Articles by Joseph Romm

Chu creates team to distribute stimulus cash 'wisely but also quickly'

Greenwire ($ub. req'd) reports:

The Energy Department has created a "special organization" to distribute $40 billion contained in the economic stimulus package for energy projects, Secretary Steven Chu said today.

"It's a challenge and something we take very seriously: how to spend that money wisely but also quickly," Chu told reporters after speaking at DOE's National Electricity Delivery Forum in Washington. Chu said he has assembled a team to start streamlining ways of delivering the cash. "We are looking at everything," he said.

Leading the advisory team is Matt Rogers, director at McKinsey & Co.'s San Francisco office, Chu said. Rogers consults in many fields, including electric power, oil and gas, and private equity, as well as strategic transformations for industrial companies. Rogers is also a leader of McKinsey's North American Petroleum Practice.

This is a very encouraging sign that the administration takes this seriously, since they have a staggering amount of clean tech to deploy (see here). The story continues:

Climate change is here and now and getting personal

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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A disturbing development in the march of global warming, revealed in science's use of the English language.

Not long ago, most climate scientists stuck to the future tense when they talked about the impacts of global warming. Now, they are using the present tense -- and using it more and more often. Now, they tell us the damages have arrived in the United States.

In other words, climate change isn't just a problem for our kids anymore. It's here and now and getting personal.

What concerns climate scientists today is not only that the adverse impacts are showing up faster than they expected; it's that political leaders are moving slower than they should. Climate scientists from around the world will meet next month in Copenhagen "to warn the world's politicians they are being too timid in their response to global warming," according to The Guardian.

They'll also introduce information to update the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose findings now are considered conservative and "wishy washy" by many in the science community, in light of more recent research and its more extreme conclusions. As Michael Lemonick reports in Yale Environment 360:

Since (2007), new reports have continued to pour in from all over the world, and climate modelers have continued to feed them into their supercomputers. And while a full accounting will have to wait for the next IPCC report, which is already being assembled (but which will not go to the printer until 2014), the news is not encouraging.

The new reports, many of them documented in an October 2008 paper by the World Wildlife Fund, include estimates that sea level rise may be triple what scientists projected just two years ago; that we should start preparing for an average atmospheric temperature rise of 4°C, twice the level the European Union defines as "dangerous"; that the Arctic Circle may be ice-free 20 years ahead of the most pessimistic IPCC projections; that carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating faster than expected; and that some of these adverse impacts already are locked and irreversible for the next 1,000 years.

Last year, the United Nations invoked the present tense in its finding that "nine out of 10 disasters recorded are climate-related, while the number of disasters has doubled to more than 400 annually over the past two decades." John Holmes, the Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, concluded:

Ocean dead zones to expand, 'remain for thousands of years'

I doubt geoengineering will ever be practical as a primary strategy for dealing with climate change (see here and here). That said, I don't consider most of the efforts to pull CO2 out of the air geoengineering -- that is ungeoengineering our self-inflicted climate wound. And those efforts are only plausible with super-aggressive mitigation that keeps concentrations close to 450 ppm.

It's strategies like injecting sulfur into the atmosphere that should worry people the most. Those strategies have many flaws, but among the worst is that they do nothing to stop humanity from turning the oceans into one giant acidic deadzone.

A new study in Nature Geoscience, ($ub. req'd, abstract below) makes crystal clear why very serious mitigation must always be humanity's primary strategy for averting climate catastrophe. As AFP reported on the study:

Global warming may create "dead zones" in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia ...

Its authors say deep cuts in the world's carbon emissions are needed to brake a trend capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas.

Precisely. This study makes a matching pair with NOAA stunner: Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.

Even worse, of course, is that while there are many plausible, albeit expensive and untried on large scale, strategies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it is far from clear how one does that from the ocean.

Here is more detail on this important study and on oceanic dead zones:

Memo to Obama: CCS won't make tar sands clean. Memo to all: They ain't 'oil sands.'

Climate Wire ($ub. req'd) reports this morning, "Obama says 'technology' can fix oil sands skirmish":

President Obama said "clean energy mechanisms," like carbon capture and storage, would allow the United States to continue consuming Canadian sand oil, an emission-heavy fuel that often requires strip-mining vast stretches of boreal forest in the province of Alberta.

The assertion yesterday came two days before Obama is scheduled to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa, and it promises to raise questions among environmental groups, which see the oil sands as a key contributor to climate change.

Uhh, no, no, no, and no. First, the tar sands are a key contributor to climate change -- it is absurd for ClimateWire to hedge (and weaken) this fact by attributing it solely to environmental groups.

Second, the "biggest global warming crime ever seen" (see here) cannot be made green with carbon capture and storage, even in the unlikely event CCS proves practical for the tar sands. If the President wants to understand everything the tar sands would have to do to be "clean," he should start with the pastoral letter of Canadian Bishop Luc Bouchard (see here).

Third, Obama said, "I think that it is possible, for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oil sands, but also coal." Did he really say "oil sands"? I can understand why greenwashing Canadian shills use the phrase rather than the traditional term "tar sands" (see here), but not why the U.S. media does, and certainly not somebody as smart as Obama.

No doubt the phrase makes it seem like, oh, I don't know, maybe up through the sand came a bubblin crude, oil that is, black gold, Texas tea, Athabasca euphemism (see ClimateProgress commenter, Jim Eager, here).