Climate Climate & Energy

Huge chunk breaks off Arctic ice shelf; 2008 Arctic melt not likely to break record

A 1.5-mile ice chunk broke off the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf last week. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in northern Canada has been thinning gradually since the 1950s, so the break-off was predictable but still relatively significant. “Once you unleash this process by cracking the ice shelf in multiple spots, of course we’re going […]

Short, medium, and long-term solutions to phase out oil

As opposed to emission or energy, what can we do about oil? As I've said in the past: not a lot. But "not a lot" is not equal to zero.

Here are some pretty immediate things we can do:

1. There have been some real drops in oil use in response to increased prices. I think Charles Komanoff once suggested that various types of conservation and efficiency measures could reduce oil use 10 percent more or less overnight [PDF]. Many of his suggestions are not exactly pain-free, but neither are the reductions we are making anyway in response $100 plus per barrel oil.
2. Alan Blinder's proposal to buy oil guzzling clunkers back from owner at a premium -- old, fairly cheap cars only. These tend not to be the cars driven the most miles. Still, there would be real savings.
3. Increased telecommuting. We are not going to switch everyone with an office job to 100 percent work-from-home mode. But putting in place some modest incentives, along with public education that help rebut some of the most common myths about telecommuting could get some modest immediate increases.
4. Increased subsidies to existing rapid transit. Existing buses and trains should not have to cut services right when more people want to use them.
5. Increased support for car pooling and van pooling. More incentives for companies to set up such pools, plus funding for services (such as the ones we already see) will make it easy for people interested in pooling private vehicles across companies to do so.

Below the fold you will find some things we can do that are not immediate, but can be done pretty quickly.

NYT: Consumers are complaining about ethanol-spiked gasoline

As ethanol continues to insinuate itself into the fuel supply — propelled by a slew of government goodies — ordinary folks are getting fed up, The New York Times reports: Many consumers complain that ethanol, which constitutes as much as 10 percent of the fuel they buy in most states, hurts gas mileage and chokes […]

The urgency to begin CO2 reduction via efficiency

If what you want to do is solve global warming, the core strategy is energy efficiency. Efficiency may have displaced more than half of all the new growth in electric consumption last year alone. It is already adding more capacity to the U.S. electric resource than all fossil and renewable fuels combined. It has done so for almost forty years, at least. So raising it enough to eliminate the new growth and some of the existing growth is not only fairly practical, it is cheaper than keeping the old coal plants operating.

Solar thermal expected to double every 16 months for the next five years

Solar baseload, concentrated solar thermal electric (with a few hours of storage), is a core climate solution. Earth Policy Institute has a useful update with lots of data,"Solar Thermal Power Coming to a Boil" (reprinted below). Key factoid:

With concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) capacity expected to double every 16 months over the next five years, worldwide installed CSP capacity will reach 6,400 megawatts in 2012-14 times the current capacity.

You can find the existing large solar baseload plants and the 50 or so currently proposed solar baseload plants here.

EPI has an astonishing goal of "cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020," with a goal of 200,000 MW of solar baseload worldwide. I think the solar baseload goal is doable, but the carbon goal makes me a techno-pessimist -- heck, it makes Al Gore a techno-pessimist. Here is the update by Jonathan G. Dorn:

Note: The rest of this post is the EPI article.

Four encouraging signs from Big Oil’s backyard

After Nerdi Gras (Netroots Nation), I took a couple days off to dry-out and trotted over to Houston to visit my parents. It came as no surprise that Houston is booming due to the skyrocketing price of oil. But I also learned a few surprising things that gave me hope that brighter days are ahead for the rest of us well. Because if Houston can get it right, who can't?

Energy efficiency, part 3

This series is based in part on this Salon article: "Why we never need to build another polluting power plant."

Energy efficiency is by far the biggest low-carbon resource available, and it is as limitless as wind, PV, and solar baseload. It is also the cheapest power you can buy, by far.

California has cut annual peak demand by 12 GW -- and total demand by about 40,000 GWh -- over the past three decades. The cost of efficiency programs has averaged 2-3 cents per kW -- which is about one-fifth the cost of electricity generated from new nuclear, coal, and natural gas-fired plants. And, of course, energy efficiency does not require new power lines and does not generate greenhouse gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.

There’s only one way to get big near-term carbon reductions

If we want to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm around 2050 -- the minimum necessary, which still might carry major impacts -- we need to achieve at least 2 percent average annual net reductions in emissions, globally, starting in two years. Not only do the near term emissions reductions matter the most, but it will get easier, not harder, as we go along. Solar PV and solar thermal are likely to become cheaper than new coal plants in a decade or so. They will also probably become cheaper than wind around the same time, and together these resources will make it possible to eliminate about three quarters of fossil generation.

It may be possible to exceed the 2 percent rate. But the only way to know that is to achieve 2 percent first. Nothing weaker than 2 percent is particularly worth talking about, and anything stronger is very hard to achieve. Also, any strategy to reduce CO2 emissions must address ongoing growth. While there are many reasons to believe the rate of new growth will change, as it has done historically, it is at present about 1.5 percent per year. Thus a 2 percent annual net reduction in today's world means a 3.5 percent gross reduction.

This series discusses the implications of this goal for the U.S. electric industry.

EDF’s support for self-cooling cans got deservedly chilly reception

Ken Ward posted an intelligent critique of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). I want to anticipate a response. EDF always says something along the lines of "We are getting the absolute best deal available. Go with us, or you will end up settling for something worse, probably nothing." Let's set the wayback machine to 1997 and look at a case where the mainstream environmental community did not go along with EDF.

Briefly: The Joseph Company wanted to market soda in a self-chilling can, cooling produced via HFC R-134a, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO2. The HFC in one of these cans would have produced a greenhouse forcing equivalent to driving a car 200 miles. EDF saw this as a perfect opportunity for emissions trading. This product is going to come to market regardless of what we do, they intoned solemnly. The Joseph Company is willing to offset their emissions -- a win-win situation.

Over the objections of EDF, the rest of the environmental community, including grassroots EDF members, stepped up and stopped this stupid project. Eventually a new version that uses CO2 was developed instead; this improved product is as bad as for the environment as canned soda normally is, but at least is not several thousand times worse. If EDF had succeeded in helping to push it through, they would be offering it today as an example of practical politics to win environmental goals, rather than an absolutely unnecessary cave. Read the long version at Nonprofit Watch.

Energy efficiency is the core climate solution, part 2

Energy efficiency is by far the biggest low-carbon resource available. It is also, as we'll see, every bit as renewable as wind power, solar photovoltaic, and solar baseload.

People who have little experience with what serious energy efficiency investments can do for a company or a state -- this means you, neoclassical economists who consistently overestimate the cost of climate mitigation! -- think it is a one-shot resource wherein you pick the low hanging fruit. In fact, fruit grow back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more and more people.

After leading the country in comprehensive efficiency efforts that have kept per capita electricity demand flat for three decades, California does not merely believe it can continue at this pace, they plan to accelerate their efforts and actually keep electricity demand itself flat. I have discussed California's efforts and plans in previous posts, and will discuss them further in part 3.

The focus of this post is the best corporate example of the inexhaustible nature of the energy efficiency resource -- Dow Chemical's Louisiana division.