Climate Climate & Energy

Some 150 million people will be at risk from flooding by 2070, says report

Some 150 million people in the world’s biggest cities could be at risk of flooding by 2070, and at-risk coastal property could have a value of $35 trillion, says a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. About 40 million people and $3 trillion worth of property are now at risk, but population […]

Texas mayors want CFL to be state light bulb

The state bird of Texas is the mockingbird. The state song is “Texas, Our Texas.” The Texas state footwear is the cowboy boot, its tie the bolo tie, and its pepper the jalapeño. Now, five Texas mayors have called for the Lone Star State to have an official state light bulb: the compact fluorescent. Which, […]

Feeding ethanol waste to cows

Perhaps the most persistent debate around corn ethanol involves its “net energy balance” — that is, whether it consumes more energy in production than it delivers as a fuel. Even the studies that credit the fuel with a robust energy balance, like this one from the USDA, acknowledge that it’s pretty much a wash unless […]

Solar project in African desert could supply clean energy to Europe

A string of gigantic solar generators in the northern African desert could cleanly supply one-sixth of Europe’s electricity needs, say backers of a project called Desertec. The project relies on concentrated solar power, in which giant mirrors focus the sun’s rays on pillars filled with water, creating steam, which drives turbines, which generate electricity. In […]

Hurricanes this past year were unpredictably … average

Lots of experts are weighing in as the Atlantic hurricane season comes to an end (today). One of my favs, Jeff Masters, summarizes it this way:

The Atlantic hurricane season of 2007 is over, and it was a strange one. For the second straight year, we had a near average season, despite pre-season predictions of a very active season.

U.N. climate conference opens in Bali, Indonesia

Plenty is going on at the United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, where delegates from nearly 190 nations are gathered to lay the groundwork for a post-Kyoto climate treaty. Conference leaders have said they aim to have a new treaty ready to go by 2009. In the meantime, there’s no shortage of things to […]

Notable quotable

“I have been in this industry for 40 years, and during that time, we always knew it got cold in December and stayed that way through January and February — and that was that. Now, it’s a crap shoot.” — Fredric Stollmack, president of outerwear manufacturer Weatherproof

Bali conference could end deforestation overnight

This post was co-written with Dorjee Sun, the head of Carbon Conservation, a company that works to protect forests in Indonesia from destruction.

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Bali, Indonesia, is the perfect backdrop for this week's climate summit. No country better embodies the immense peril of inaction -- and the immense opportunity this meeting has to make massive and immediate progress in stemming the climate crisis.

Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. (Despite its green reputation, palm oil is anything but: a recent study in Science found that palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.)

Companies like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables are paying top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel. That global demand has driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 (PDF) in some cases -- providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people -- who need them to survive.

The Bali conference could immediately eliminate that perverse accounting by making sure forests and other wild lands around the world are financially valued for the carbon they store, and not just their potential as timber or agricultural land. The way to do that is to allow polluters to get credit for protecting forests that they can apply against their pollution reduction obligations, an idea called carbon ranching or avoided deforestation.

Polluters would jump at this opportunity. Protecting forests from destruction can cost as little as 75 cents per ton of carbon dioxide - even at higher costs, it's a fraction of the price (PDF) of cleaning up most industrial pollution. In the past, some environmentalists criticized carbon ranching for this very reason: they were concerned that if polluters focused their greenhouse gas reduction efforts on forest conservation, that would divert money from necessary clean-ups in industrial pollution. That's the wrong way to look at it. Because locking up carbon dioxide by protecting forests is so cheap, it means that the world can achieve bigger reductions in global warming pollution faster and for less money. Carbon ranching should be an argument for bigger immediate pollution reductions, from both forests and industry, not a way for polluters to get around their responsibility to clean up their own pollution.

Tips for low-carbon merrymaking

See that green line on the map? Study it closely, boozehounds. Those of you to the right of it can enjoy a nice French Bordeaux. Those to the left should be getting your Pinot from Napa.

So concludes Dr. Vino in his excellent -- and topical! -- study, "Red, White and 'Green': The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade."

The paper is nicely readable in addition to being thorough. Few details go unconsidered. Dr. Vino cares about the CO2 produced from the breakdown of sugar during the fermentation process. He mulls the land-use implications of grape production. He knows his screw caps from his corks.

All of these factors (well, not the corks) feed into a model that allows the paper's authors to compute the carbon content of different bottles of wine drunk in various points in the U.S. Some conclusions:

Even in the short term, R&E is a better choice than clean coal for developing nations

OK, if you’re just joining us in this apparently interminable series, here’s where we’ve been: Jeremy said the power players in China and India (C&I) "care about money, not climate." But if that’s true, they’re not going to go for clean coal either — it’s more expensive. Happily, I think it’s not going to be […]