Articles by Joseph Romm

Dubious 2009 energy budget released

On the heels of giving away the (decorative) centerpiece of his climate technology effort, NeverGen FutureGen, Bush released a heartless and mindless FY09 energy budget yesterday.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, sent around an email on the President's Budget Request for FY2009 (I will post budget details later). Bingaman is "pleased to see overall growth in the DOE budget, particularly in the area of basic research," but critical of a number of dubious administration choices:

How to pick the president

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

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A plaque on the wall at Wal-Mart headquarters carries a quote attributed to Sam Walton. It says:

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.
We don't want continuous improvement,
we want radical change.

That plaque should be mounted on the door of every caucus room and voting place in America on Tuesday, because it gives the key to electing the next president of the United States.

If the most popular word of the 2008 presidential campaign is "change," then let's take a moment to think about what "change" means. For the sake of discussion, let's categorize change into two types: transactional and transformational.

Transactional change might be a new tax credit, a new regulation, a new policy that alters the way we transact business. When the candidates get into specific proposals about energy and climate policy, for example, they generally are describing transactional change. In that department, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have issued detailed energy and climate platforms. They far outclass John McCain and Mitt Romney, who have not.

Transformational change is something altogether different. As Wikipedia explains:

Tackling the biggest source of climate confusion

Avoiding catastrophic global warming requires stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations, not emissions. Studies find that many, if not most, people are confused about this, including highly educated graduate students. I have personally found even well informed people are confused on this point and its crucial implications.

We need to cut emissions 50 to 80 percent below current levels just to stop concentrations from rising. And global temperatures will not be stabilized for decades after concentrations are stabilized. And of course, the ice sheets may not stop disintegrating for decades -- and if we dawdle too long, centuries -- after temperatures stabilize. That is why we must act now if we want to have any reasonable hope of averting catastrophe.

One 2007 MIT study, "Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults' mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter," concluded "Low public support for mitigation policies may be based more on misconceptions of climate dynamics than high discount rates or uncertainty about the risks of harmful climate change."

Here is a great video clarifying the issue, which you can send to folks. It is narrated by my friend Andrew Jones:

If you want to play the simulation itself, go here. They make use of the bathtub analogy: While atmospheric concentrations (the total stock of CO2 already in the air) might be thought of as the water level in the bathtub, emissions (the yearly new flow into the air) are the rate of water flowing into a bathtub.

Bush drops mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project

For those remaining seven or eight three or four people who still buy the Bush rhetoric that he cares about global warming and is committed to addressing the problem with new technology, Exhibit 435C for the prosecution is the just-canceled "clean coal" project called FutureGen.

[Amusing anecdote for FHA (Future Historians of America): I once had a boss at the U.S. Department of Energy who practiced repeating "clean coal" in front of a mirror so as not to break out smiling when uttering that oxymoron.]

Yes, I know Bush said as recently as Monday (in the most vetted of all presidential speeches), "Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions." But he wasn't lying or flip-flopping or anything. He didn't say, "We are funding new technologies ..." or "Anyone who actually meant what they said would keep funding new technologies ..." Give the guy a break. He said, "Let us fund new technologies ..." He was imploring Congress for help in a "Let my people go" vein.

Yes, two months ago, "administration officials were calling it a 'centerpiece' of their strategy for clean coal technologies," but centerpieces are largely decorative, no?

This is sort of a setback for those who believe coal gasification combined with carbon capture and storage could be a major global warming solution. I say "sort of" for two reasons. First, the program was being horribly mismanaged:

"The idea of FutureGen makes complete sense," Dr. Moniz [undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration] said. However, a study he helped direct concluded earlier this year that the FutureGen project was badly structured, with confusion about whether it was a research project or a demonstration. Among its problems, he said in a telephone interview on Friday, was that it has "a cast of thousands" ...