Climate Climate & Energy

An ad campaign on climate needs spokespeople who believe what they’re saying

Idly watching TV the other day, my attention was caught by the arresting image of Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson sitting on a sofa. The artfully shot, 15-second spot is one of the first blitz of television ads from We Can Solve It, Al Gore's $300 million project to build up a public base of support for climate action.

The two resemble each other, looking as sleek and plump as sea otters after a good feed. Sharpton and Robertson fence good naturedly, following the strange-bedfellows format of the ad series. Robertson puns, "So get involved; it's the 'right' thing to do," and Sharpton ripostes with the Reagan line, "Now there you go again!"

The thing is well done and I enjoyed it, but I was also aggravated by the choice of spokespersons -- and the more I thought about it, troubled by the deeper meaning of the ad.

Standing up to Samuelson

This post is by Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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In Monday's Washington Post, and a parallel piece in Newsweek, Robert Samuelson gets it wildly wrong on cap-and-trade, parroting a litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations concerning the most probable federal policy for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Like most detractors of action on global warming, Samuelson continues to push the unsubstantiated notion that reducing emissions will tank the economy, and thus is not worth the effort. The problem with this argument is that it ignores the last three decades of science, misunderstands basic economic theory, and overlooks the enormous opportunity presented by the clean energy economy.

Inaction is by far the most expensive policy option, as many recent studies make clear.

The challenges of reconciling science and policy

This is a post that I'm virtually certain will be misinterpreted. But it's an important enough issue that I'm going to bet that my writing skills are sufficient to provide clarity to a rather muddy issue.

First off, though, a disclaimer: Science is good. Policy informed by science is good. Leadership informed by science is good. The alternative to all of the above is bad. Nothing I am about to say is to be taken as support for creationism, global warming denial, diminution of White House science advisers or the re-excommunication of Galileo.

However, there is a conflict that lies between the fuzziness that is innate to scientific inquiry and the precision that is required for policy -- and more broadly, leadership. We see this conflict whenever global warming deniers trot out scientists who disagree with mainstream theories and we are forced to explain to the deniers that while the nature of scientific inquiry invites debate, the presence of a debate per se does not imply anything about the preponderance of evidence. As Joe Romm has pointed out, Einstein's revisions to the laws of motion did not prove that Issac Newton was an insufferable quack. It just meant that science is innately fallible and subject to revision. Or as Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"

So far, I don't think I've said anything novel or controversial. But here's the catch: The same logic that compels us to acknowledge that science is fallible and evolves must also compel us to acknowledge that policy based on science might be wrong. This is not to suggest that a 1-percent doubt ought to stand in the way of policy based on 99 percent certainty, but rather to recognize that good policy must retain sufficient flexibility to "change its mind."

Cool housing for oldsters

People who think about how we're going to adapt to lower-energy living arrangements often miss that the U.S. continues to gray rapidly. Given that we've had almost sixty years of radical suburbanization and cross-country relocation, sundering the extended family networks that once provided child and elder care, we're in a pickle when it comes to figuring out how to care for elders.

Here's an encouraging story about a new facility that really seems to get it. My question is why we aren't thinking about these for just-getting-starteds and young adults ... we could call it co-housing ...

Spain experiencing severe drought due to climate change

Warming-driven desertification is spreading. Australia has gotten the most attention, but Spain is also turning into a desert. As Time reported:

Spain is in the grip of its worst drought in a century as a result of climate change -- this year's total rainfall, for example, has been 40 percent lower than average for the equivalent period, and the country's reservoirs are, on average, only 30 percent full. The reservoirs serving Barcelona are only 20 percent full, and without significant rainfall, supplies of drinking water will likely run dry by October.

Rail and the coming changes in transport

National Train Day was marked this year on May 10, so it's not too incredibly late to mention two new books of note: John Stilgoe's Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape that came out in the fall says that rail is "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States." Maybe that's a little grand, but rail is definitely on the ascendancy, since it can move people and freight at a fraction of the energy usage vs. petroleum.

Also, Radio Ecoshock's March 28 edition of its useful weekly podcast had a recording (skip to minute 11 for the presentation) by authors Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl at the launch event for their new book Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil. They are forecasting a grid-tied and electrified (increasingly from renewables) rail system among four revolutions coming in transport:

Rogers: cap-and-trade without corporate giveaways like ‘mafia’

“This is just a money grab. Only the mafia could create an organization that would skim money off the top the way this legislation would skim money off the top.” — Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill

Hybrid solar lighting: a solar retrofit for hot climates

A fascinating commercial application for solar energy in clear (or semi-clear) hot climates seems to not be getting the attention it deserves: hybrid solar lighting.

You take a parabolic concentrator and focus some sunlight, optically split with plastic fiber into visible light and heat. Pipe the visible light through diffusers throughout the building. It saves lighting electricity, of course, but unlike skylights or conventional T8s, it adds almost no heat to the building. In a cooling climate it saves about a third as much in air-conditioning energy as it does in light.

Can we shoot concentrated solar power down from space?

CNN takes a look an energy long shot that could change the game on climate change: space-based solar power. The idea is to launch satellites covered with solar panels up into geosynchronous orbit, where the sun is always shining, and beam the power back down to land-based receivers. A 2007 Pentagon study concluded that “a […]

Bite-sized version of longer nuke study is on Salon

If you are looking for a shorter, more readable version of my study, "The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power," I've got just the thing. Salon has published my article, "Nuclear bomb: Nuclear energy, the sequel, is opening to raves by everybody from John McCain to a Greenpeace co-founder. Don't be fooled. It's the Ishtar of power generation."

As the article points out, back in May 2001, the Economist explained ($ub. req'd) that nuclear power had fallen out of favor because it simply was "too costly to matter." Today, nuclear power is nearly three times the price it was when the Economist wrote that.