Climate Climate & Energy

Mike Tidwell speaks out in the WaPo against coal

Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, regularly has me on his Earthbeat radio show, so I'm returning the favor with this great letter to the editor he had in the Washington Post yesterday:

Fact: Virginia gets less than 1 percent of its electricity from "green" sources such as the wind or the sun. Fact: Virginia ranks 38th among U.S. states in energy efficiency. Fact: Climate change is real, and fossil fuel substitutes are needed, according to President Bush's State of the Union address last year. So how would Dominion Virginia Power respond to these facts?

• Savagely blow up entire mountains in southwest Virginia.
• Feed the resulting exposed coal to a proposed power plant that is unnecessary and would cost ratepayers at least $1.8 billion.
• Create lots more greenhouse gases in the process.
• Doom the good people of southwest Virginia to living with a brutal extraction industry that has no future.

Whew! Talk about getting everything wrong.

And yet Gov. Tim Kaine supports the plan:

Here’s your chance to be the Pollan of climate change

Kristina/Jason’s plea for a tagline here reminds me: check out this post over on the NRDC Switchboard blog. It notes the success of Michael Pollan’s already legendary aphorism — "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." — and wonders whether something similarly compact could be used to explain what people need to know about climate […]

Climate change is as much a social priority as an environmental concern

Climate change is a universal menace, threatening hardships for everyone. But it's not an egalitarian menace: everyone will not suffer equally. Perversely, those people and nations least to blame for causing it are most vulnerable to its impacts.

Climate disruption heaps misfortune on the less fortunate, whether in low-lying Bangladesh, the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, or the flood plains around Chehalis, Wash. In the aftermath of climate change, the less you have, the more you're likely to lose.

NYT endorses Clinton and McCain, notes McCain’s climate advocacy

The New York Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton and John McCain for their respective parties, noting that McCain “was an early advocate for battling global warming.”

Severe drought in the Southeast impacts nuclear power production

A cautionary tale for all those who think nuclear is the answer to climate change. The Washington Post reported yesterday that drought conditions are affecting nuclear production capacity.

[Plants] could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

But wait, there's more ...

AGU releases position statement on climate change

The American Geophysical Union, a scientific organization with over 50,000 members, mostly earth scientists, just released a position statement on climate change.

It is a strong endorsement of the mainstream view of climate science, as articulated by the IPCC reports: the Earth is warming, humans are to blame for most of the recent warming, and future warming may be disastrous.

While this is a strong statement by itself, its true strength comes when you consider that this statement is just one of a spate of similar statements by other expert organizations: the American Meteorological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (PDF), as well as several others. Even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, while not exactly embracing the connection between carbon dioxide and climate, cannot bring themselves to contradict it.

Then, of course, we have the "Inhofe 400." Whom should we believe? Jim Inhofe or virtually all of the world's experts? That's a tough one ...

Air Force and liquid coal industry interbreed

A friend just sent me this remarkable story, "Former Air Force official joins leading coal-liquids developer," which appears in the little-known Aim Points, "A daily summary of news, messages and communication tactics to help AF people tell the AF story."

It looks like the "tactic" AF people are being told about is the good-ol' revolving door:

Climate skeptics blame the sun for global warming

Global warming skeptics everywhere are jumping on the solar bandwagon: "It's not greenhouse gases, it's the sun! Let's burn some coal to celebrate!"

There are, of course, many, many problems with the solar theory as an explanation for recent warming. To me, the most damning is that the correlation has failed in the last few decades. As highlighted in an interesting news item in this week's Science:

[Courtillot] and his team acknowledge that "anomalous warming" in the past 2 decades apparently cannot be linked to solar or geomagnetic activity, although they decline to ascribe it to greenhouse gases.

On the other hand, the mainstream theory that today's warming is caused by carbon dioxide (along with other anthropogenic effects and known natural variability) provides an explanation not just for the "anomalous warming," but for just about every climate variation over the last 100 million years.

Global warming will reduce U.S. hurricane landfall, says controversial new research

The argument over whether climate change is real has largely subsided — and, as nature abhors a vacuum, another tiff has risen to fill its place. What effect will global warming have on hurricanes? Them’s fightin’ words! Various studies have suggested that climate change will increase hurricane frequency and intensity, but new research by the […]

Israel to build national electric car infrastructure

Project Better Place, in partnership with Renault/Nissan and the Israeli government, will build a national electric car infrastructure.

A major manufacturer developing new electric vehicles with swappable batteries, and a plan to develop 500,000 battery recharging sites across the country? It's still January, and I'm ready to call this the most important environmental news story of 2008.

I'm going to write more about this later, but do yourself a favor and read all about it here.

This, friends, is the road to Middle-East peace. And it was announced on MLK day. How appropriate.