor of London. It's pretty surprising to many of us here, including a fair number of political commentators and, I'd be willing to bet, even a number of the people who voted for him. It's hard to imagine an American equivalent. George Bush as president has some of the connotations, but lacks the class overtones (Johnson is an old Etonian) that we find so irresistible in Britain.

Johnson's trademarks thus far in his political career have been saying what he thinks (sounds great, but includes occasionally referring to black people as "picaninnies"), being posh and funny, and having blond hair. Despite being a senior member of the Conservative team, in his media appearances he is charmingly off-message, with a self-deprecating gag to deflect any serious questions. He's become a sort of mascot for English love of wit but hatred of the intellectual.

So far so good, but compared to the previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, who battled Maggie Thatcher for the soul of London in the '80s and who defined the new office of London mayor, Johnson seems almost willfully lightweight, with no policy record and no real policies, particularly on the environment. Beyond the knee-jerk stuff -- fight crime! get rid of bendy buses! affordable housing for all! -- Johnson's campaign has been very short on specifics. "This guy is just fumbling around," Arnold Schwarzenegger said after seeing him speak at a conference last year.

Snippets from the news

• Kansas Senate tries yet again to get those damn coal plants built. • Northwest sea lions can’t be captured or killed until early 2009. • Climate change comes after koalas. • Canada may have violated Kyoto Protocol rules. • Biking in New York ain’t fun. • Clean the air, kill the Amazon.

How much would you pay for cheap gas?

Suppose you're a commodity trader. Someone offers you a future contract to buy gasoline at $2.99/gallon for the next three years. If you think that you can sell that gasoline for more than that, you might think this is a license to print money, and would therefore pay for that privilege. Which raises the following questions:

1. How much would you pay for that future "strip"?
2. Is the answer to Question 1 more or less than a Chrysler?

Cities

Why don’t candidates who claim to be interested in climate change talk about cities more? That’s where the rubber is hitting the road: Officials in King County and other places are rethinking the way their communities grow and operate, all with an eye toward reducing their overall carbon footprint. After decades of policies that encouraged […]

Senate Democrats unveil a new energy bill based on the same false premises

Senate Democrats have just proposed a new energy bill: the Consumer-First Energy Act. It is meant as a response to the Republican bill introduced last week, which R’s are currently trying to pass as an amendment to the flood insurance bill. Now, the Republican bill — the Drill, Drill, Drill Bill — would be incredibly […]

Senators both GOP and Dem introduce destined-to-fail legislation

Senate Democrats are trying once again to yank $17 billion in tax breaks away from oil companies that are enjoying booming profits. The Consumer-First Energy Act, introduced in the Senate on Wednesday, would also put a 25 percent tax on oil companies that don’t invest in renewable energy. Bill cosponsor Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sums up, […]

Should we take Italian nuclear waste?

So an industry CEO tells E&E News that nuclear is the only non-carbon baseload power (not!) and that therefore nuclear is our only future and since the United States does such a great job of dealing with low-level radioactive waste, we should become the world's repository.

That would be the logic of one Steve Creamer, CEO of EnergySolutions, "a full-service nuclear fuel cycle company" (in contrast to all of those "partial-service nuclear fuel cycle companies," sometimes called electric utilities).

Why shouldn't we take the world's low-level radioactive waste? asks Creamer. Other countries take our recycled computers [!], so it's the perfect division of global labor:

Valuing environmental services saves lives

As this new BBC article points out, it appears that the loss of mangroves around cities in Myanmar made the impact of the cyclone much worse, resulting in higher casualties and greater destruction. Scientific evidence compiled after the 2004 Asian tsunami showed that areas with more intact coastal ecosystems suffered less destruction, showing the upside of investing in the preservation of coastal swamps and forests, especially in disaster-prone areas.

These developments highlight the urgent need to continue to demonstrate and make clear to policymakers the tremendous value these coastal environmental services provide. Of course, coastal ecosystems are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full range of environmental services that forests (both tropical and temperate), wetlands, coral reefs, and prairies provide.

Identifying these values and estimating their magnitude is the first step in making sure that they are not ignored when development decisions are made, or when assessing the value of restoring systems that have been degraded.

This is one area where the combination of economics and ecological science can demonstrate why conservation not only pays but saves lives.