Articles by Joseph Romm

Pickens embraces electric vehicles, predicts $140 oil by 2011

Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Billionaire oil man T. Boone Pickens, who once pushed natural gas as the only way to get off of oil imports, said at today's National Clean Energy Project (see live-blogging here):

Diesels should be replaced by natural gas. Light-duty vehicles go to the battery.

Yes, the 80-year-old Pickens has been edging slowly in that direction, since running cars and light trucks on natural gas never made much sense (see here and here). But this was the bluntest I had heard him.

The problem for his messaging, of course, is that even if you replace half of highway diesel use with natural gas over the next decade -- a huge accomplishment -- that would be under 10 percent of all U.S. petroleum use and barely make a dent in oil imports and the trade deficit 10 years in 2020.

Pickens also said made his prediction that we will be back at $140 a barrel oil in 2 years, which I tend to agree with unless this global recession turns into a global depression, which remains possible.

He also cannot bring himself to acknowledge that it is his fellow conservatives who are the stumbling block to the high-renewable future he advocates. After all the strong, positive comments from so many speakers about the need and the practicality of a clean energy future, he warned:

If Obama stops dirty coal, as he must, what will replace it? An intro to biomass cofiring

Biomass cofiring will be the focus of a couple of posts since, although rarely-discussed, it is probably the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way to provide new renewable baseload power without having to build any new transmission lines.

I first started analyzing the carbon benefits of cofiring biomass with coal in 1997 when I was overseeing a study by five U.S. national laboratories that examined what an aggressive technology-based strategy built around energy efficiency and renewable energy could achieve in terms of emissions reductions. (See full study here and some history on it by California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld here [PDF].) With supporting analysis done by the Electric Power Research Institute, the Five Lab Study concluded that biomass cofiring was the single biggest potential contributor to near-term greenhouse gas reductions of any renewable energy strategy.

Cofiring is a well demonstrated strategy with multiple benefits. From a practical perspective, most of the existing coal plants are mostly paid off. Plus they are fully permitted and have all the necessary transmission plus they are connected to freight train lines and water supply. Plus this is baseload power. So you avoid all of the problems associated with citing new renewables in the Midwest or Southwest. Cofiring is thus a key near-term strategy for meeting climate goals -- and renewable standards -- in the Midwest and Southeast.

Is the New York Times coverage of global warming fatally flawed?

Two dreadful, tunnel-vision articles in the New York Times suggest the "paper of record" must rethink how it covers the most important issue of our time.

Yes, the NYT has the biggest climate team, but their reporting by stovepipe (rather than by team), renders that staff largely useless. Indeed, it may be less than useless, as these articles make clear.

Let's start with today's front-page story "Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California" on the state's record drop in snowpack and rainfall. Even though there is abundant science that both impacts are precisely what we would expect from human-caused climate change, reporter Jesse McKinley never mentions the subject at all. Quite the reverse, he opens the piece:

The country's biggest agricultural engine, California's sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.

So not only does McKinley ignore a likely contributor to the drought and snowpack loss, he attributes the whole damn thing to "an unlucky strike of nature."

No wonder the public is not terribly concerned about global warming and fails to understand that humans are changing the climate now. The only surprising thing is that the NYT itself is surprised that the public is under-informed (see here).

The NYT did not make this mistake when it reported on Australia's drought -- because it used team-based reporting (see here). I will return to this point at the end.

Moreover, the impacts California is experiencing are not some obscure or distant prediction of climate change -- they are so well-known and well accepted that even that bastion of climate denial, the Bush administration, not only acknowledged them in a December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report, Abrupt Climate Change, but warned they may be just around the corner (see here):

In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.

Indeed, these impacts in California should be incredibly well known to the media now that Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has spoken out about them (see here):

Washington Post is staffed with people who found no mistakes in George Will's denial

After my debunking of George Will's recent column collection of error-filled denier talking points [redundant], it became somewhat of a sport on the internet (see here). I had written:

I don't know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie again and again.

Now we know it is the latter, thanks to Brad Johnson at WonkRoom, who got this jaw-dropping email from Post ombudsman Andy Alexander:

Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will's column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

Paging Woodward and Bernstein. [The CP fact checker notes that Woodward abandoned journalism based on facts, at least checkable facts, many years ago.]

Both of my parents were professional journalists, and I must say that response makes me want to cry. I could understand Will's people stooges signing off on his crap -- they drink from the same pitcher of Kool-Aid. And I could understand if the Post said that they don't fact-check opinion pieces.

But there is no clearer evidence of how far traditional journalism has sunk than that five different editors associated with the Washington Post signed off on a piece that brings to mind Mary McCarthy's famous quip about Lillian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie -- including 'and' and 'the.'

I am not going to redebunk Will here point-by-point, but I will excerpt the devastating response to the ombudsman's lazy defense of Will penned by Hilzoy of the Washington Monthly. After you read it, I'm sure you will want to give Andy Alexander (ombudsman@washpost.com) -- "the reader's advocate" -- a piece of your mind (and please do repost it in the comments).

Alexander's original email ends: