Climate Climate & Energy

Berkeley shows the way to climate change mitigation at a local level

The city of Berkeley, Calif., shows how to take serious action on climate disruption by paying up-front costs to help residents switch to solar power.

This could be done at any scale, from village to nation. All that is needed is wisdom and an understanding that any "ROI" (return on investment) calculation that doesn't include the risk that failure to respond to climate disruption will bankrupt us (in addition to its moral bankruptcy) isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Berkeley, Calif., suggests innovative solar scheme

The Berkeley, Calif., city council will soon vote on an innovative scheme to front the cost of solar panels to homeowners, who would pay the city back over 20 years as a property tax add-on. The amount to be paid back would be roughly what homeowners would save on electric bills by being sun-powered. “This […]

Says uptight libertarian wonk

I don’t understand what Steven Landsburg is supposed to be saying here. By his own admission, the position Gore advances is in line with the Stern Review. But Stern showed his work, with a few hundred pages on discount rates and risk assessments, and Gore just made a movie that got seen by tens of […]

White House spokesfolks play up health benefits of climate change

Recent Senate testimony on the public-health impacts of climate change by the director of the Centers for Disease Control was watered down because the White House wanted “to focus that testimony on public health benefits,” White House spokesperson Dana Perino said this week. She went on to state that U.S. experts are attempting to determine […]

Why coal is cheaper in China

Alternatives to coal are at a severe disadvantage in China: These are the realities faced by companies seeking to make themselves more environmentally friendly in China, where coal is king. Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build and easy to run. While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a […]

Physical chemist on climate change

Turns out that my friend's brother is a physical chemist who has a lot of interesting things to say in response to the abrupt <a href="http://e-center.doe.gov/iips/faopor.nsf/d75c18ae2432dc898525649c005de232
/cd548f8acf0efbe28525736900689456?OpenDocument">climate change modeling grant posting that the feds just put out.

He sent this great rundown on how things look from his point of view:

Poll: Americans deeply, perhaps irredeemably, confused

From the American Institute of Architects’ annual public survey (sub rqd): The greatest percentage — 31 percent — of respondents said they believed recycling was one of the three most important things they could do to reduce [global] warming. Reducing driving came in next, at 25 percent, followed by reducing energy consumption, at 23 percent. […]

Earth still round; sky, blue

IPCC: climate change will hit poor hardest.

No supply-side energy solution will come to our rescue

No one is going to come to the rescue on the supply side -- and, of course, we remain stuck with an administration that doesn't believe in demand-reduction strategies.

As the Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) reported in "OPEC's Lever Loses Its Pull on Oil":

Oil prices are hovering near historic highs, but consuming nations shouldn't expect quick relief from OPEC, the world's only source for big, quick supplies.

For several reasons, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has neither the clear leverage nor the inclination to open the spigots and drive down the price of crude, which jumped past $90 a barrel in intraday trading in New York last week for the first time.

This figure shows how little spare capacity OPEC has -- essentially none outside of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis have no inclination to initiate a major price drop, especially since these prices do not appear to be destroying demand.

Moreover, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned back in July that it saw "OPEC spare capacity declining to minimal levels by 2012."

And the WSJ notes no one outside of OPEC will be coming to the rescue either:

Saudi Arabia has little to fear from the world's other major producers, such as Russia, which in decades past have ramped up supplies in an effort to capture a greater market share. But at the moment, the world's major producers for the most part are already pumping flat-out.

"They have little competition from non-OPEC suppliers and few worries about losing market share," says Jeffrey Currie, senior energy economist at Goldman Sachs in London.

We cannot be far from $100+ oil.

Notable quotable

“Well, there are public health benefits to climate change, as well, both benefits and concerns …” — White House spokeswoman Dana Perino