Climate Climate & Energy

Day five of the UN Dispatch-Grist collaboration

The UN Dispatch - Grist collaboration concludes today with discussion of an idea submitted by On Day One user James Hansen -- yes that Dr. James Hansen!

Tony Kreindler of the Environmental Defense Fund, Nigel Purvis, Kate Sheppard, Timothy B. Hurst, and David Roberts respond below the fold.

McKinsey report shatters myths on cost of curbing climate change

The McKinsey Global Institute has published another terrific piece of analysis, "The carbon productivity challenge: curbing climate change and sustaining economic growth."

MGI is best known for its comprehensive cost curve for global greenhouse gas reduction measures (reprinted below), which came to the stunning conclusion that the measures needed to stabilize emissions at 450 pppm have a net cost near zero. The new report has its own stunning conclusion:

In fact, depending on how new low-carbon infrastructure is financed, the transition to a low-carbon economy may increase annual GDP growth in many countries.

The new analysis explains that "at a global, macroeconomic level, the costs of transitioning to a low-carbon economy are not, in an economic 'welfare' sense, all that daunting -- even with currently known technologies." Indeed, 70 percent of the total 2030 emissions reduction potential (below $60 a ton of CO2 equivalent) is "not dependent on new technology."

Feds freeze new solar projects on public land, pending review

The Bush administration has put a moratorium on new solar projects on public land pending large-scale study of their environmental impacts, a process which could take about two years. Since 2005, over 130 solar-plant proposals have been filed for large-scale solar projects that together would cover some 1 million acres of BLM land, if approved. […]

Delaware to have offshore wind farm in 2012

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

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On Tuesday, the utility Delmarva announced a 25-year contract with Bluewater Wind Delaware, a subsidiary of the Babcock & Brown, to purchase 200 megawatts of power from a wind farm that would be constructed 11.5 miles in the Atlantic off Delaware's Rehoboth Beach. First power is expected in 2012. The contract locks in the price Delmarva will pay per kilowatt-hour. Bluewater has previously built offshore energy near Denmark.

The wind farm will be located in ocean waters 75 feet deep. The turbine mounts will extend 90 feet into the sea floor and 250 feet above he waterline. Each of the three blades will be 150 feet long.

Newt thinking on energy arousal (and domestic oil production)

"... when the American people are aroused, they can in fact coerce the Congress ..."

-- Newt Gingrich on "Energy Independence Day"

Living on the ice shelf

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

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Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in 19th-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.

California plans to cut 169 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020

How do you return greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 while promoting jobs, competitiveness, and public health? Conservatives in the U.S. Senate think it can't be done. California knows it can.

The Air Resources Board has just published their "Scoping Plan." How do they cut 169 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020? Efficiency, efficiency, renewables, renewables, and even some conservation:

Britain lays out plans for renewable-energy ‘revolution’

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown set out goals Thursday to increase renewable-energy use in Britain tenfold by 2020. Brown’s vision for a “green revolution” is heavily reliant on wind power, with plans for 7,000 new turbines — 4,000 onshore and 3,000 offshore. The North Sea could turn “into the equivalent for wind power of what […]

All new homes to sport solar hot water

Hawai'i is highly dependent on imported oil for its electricity needs -- I've heard Jeff Mikaluna, Director of the Hawai'i chapter of the Sierra Club, quip that the state is one supertanker accident away from becoming Amish.

Which makes this press release great news:

His argument is still bogus

The Washington Post embarrasses itself today by publishing the usual delayer drivel in an op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg.

The fundamental problem with Lomborg's argument (which he also makes in his recent book Cool It!) is that it is based on the assumption that the worst-case, climate-change scenario cannot happen.

The IPCC's predictions for climate change over the next hundred years range from about 2°C to 5°C. If you assume that the warming will be closer to 2° than 5°, which Lomborg does, then it certainly does reduce the pressure to act immediately on climate change. No doubt about that.

However, there is no scientific basis for that assumption. Future warming certainly could be closer to 2°, but it could equally likely be close to 5°. We just don't know.

Why does he make this assumption? Because there is a conclusion he wants to reach: We should not be taking action on climate change. The only way you can reach that conclusion is by assuming that future climate change will be mild.

This argument is bogus. Don't believe it.