Climate Climate & Energy

Don’t make too much of current energy prices; they are disconnected from fundamentals

There is a fair amount of hand-wringing over the recent collapse in energy prices which — while academically interesting — is largely irrelevant to larger macro forces. Here then a quick observation that is critically important and horribly misunderstood throughout our current energy, environmental, and economic conversation: current energy prices have very little to do […]

Climate change and the threat to water

INSTANBUL — The World Water Forum — the largest gathering of water-sector public policy makers, private-sector vendors and non-profit organizations — got underway this morning in Istanbul with a dash of glitz and a glut of gloom. “Everyday, thousands of children die as a result of complications due to consumption of unclean water,” Turkish President […]

Book exposes the messy conditions of Canada’s tar sands

Of all the absurdities at play in extracting oil from Alberta’s vast northern tar sands deposits, the most staggering might be the nuclear renaissance it threatens to create in Canada. Andrew NikiforukWhether nuclear energy presents a legitimate alternative to greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources is one question. Environmentalists have long debated that. But Canada is considering something […]

Hilarious headline of the day

“Saudi Arabia Warns on Rapid Shift to Renewable Energy“

DARPA to investigate geoengineering

Oh, great, DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Dept — is convening a meeting to look into geoengineering. Count me with Ken Caldeira: “The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate intervention technology,” says Caldeira. He says he agreed to go to the meeting “to […]

The choice of what to do with carbon revenue is a clear-cut issue of justice

The debate around various climate policies sounds complex, but there’s a simple way to understand it: follow the money. When we put a price on carbon emissions, we place value on something that used to be worthless. That means all the sudden there’s a big new pot of money. The most important question facing policymakers […]

Alternative energy revolution

XKCD is so damn funny.

FutureGen was 'nothing more than a public relations ploy,' House study finds

In a stunning new report [PDF], two House Committees demonstrate that the Bush administration was never serious about FutureGen NeverGen, the "centerpiece" of its effort to develop "clean coal" technology. Turns out centerpieces are largely decorative.

Climate Progress has previously documented that the coal industry itself has never taken seriously the development of the one technology that could save the industry from extinction in the face of humanity's urgent need slash CO2 emissions sharply and avoid its own self-destruction [see here].

Now we learn the same was true of the Bush Administration. We learn that they killed FutureGen even after Department of Energy staff explained the implications: "affordable coal fueled CCS plants would be delayed at least 10 years" deferring "widespread deployment of CCS" until after 2030.

That means the whole "clean coal" or carbon capture and storage (CCS) effort of the past decade was an intentional fraud by all parties concerned -- and nobody should be allowed to use the absence of demonstrated CCS technology today as an excuse for weakening near-term CO2 targets or for giving the coal industry another decade to (fatally) delay serious climate action.

As the shocking House press release reveals:

In an effort to kill the FutureGen project, top officials at the Department of Energy knowingly used inaccurate project cost figures and promoted an alternative plan that career staff repeatedly warned them would not work, according to a majority staff report to Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC).

FutureGen was a highly-touted initiative announced by President George W. Bush in February of 2003 to demonstrate that coal could be changed from an environmentally challenging energy resource into an environmentally benign one by sequestering carbon dioxide emissions and eliminating other pollutants.... It would have been the first plant of this type in the world. But in January of 2008, former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pulled the plug on the project, reconfiguring it as a privately funded initiative with limited government subsidies. To date, nothing has come of this new initiative.

"To knowingly abandon a program that held out the hope of making a real impact in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases from coal in favor of another program that held out no hope at all-not commercially and not to provide technological innovation to capture and sequester carbon-is inexcusable," said Gordon. "All we have to show for 'Plan B' is lost time and an abandoned global leadership role."

"DOE officials knew that they were manipulating the numbers, and that the 'restructured' FutureGen would not accomplish what had been planned, but they went ahead anyway," said Subcommittee Chairman Miller. "In the process, they lost the participation of China and India, which are some of the largest users of coal in the world. The damage to U.S. leadership on "clean coal" technology, and climate change generally, cannot be overstated."

I had thought, like many others, that the Bush administration was simply incompetent in its management of the program (see here). But this wasn't benign neglect, it was malign neglect.

The entire report [PDF] is worth reading if you can stomach the Administration's audacity (of hopelessness), but let me pull out some of the highlights:

Climate change: Acid oceans transform marine life, says study

PARIS — Ocean acidification driven by climate change is stripping away the protective shell of tiny yet vital organisms that absorb huge amounts of carbon pollution from the atmosphere, a new study has revealed. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the calcium carapace of microscopic animals called foraminifera living in the Southern Ocean have […]

Drought threatens Amazon, speeds global warming: study

PARIS — Drought is killing off trees in Brazil’s fragile Amazon rain forest and depleting the region’s carbon reservoirs — an ecological double-whammy with devastating implications, according to a study published Thursday. The Amazon’s lush vegetation in a typical year absorbs nearly two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, one of the chief culprits causing climate […]