Climate Climate & Energy

Gigantic hydropower dam planned for Congo River

Some of the world’s largest banks and construction firms gathered with seven African governments Monday to chat about plans for an $80 billion hydroelectric dam on the Congo River. The proposed Grand Inga dam could generate twice the electricity of China’s controversial Three Gorges Dam and greatly increase the amount of cheap and clean power […]

Da yoots!

Cute! We’re now hearing from Avery Hairston, founder of an NGO called RelightNY — oh, and a 16 year old high school sophomore. He’s all rumpled and nervous and brainy. I want to go muss his hair. RelightNY raises money to buy and distribute CFLs — 20,000 so far, 50,000 more planned for this year. […]

Your last chance to be heard about Cape Wind

A friend once described Nantucket Sound as a body of water surrounded on three sides by money. The outcome of the six-year-long effort to use a small part of that water to house a 130-turbine, 468-megawatt wind farm -- still the largest proposed renewable-energy project in the eastern U.S. -- will help determine whether we, as a nation, are serious about confronting the climate crisis.

The federal agency in charge of the formal review of the Cape Wind project, the Minerals Management Service, is receiving public comments through Monday, April 21. It's the last opportunity for ordinary citizens to outshout the Kennedys and other plutocrats who would rather keep subjecting Cape Cod waters to oil tanker spills than sully their viewsheds with matchbox-sized spinning blades (which is how they'll appear from land).

The Cape-based citizens group Clean Power Now ("It's not the view, it's the vision") has an e-mail form you can fill out in a few seconds to register your support. If you prefer to compose your own message, use this form from the project developers, Cape Wind. That's how I beat the deadline with my comments, below.

A story in pictures

  Minorities are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution … is suspected of posing the greatest health danger, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. … • The Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this year that EPA devoted little attention to environmental equality when it developed three […]

Pope preaches environmental protection to United Nations

After gallivanting around Washington, D.C., Pope Benedict XVI traveled to New York Friday to make an address to the United Nations General Assembly. In a speech largely focused on human rights, the pope also made note of the world’s plentiful other problems, including “the protection of the environment, of resources, and of the climate.” Our […]

Encouraging solar installations in cities

Harder than it looks.

Polar bear listing decision delayed, again

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it needs 10 more weeks to decide whether to list polar bears as a threatened or endangered species. The agency’s self-imposed deadline is now June 30; the original deadline was Jan. 9. The USFWS says it needs time to review the legal and policy implications of […]

McKibben kicks off 350.org, a new international grassroots climate campaign

If only atmospheric chemistry gave you points for trying. A year ago this week, we were celebrating. I and six college-age colleagues of mine, joined by thousands of organizers across the country, had managed to pull off 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations against global warming in all 50 states. Though we didn’t have much in the way […]

Does the IPCC dangerously assume ‘spontaneous’ decarbonization?

No.

The central point of the recent Nature article "Dangerous Assumptions" (available here [PDF]) is that the IPCC made dangerous assumptions in their reference scenarios:

... the scenarios assume a certain amount of spontaneous technological change and related decarbonization. Thus, the IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies. We believe that these assumptions are optimistic at best and unachievable at worst, potentially seriously underestimating the scale of the technological challenge associated with stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations.

That would be a powerful conclusion, if it were true. But it isn't, as this post will make very clear. In fact, I suspect most people will be quite surprised at how clear it is that this conclusion is not true, given that it appears in a major science journal.

First, I think it is worth noting that the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, said late last year:

If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

Does that sound like the head of a group that has underestimated the scale of the climate challenge?

Notable quotable

"It's a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels."

-- Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's finance minister

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