Climate Climate & Energy

It’s not whether we can beat climate change with today’s tools, but whether we can get moving

Tyler Hamilton ran across some elaborate, multibillion-dollar plans for a carbon capture and sequestration network in Canada, geared around enhanced oil recovery. Naturally it was asking the government (read: Canadian taxpayers) to assume the bulk of the risk. Naturally it won’t be done for well over a decade. Then he ran across something else: Then […]

Sea-level rise this century could be twice IPCC’s predictions, says research

If you thought the predictions of sea-level rise by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were bad, you should probably stop reading. Researchers publishing in brand-new journal Nature Geoscience say the oceans could surge twice as high this century as the IPCC’s predictions, or some 64 inches. So, um, let’s hope they’re wrong.

A response to Jim Manzi

I want to thank Jim Manzi for taking the time to respond to my criticisms of his recent writing on warming policies here at Gristmill. Though I disagree with much of what he says, his thoughtful work on the subject has improved the debate. I want to use one more post here to rebut a […]

California looks for yet more clean energy

The following essay is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

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The California Energy Commission (CEC) has released its biennial integrated energy policy report (PDF). The 301-page report looks at various issues confronting California and makes recommendations on how to address them. The issues include:

• Rising population leading to greater demand for energy (natural gas, petroleum, and electric power).
• Rising natural gas demand while production remains flat, leading to a tight market and higher prices.
• Increasing population away from the coast, increasing peak electric demand from air conditioning.
• Increasing vehicle travel from population and sprawl.
• Expected petroleum supply constraints (e.g. port facilities for increase imports) making it difficult to fuel future vehicle travel conventionally.
• California's AB32 cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, requiring 1990 levels by 2020 (despite the population increase -- a 30 percent decrease in absolute emissions).

Even though California is already one of the most efficient users of energy, the CEC is looking for further efficiency improvements, and although a 2006 legislative act mandates 20 percent renewable electricity by 2010, the report looks to 33 percent by 2020 to support California's population growth. A few of the numerous specific recommendations from the report include:

Combating global warring by addressing global warming

A long-established statewide peace organization in Oregon has initiated a new project called "The 5% Solution" as a way to give people a SMART (specific, measurable, appropriate, realistic, and timed) goal for climate action. It asks people to pledge to reduce their own carbon footprint 5 percent a year, each year, and to spread that commitment through their communities, and then states, and then country.

As the material here notes, if the developed world stops increasing emissions and makes 5 percent cuts per year from 2008 to 2050, its emissions will go down about 88 percent and the developing world will have some flexibility to increase emissions for a few more years before joining the rich countries on the glide path to an overall drop of about 80 percent.

Scientist claims that climate models are too conservative in predicting ice loss

Maybe I'm not alarmist after all. Maybe this future is nearer than everyone thinks:

I was called "over-alarmist" by one of the people who took my bet that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2020. But one of the country's top ice experts, non-alarmist Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School, told an American Geophysical Union audience this week:

Killer farmed salmon and non-deadly sharks

More than 10,000 people worked to clean up the worst oil spill in South Korean history after a crane punched a hole in an oil tanker, releasing 2.7 million gallons of crude. A 63-year-old shellfish farmer wept as she showed dead tar-coated oysters to a reporter ...

... a study published in Science suggested that leaving more fish in the sea leads to higher profits than the traditional target known as maximum sustainable yield. "We like to say it's a win-win," said one of the study's authors ...

... a detailed new study of salmon farming found that farmed fish spread sea lice, which killed juvenile wild salmon ...

An unbiased, factual report on biofuels: How rare is that?

The Worldwatch Institute has produced an interesting summary of what's happening in the world of grain supplies.

They also just published a book called Biofuels for Transport. Along with all of the positive potential for biofuels, I'm sure it also discusses the "potential" problems with "first generation" biofuels.

These are some of the latest buzzwords being used to support industrial agrofuels. The word "potential" suggests that there are not yet any actual problems. The words "first generation" suggest that all of these "potential" problems will fail to materialize thanks to the timely arrival of "second generation" fuels.

The reality, of course, is that these fuels (i.e., industrially grown food monocrops) are already wreaking all kinds of havoc and are likely to remain the only commercially viable biofuels for the foreseeable future (i.e., forever).

High drama leads to compromise at climate conference

After days of bitter fighting and an overtime stretch filled with twists and turns and even tears, world leaders on Saturday came to agreement on a rough roadmap for developing a new global climate treaty by 2009. The European Union had pushed for industrialized countries to commit to cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions of 25 to […]

Why ecology explains growth, and economists don’t

Recently there have been a number of discussions concerning economic growth and global warming. Some have argued that the effort to prevent as much global warming as possible will incur unacceptable costs to the global economy in terms of growth. Others have argued that growth is causing global warming.

I want to argue that neoclassical economics is badly designed to help with this debate. The two main problems, in my opinion, are that economics does not see the economy as being composed of a set of nonsubstitutable "life support" functions, to use Joshua Farley's phrase; and the neoclassical theory of economic growth is inadequate (PDF) for understanding how global warming (and most everything else) will effect growth.

The problem of economic growth looms large in both the DICE model put forward by William Nordhaus, and the Stern Report, led Sir Nicholas Stern, because they both calculate the extent to which global warming and global warming mitigation will effect growth. In 1991, Stern opined that growth theory "has, however, been a popular topic for those involved in formal economic theory only for short periods, notably from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s." There is a good reason for this: neoclassical growth theory doesn't really explain economic growth.