Climate Climate & Energy

DOE applies to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain

The U.S. Department of Energy has filed a formal application to construct a nuclear-waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The application, which runs tens of thousands of pages, attempts to prove that 77,000 tons of nuclear waste could be stored at Yucca Mountain without harming public health, safety, and the environment for up to a […]

Climate action advocates need a simple, compelling message on costs

As this lamentable New York Times piece demonstrates, advocates for action on climate change have lost the framing battle. If they don’t want to lose the war for America’s future, they need to step back, coalesce around a simple message, and get it out to voters in a disciplined way. The corporatist wing of the […]

A little bit of this, a smidge of that

The ol’ browser’s getting a little clogged up. Time to stop thinkin’ and start linkin’! Yee-haw. —– Eco-friendly bombs! A couple of crack economists at Environmental Defense Fund synthesized the results of several different economic models projecting the impact of cap-and-trade legislation. Their conclusion? A business-as-usual approach, continuing with today’s policies, puts the U.S. economy […]

Carbon pricing is about tweaking the little, everyday decisions we make

I’d like to add one quick addendum to my previous post on cap-and-trade. When we consider the extent to which we need to reduce our emissions in the abstract, it can appear quite daunting. This is especially the case when we look at the needed reductions and then focus on how big a role coal […]

Fear of the day

What if the anticipation of carbon legislation has driven more investment away from coal than actual carbon legislation will?

The self-limiting future of nuclear power, Part I

My analysis on nuclear power for the Center for American Progress Action Fund is finally finished and online. I think you will find it useful because it has many links to primary sources and tries to avoid the typical discussions by nuclear proponents and opponents, focusing instead on the rapidly escalating cost of nuclear power.

My point in this paper is not to say nuclear power will play no role in the fight to stay below 450 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and avoid catastrophic climate outcomes. Indeed, I even include a full wedge of nuclear in my 14-wedge "solution" to global warming -- though as will be clear from the study, "The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power," that achieving even one wedge of nuclear will be a very time-consuming and expensive proposition, probably costing $6-8 trillion.

Fundamentally, the large and growing risks from climate change, particularly the real danger that failure to act now means we will approach a horrific 1000 ppm by century's end, mean two things:

Why does the Post let conservative columnists make up climate facts?

Memo: To Washington Post, circa 2008
From: Future Historians of America (FHA), circa [you wouldn't believe us if we told you]
Re: Historical Fact Checking

Via: T-mail (Tachyon-Mail)

As we attempt to document the reasons carbon dioxide concentrations are currently 945 ppm and rising 5 ppm a year, the FHA has a few questions we hope you can answer for us. It seems like every time the United States contemplated legislation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, you and other major media outlets allowed your -- we believe you called them conservative columnists, but we call them Delayer-1000s -- to ridicule any serious action using claims that would never have passed a ninth grade science teacher with access to Google.

(There is some controversy today at the FHA as to whether major media outlets of your time actually had access to Google, given the stream of disinformation you kept printing. Can you clear that up for us?)

World’s third-largest tropical rainforest disappearing quickly

Papua New Guinea is home to the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest, but the country is experiencing such rampant deforestation that more than half of its tree cover could be lost by 2021, says a new study. “Forests in Papua New Guinea are being logged repeatedly and wastefully with little regard for the environmental consequences and […]

How not to inform readers about cap-and-trade

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson has long impressed me as one of the most hackish economic columnists not associated with the Wall Street Journal and not named Ben Stein, but today’s piece on cap-and-trade is dismally, embarrassingly stupid. Its essential premise is that consumers and producers of energy don’t respond to price signals, something so […]

Airlines, cargo ships increasingly desperate due to rising fuel costs

Globalization was built on cheap oil. As that era draws to a close, so will the current phase of global integration, whether Thomas Friedman, Wal-Mart, and all those involved in intercontinental trade like it or not.

The current transportation infrastructure is based on cars, trucks, airplanes, and cargo ships, which together consume about 70 percent of the gasoline used in the United States. While the greatest focus has been on cars, trucking and airline companies are facing collapse.

The International Air Transport Association just published a new report in which they call the situation of many airlines "desperate." According to The N.Y. Times:

If price of oil, which is now just below $130 a barrel, averages $107 over 2008, the aviation industry would lose $2.3 billion for the year, the chief executive of the group, Giovanni Bisignani, said. Should it hold at $135 a barrel for the rest of the year, the industry will lose $6.1 billion.