Articles by Joseph Romm

Skip it

You can skip George Monbiot's book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning.

Slightly longer book review:

Because there are far too many climate books to read, I confess I apply a litmus test. I look up "hydrogen" in the index. If the writer thinks it's a climate solution, the book can be skipped.

I thought I would like this book, since I like many of the columns by the British author, including an early excerpt on the connection of the global warming deniers to big tobacco. But on page 162, he writes, "hydrogen fuel cells are beginning to look like a feasible technology for motor transport, if not on the time scale the producers predict."

No. Not even close. They are looking less feasible these days. They are a post-2050 climate solution at best. And Monbiot is a man in a hurry -- he believes the only hope for mankind is "for rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2030."

Heck, it would require three major breakthroughs -- in fuel cells, storage, and renewable hydrogen -- just for hydrogen cars to be 1% of the cars on the road by 2030 -- and they would still be a lousy way to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunate

NASA administrator Michael Griffin offered a lame apology for his denier remarks on climate change. The Associated Press reports that Griffin "regrets airing his personal views about global warming during a recent radio interview." That is, he apologized for speaking his mind. Sad.

In a related story, the media revealed a recent report on how NASA and the Bush administration are gutting earth observation work crucial to tracking climate change:

It would pre-empt state fuel efficiency laws

An energy bill is emerging from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but it has some "unacceptable" provisions, according to leading energy and environmental experts.

Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, has a draft bill online, along with summaries of key provisions. The bill has a variety of important provisions aimed at promoting energy efficiency in electricity and vehicles -- and some useful provisions to promote low carbon fuels.

But it has at least two serious flaws.

First, it helps subsidize coal to liquids, which is an irredeemably bad idea, as I have argued repeatedly (here and here). Yes, the bill would require carbon capture and storage, but even so, the process still generates high-carbon diesel fuel. Also, such storage would take up the space in underground geologic repositories that could otherwise be used for storing carbon dioxide from future coal plants, which results in carbon-free electricity -- vastly superior to high-carbon diesel fuel.

Second, the bill would "prevent California and other states from taking independent action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions," as noted by Environment & Energy Daily (sub. req'd -- article reprinted below). In an email, David Hawkins, director of NRDC's Climate Center, called this provision "absolutely unacceptable."

Others who question this provision can be found in today's E&E Daily:

And yet the media isn’t reporting it

Global warming has long been predicted to make the weather more extreme. Wouldn't it be great if there were an official government index of extreme weather -- of heat, drought, rainfall, and hurricanes -- that would let us know if the prediction had come true?

Well, such an index exists: the National Climatic Data Center's Climate Extremes Index. As the figure shows, the most extreme year by far was 1998; 2006 was the second most extreme, followed closely by 2005. The fourteen least extreme years all predate 1981. The weather is becoming more extreme, as predicted: