Articles by Joseph Romm

The mag exalts Canada’s potential to become the Saudi Arabia of the north

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

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I consider Time to be one of the more forward-looking periodicals when it comes to the environment. But the editors messed up in this week's edition. The June 2 Time carries a breathless feature about the potential petroleum bonanza in Canada's tar sands.

The article's authors are so giddy with the testosterone rush of big-ass earth-moving machines that they forgot what a multifaceted disaster this "bonanza" would be. The magazine quotes tar men in Alberta as they marvel at their own ability to move mountains ... literally.

At one open-pit mine, a manager brags that his operation moves enough dirt every 48 hours to fill Toronto's 60,000-seat SkyDome. "A year from now, that mountain won't be there," he says, referring to a wall of black soil. Some of the biggest trucks on earth, 20 feet tall, carrying 320 tons of dirt in each load, crawl through the "stark landscape of jack pine, spruce and poplar forests" like Tonka toys built for Paul Bunyan.

How intense is the mining?

If cost-containment mechanisms in new climate bill are exploited, emissions could remain unchanged

The short, snarky answer is "No; Boxer-Lieberman-Warner is never going to become law." The longer, analytical answer, which is the primary subject of this post, is "probably not, thanks to the bill's many cost containment measures, but it would take us off the business-as-usual emissions path."

Before explaining why, let me make clear that the vote on B-L-W is purely symbolic, since it is DOA as a bill can be. Most of the media, most of the public, and most of the world are unlikely to get much detail on the bill. They will just see whether a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill can get a majority, if not 60 votes, in the U.S. Senate. So I would recommend any senator vote for it -- after giving a floor statement explaining that it was in fact too weak. I can't see casting a protest vote against a symbolic bill while asserting it is too weak. The protest would get lost in the noise. Finally, it would be the height of hypocrisy for a conservative senator to cite progressive critiques of the bill, including mine, as a reasons to vote against it. Anyone who votes against this bill should at least have the guts to say whether they themselves think the bill is too weak or too strong.

Why the Boxer bill wouldn't cut U.S. CO2 emissions by 2020

This story begins late Friday night, when Deep 'emissions cut' Throat sends me the World Resources Institute's 14-page summary of the Boxer substitute to the Lieberman-Warner bill [PDF], with a note, "Does this mean no emission reductions until 2028? See bottom of page 6." Intrigued, I turned to the bottom of page 6 and read this bullet:

Geothermal power: a core climate solution

While wind and solar get the media attention of a sexy starlet, good old geothermal power is treated like an aging character actor.

But geothermal energy is, in fact, sizzling hot these days. Big-time investors from Warren Buffet to Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to Google have begun investing:

In 2007, private equity firms invested more than $400 million in geothermal energy, which is derived from hot water under the Earth's surface and can be used for space heating or generating electricity.

Why the interest in a form of energy that President Bush repeatedly tried to zero out of the Department of Energy Budget? One reason is the soaring cost of conventional power like coal and nuclear. Another is the growing awareness of just how much is zero-carbon electricity will need in coming decades.

CO2 released from disappearing permafrost must be factored into climate projections

What is the point of no return for the climate -- the level of CO2 concentrations beyond which catastrophic outcomes are virtually unstoppable?

No one knows for sure, but my vote goes for the point at which we start to lose a substantial fraction of the tundra's carbon to the atmosphere -- substantial being 0.1 percent per year! As we saw in my last post, frozen away in the permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere currently contains (and much of that is in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide).

What is the point of no return for the tundra? A major 2005 study ($ub. req'd) led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafrost around the globe could disappear by the end of this century.