Articles by Joseph Romm

Former GE Chief Jack Welch says obsession with short-term profits was ‘Dumb Idea’

File this one under “now they tell us” or maybe “the former drug kingpin says crack is not healthy for you.” The Financial Times reports the shocking not-quite-deathbed conversion: Jack Welch, who is regarded as father of the “shareholder value” movement, has said the obsession with short-term profits and share price gains that has dominated […]

Must-have slide No. 2: The 'global-change-type drought' and the future of extreme weather

This must-have slide comes from a 2005 study, "Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought." I first saw it in a powerful 2005 presentation [PDF] by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck, "Warm climate abrupt change-paleo-perspectives," that concluded "climate change seldom occurs gradually."

Overpeck noted that the 2005 study, together with the recent evidence that temperature [in red] and annual precipitation [in blue] are headed in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest, raises the question of whether we are at the "dawn of the super-interglacial drought."

Before explaining why I like this slide and how it shows the future of extreme weather, I need to review the conclusion of the study, which was led by the University of Arizona, with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey:

Global climate change is projected to yield increases in frequency and intensity of drought occurring under warming temperatures, referred to here as global-change-type drought ...

Our results are notable in documenting rapid, regional-scale mortality of a dominant tree species in response to subcontinental drought accompanied by anomalously high temperatures.

The researchers examined a huge three-million acre die-off of vegetation in 2002-2003 "in response to drought and associated bark beetle infestations" in the Four Corners area (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah).

This drought was not quite as dry as the one in that region in the 1950s, but it was much warmer, hence it was a global-warming-type drought. The recent drought had "nearly complete tree mortality across many size and age classes" whereas "most of the patchy mortality in the 1950s was associated with trees [greater than] 100 years old."

The study concluded:

FutureGen was 'nothing more than a public relations ploy,' House study finds

In a stunning new report [PDF], two House Committees demonstrate that the Bush administration was never serious about FutureGen NeverGen, the "centerpiece" of its effort to develop "clean coal" technology. Turns out centerpieces are largely decorative.

Climate Progress has previously documented that the coal industry itself has never taken seriously the development of the one technology that could save the industry from extinction in the face of humanity's urgent need slash CO2 emissions sharply and avoid its own self-destruction [see here].

Now we learn the same was true of the Bush Administration. We learn that they killed FutureGen even after Department of Energy staff explained the implications: "affordable coal fueled CCS plants would be delayed at least 10 years" deferring "widespread deployment of CCS" until after 2030.

That means the whole "clean coal" or carbon capture and storage (CCS) effort of the past decade was an intentional fraud by all parties concerned -- and nobody should be allowed to use the absence of demonstrated CCS technology today as an excuse for weakening near-term CO2 targets or for giving the coal industry another decade to (fatally) delay serious climate action.

As the shocking House press release reveals:

In an effort to kill the FutureGen project, top officials at the Department of Energy knowingly used inaccurate project cost figures and promoted an alternative plan that career staff repeatedly warned them would not work, according to a majority staff report to Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC).

FutureGen was a highly-touted initiative announced by President George W. Bush in February of 2003 to demonstrate that coal could be changed from an environmentally challenging energy resource into an environmentally benign one by sequestering carbon dioxide emissions and eliminating other pollutants.... It would have been the first plant of this type in the world. But in January of 2008, former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pulled the plug on the project, reconfiguring it as a privately funded initiative with limited government subsidies. To date, nothing has come of this new initiative.

"To knowingly abandon a program that held out the hope of making a real impact in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases from coal in favor of another program that held out no hope at all-not commercially and not to provide technological innovation to capture and sequester carbon-is inexcusable," said Gordon. "All we have to show for 'Plan B' is lost time and an abandoned global leadership role."

"DOE officials knew that they were manipulating the numbers, and that the 'restructured' FutureGen would not accomplish what had been planned, but they went ahead anyway," said Subcommittee Chairman Miller. "In the process, they lost the participation of China and India, which are some of the largest users of coal in the world. The damage to U.S. leadership on "clean coal" technology, and climate change generally, cannot be overstated."

I had thought, like many others, that the Bush administration was simply incompetent in its management of the program (see here). But this wasn't benign neglect, it was malign neglect.

The entire report [PDF] is worth reading if you can stomach the Administration's audacity (of hopelessness), but let me pull out some of the highlights:

Always use WWII metaphors

RealClimate has an excellent post for aspiring climate bloggers, "Advice for a young climate blogger." It has some incredibly useful advice and warnings, including "Bad things can happen to good bloggers."

But there is one bullet point that I think is misleading:

Don't use any WWII metaphors. Ever. This just makes it too easy for people to ratchet up the rhetoric and faux outrage. However strongly you hold your views, the appropriateness of these images is always a hard sell, and you will not be given any time in which to make your pitch. This is therefore almost always counter-productive. This can be extended to any kind of Manichean language.

Silly. You should probably avoid Nazi metaphors, but in fact WWII is the only plausibly-close metaphor for the scale of effort needed to stabilize at or below 450 ppm and preserve a livable climate [see here or my book].

Indeed, at the press conference I participated in with Greenpeace and Sen. Sanders today (details to come), Sanders himself said that we have the technology to do this today (or will very soon) -- which is of course a central point of this blog, but what we most need to do is deploy, deply, deploy:

I think there is an enormous amount of technology out there ... Go back to December 1941. America had to completely retool its economy in two years. So don't tell me it can't be done.

And one of the most important scientific studies published last year (see here) concludes with this key paragraph: