Latest Articles

Water, water, everywhere

Good lord, it’s a deluge! I wish we could export some of this water down to the Southeast.

Bali conference could end deforestation overnight

This post was co-written with Dorjee Sun, the head of Carbon Conservation, a company that works to protect forests in Indonesia from destruction.

-----

Bali, Indonesia, is the perfect backdrop for this week's climate summit. No country better embodies the immense peril of inaction -- and the immense opportunity this meeting has to make massive and immediate progress in stemming the climate crisis.

Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. (Despite its green reputation, palm oil is anything but: a recent study in Science found that palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.)

Companies like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables are paying top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel. That global demand has driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 (PDF) in some cases -- providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people -- who need them to survive.

The Bali conference could immediately eliminate that perverse accounting by making sure forests and other wild lands around the world are financially valued for the carbon they store, and not just their potential as timber or agricultural land. The way to do that is to allow polluters to get credit for protecting forests that they can apply against their pollution reduction obligations, an idea called carbon ranching or avoided deforestation.

Polluters would jump at this opportunity. Protecting forests from destruction can cost as little as 75 cents per ton of carbon dioxide - even at higher costs, it's a fraction of the price (PDF) of cleaning up most industrial pollution. In the past, some environmentalists criticized carbon ranching for this very reason: they were concerned that if polluters focused their greenhouse gas reduction efforts on forest conservation, that would divert money from necessary clean-ups in industrial pollution. That's the wrong way to look at it. Because locking up carbon dioxide by protecting forests is so cheap, it means that the world can achieve bigger reductions in global warming pollution faster and for less money. Carbon ranching should be an argument for bigger immediate pollution reductions, from both forests and industry, not a way for polluters to get around their responsibility to clean up their own pollution.

White House renews energy bill veto threat

The White House just sent this letter (PDF) to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, renewing its threat to veto any bill that doesn’t follow exactly the (absurd) guidelines it laid out in its last letter.

The economy is an ecosystem

It is increasingly argued by people who used to be climate change deniers that preventing global warming will be too expensive to contemplate; even the Stern report, which was put together by a sympathetic economist, estimates that the world economy would have to decrease annual growth by about 5 percent. On the other hand, reports are emerging that argue that green jobs will reinvigorate the economy, creating an entirely new green-collar job sector.

I want to argue something much stronger -- that by building green industries, such as wind, solar, geothermal, public transit, zero-emission buildings, and others, we will not only provide millions of jobs, we will be able to rebuild our manufacturing and machinery industries and thereby expand the middle class and the long-term source of our wealth. I will argue such an expansion can be environmentally sustainable.

In order to understand why this is so, we have to understand how the economy works, looked at from a production-centered point of view. Think of the economy as a kind of ecosystem -- a system that is full of various niches and levels, as a natural ecosystem is.

Tips for low-carbon merrymaking

See that green line on the map? Study it closely, boozehounds. Those of you to the right of it can enjoy a nice French Bordeaux. Those to the left should be getting your Pinot from Napa.

So concludes Dr. Vino in his excellent -- and topical! -- study, "Red, White and 'Green': The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade."

The paper is nicely readable in addition to being thorough. Few details go unconsidered. Dr. Vino cares about the CO2 produced from the breakdown of sugar during the fermentation process. He mulls the land-use implications of grape production. He knows his screw caps from his corks.

All of these factors (well, not the corks) feed into a model that allows the paper's authors to compute the carbon content of different bottles of wine drunk in various points in the U.S. Some conclusions:

Xerox substantially reduces emissions, pledges to do more

In 2002, Xerox Corp. pledged to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions 10 percent by 2012. With four years to go, the company has in fact reduced emissions by 18 percent, and has boosted its goal to 25 percent by 2012. Xerox says it saved $18 million last year through practices like increasing manufacturing efficiency and reducing […]

Help us get our Umbra back

So I’m getting ready to make my Christmas wreath and I’m wondering whether there’s someplace I can get organic pine cones and I go to check it out with my No. 1 eco-tipper Umbra and OMFG SHE’S BEEN KIDNAPPED! That’s right, they’ve absconded with Umbra. Yes … they. Word has it they’re making her eat […]

Apparel companies hire climatologists to predict consumer trends

In the good old days, the only constant that the fickle fashion industry could rely on was the changing of the seasons — now, it can’t even rely on that anymore. A run of unseasonably warm winters has led some apparel companies to hire staff climatologists who help predict when consumers will be in the […]

Even in the short term, R&E is a better choice than clean coal for developing nations

OK, if you’re just joining us in this apparently interminable series, here’s where we’ve been: Jeremy said the power players in China and India (C&I) "care about money, not climate." But if that’s true, they’re not going to go for clean coal either — it’s more expensive. Happily, I think it’s not going to be […]

What should I ask Andrew Rice?

In about three hours, at 1pm PST, I’ll be chatting with Andrew Rice, the 34-year-old Okla. state senator and Democratic candidate for Senate in Oklahoma. Yes, that’s the guy running against the 74-year-old Inhofe. You can read about his positions on the issue here. (Global warming is one of the top four.) Oklahoma’s a fairly […]