Climate Climate & Energy

October is Energy Awareness Month

October is Energy Awareness Month. What's more, October first got this designation from the first President Bush in 1991.

Why do I know this? Because the only people I have ever met who know about Energy Awareness Month are people who have worked at the Department of Energy. I'm going to change all that with this blog post, which will probably double the number of people aware of Energy Awareness Month. Don't worry, though, the DOE has made it easy to take action:

To help you customize your energy awareness program, You Have the Power campaign artwork is available for you to download from the images [on this website].

This is my favorite downloadable poster. Click on the image for animation -- I could watch it for hours. And yes, since you ask, the energy savings from walking one or two flights of stairs instead of using an elevator is humongous -- easily equal to those cancelled Kansas coal plants. Easily! (Although if there are other people waiting for the elevator, then it was going to run anyway, but don't go all techno-nerd on me -- it is the thought that counts!)

Even the greenest suburbs can’t touch low urban emission rates

Last Sunday, the Washington Post published a piece by Joel Kotkin and Ali Modarres which sought to debunk the ideas that dense urban areas are greener than their suburban counterparts and that encouraging dense growth might play a significant role in reducing America’s carbon output. The piece was wrong or misleading on practically every point, […]

George Will’s latest column tests the limits of self parody

George Will pulls off a real triple axel of hackery in his latest column, taking the Stepford flimflam of Bjorn Lomborg and ladling on a glutinous serving of his own pinkie-raised pomposity. Rarely has such a poor grasp of the facts been presented with such preening self-regard … at least since the last George Will […]

Methane from Vermont dairy farms to provide electricity for utility customers

Central Vermont Public Service is laying claim to one of the fastest-growing renewable energy programs in the country: its customers can now choose to receive all, half, or a quarter of their electrical energy through the Cow Power program, which digests cow manure at participating dairy farms, captures the methane, and uses that to power generators. CVPS customers pay a premium of 4 cents per KWh, delivering another revenue stream for farmers, who are paid 95 percent of the market price for all of the energy sold to CVPS.

From denying climate disruption to denying a coal plant permit application

Who knew Kansas and Oklahoma could be so far apart? Worlds apart.

From an interview with Inhofe:

[Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.)] also co-authored an article for the Energy Law Journal on "Energy and the Environment: The Future of Natural Gas in America."

In the interview, this self-described "one-man Truth Squad" provides a frank and candid account of the evolution of his position on global warming, from believing that manmade gases are the cause of climate change to advocating against the reduction of man-made gases at great costs.

Inhofe also provides in the interview four points in rebuttal to the global warming issue as presented in what he described as Vice President Al Gore's "science fiction movie.".

Against this: Kansas denies a coal plant's permit application -- because of CO2 concerns!

Climate change mitigation strategy could actually damage the planet

Earl Killian sends me this WSJ op-ed: "Thinking Big on Global Warming" (subs. req'd.). He sees some good news in it -- the WSJ "published a non-denier [opinion] piece."

Yes, but geo-engineering is one of the delayers' sexiest strategies -- holding out the promise of a pure techno-fix that doesn't require all those annoying regulations needed to completely change our energy system. The conservative (duh!) authors of the WSJ piece embrace trying to "develop capabilities for increasing the fraction of sunlight that is reflected outward by the upper atmosphere back into space." They claim: "We know it would work because it happens naturally all the time."

Yes, volcanoes spew out aerosols that cool the Earth, but I have previously debunked aerosol geo-engineering. The authors seem unaware of a major study that finds "doing so would cause problems of its own, including potentially catastrophic drought."

And, of course, this strategy allows unfettered ocean acidification, and as noted recently, "when CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans."

So we might temporarily stave off superheating the planet, but still bring ruinous climate change and destroyed the ocean ecosystem! The authors claim:

Do not try to sell climate geo-engineering to committed enemies of fossil fuels. Although several geo-engineering options appear to be highly cost-effective, ideological opposition to them is often fierce. Fashionable blogs are replete with conspiracy theories and misinformed attacks.

Who are these enemies of fossil fuels? I don't know such people. I know enemies of greenhouse gases. I am one of those. But we tend to like natural gas, and many of us would be okay with coal if you added permanent carbon capture and storage. Greenhouse-gas mitigation avoids catastrophic global warming with high confidence and few negative side effects (and, indeed, many positive side effects). No one has proposed a geoengineering plan that meets either of those two tests.

More on the nine ‘errors’ in Gore’s movie

As I said in my earlier post on the subject, there’s less than meets the eye to the story of the British judge that found nine "errors" in An Inconvenient Truth. Turns out they weren’t errors, just points the judge deemed different enough from the IPCC view to warrant explanatory materials — and the judge […]

New poll finds public wants renewables over coal

And the bad news for coal / good news for humanity just keeps rolling in. According to a new poll (PDF): 75 percent of Americans — including 65 percent of Republicans, 83 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Independents — would "support a five-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in the United States […]

Delayers are replacing deniers

There's been some hand wringing about the fact that science does not have the traction it should in the political debate over climate change.

This is the genesis of the framing argument, most recently pushed by Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet. Basically, this thesis says that scientists need to put their scientific results into a "frame" that allows the general public to better understand how to interpret their results.

I've never particularly liked "framing," and here's one reason: I think that the scientific community has been extremely effective at getting the word out about climate change.

Look at this article:

Kansas denies permit for coal-fired power plant due to concern over CO2 emissions

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Thursday became the first government agency in the United States to reject a permit for construction of a coal-fired power plant based on its carbon dioxide emissions, saying such emissions could harm human health and the environment. The final decision rested with secretary of the KDHE, Roderick […]