Climate Climate & Energy

Cogeneration and ethanol production

I am not the biggest fan of corn ethanol. But I am the biggest fan of cogeneration, also known as combined heat and power, or CHP (well, maybe the second-biggest fan). It is probably the single most overlooked strategy for sharply cutting greenhouse-gas emissions while reducing overall energy costs.

Now a new EPA report finds that running an ethanol plant on natural gas CHP can, with the right design, result in negative net CO2 emissions (click on figure to enlarge).

Important caveat: "Impact of Combined Heat and Power on Energy Use and Carbon Emissions in the Dry Mill Ethanol Process" (PDF) does not examine the energy consumed (or emissions generated) from growing and harvesting the corn or from transporting the corn or ethanol. Still, with CHP, corn ethanol can actually generate significant CO2 reductions compared to gasoline.

If Congress is serious about promoting ethanol in a manner that actually reduces GHGs, they should require all new ethanol plants to cogenerate.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sea-level rise at our doorstep; puts nation at risk

What the scientific community has failed to communicate, and the public has failed to grasp, is that the U.S. is particularly vulnerable to very small increments of sea-level rise.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment projects a sea-level rise of 0.18 meters to 0.59 meters this century. Even though the report includes a caveat that this range does not include any significant contribution from the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, global warming skeptics continually characterize those who mention a six-meter sea-level rise as scaremongers.

There is also a common notion in circulation, advanced by the media and many studies on the impacts of climate change, that wealthier countries in the West will be able to adapt, while underdeveloped countries will bear the brunt of the impacts.

It is no wonder then that global warming scarcely registers as an issue in the presidential election. Until the American public understands that the U.S. is directly threatened by impacts resulting from global warming, little meaningful action to curb our greenhouse-gas emissions will take place.

With just one meter of sea-level rise, the U.S. will be physically under siege, with calamitous and destabilizing consequences.

One-hundred-dollar oil

The Oil Drum had a few comments yesterday on $100 oil:

Two years after Sago Mine explosion, many mine-safety standards still not implemented

In January 2006, 12 coal miners were killed when an explosion in West Virginia’s Sago Mine trapped them underground. In response, Congress passed legislation strengthening mine safety standards. Two years later, many of the standards have yet to be implemented, to the frustration of the United Mine Workers union. Says union president Cecil Roberts, “[The […]

Britain expected to back new construction of nuclear power plants

Britain is expected to next week give a nod to new nuclear-power-plant construction. A judge overturned an initial go-ahead in February, saying the government failed to properly consult the public; officials have undertaken five months of public consultation in the lead-up to the expected announcement. “Dozens of individuals and organizations have contributed to the consultation […]

Bush administration will offer oil leases in prime polar-bear habitat

The U.S. Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service plans to offer offshore oil and gas drilling rights to 29.7 million acres of Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. The area is home to one of two U.S. polar bear populations; interestingly enough, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — also a part of the Interior Department — is within […]

Automaker lawsuit against Rhode Island can go forward, and more vehicle news

If news of states suing the EPA merely whets your appetite for vehicle-emissions news, here’s more: Firstly, a federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit from automakers seeking to prevent Rhode Island from regulating vehicle emissions can go forward. Rhode Island officials are left wondering how their situation is different from a very similar lawsuit […]

Landowner hopes to mine mother lode of uranium in Virginia

A 200-acre plot of earth in Virginia is not the unassuming farmland it appears. It harbors what is thought to be the largest deposit of uranium in the U.S. — 110 million pounds of the stuff, worth almost $10 billion and able to supply every U.S. nuclear power plant for two years. Unfortunately for drooling […]

Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner on climate change

Today's members of the "Inhofe 400," Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, do appear to have expertise on climate change policy. Prins is the professor and director of the Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events at the London School of Economics, while Rayner is professor and director of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the University of Oxford.

As such, they are different from those that I have previously highlighted (here and here), who were true skeptics of human-induced climate change, but didn't have the credentials or credibility in the climate change arena to be considered "experts."

So Prins and Rayner have credibility in their area of expertise, but are they actually skeptics? The first sentence of the executive summary of their report, "The Wrong Trousers," (PDF) says:

We face a problem of anthropogenic climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 has failed to tackle it.

I would say that Prins and Rayner do not doubt the reality of human-induced climate change.

Sea levels may rise five feet by 2100

A recent Nature Geoscience study, "High rates of sea-level rise during the last interglacial period," ($ubs. req'd) finds that sea levels could rise twice what the IPCC had project for 2100. This confirms what many scientists have recently warned (also see here), and it matches the conclusion of a study (PDF) earlier this year in Science.

[As an aside, in one debate with a denier -- can't remember who, they all kind of merge together -- I was challenged: "Name one peer-reviewed study projecting sea-level rise this century beyond the IPCC." Well, now there are two from this year alone!]

For the record, five feet (PDF) of sea level rise would submerge some 22,000 square miles of U.S. land just on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (farewell, southern Louisiana and Florida) -- and displace more than 100 million people worldwide. And, of course, sea levels would just keep rising some six inches a decade -- or, more likely, even faster next century than this century.