Climate Climate & Energy

What does the future hold for renewables?

Again, I babbled away too long in an interview (a great one) and missed the beginning of “Baseload Challenge and the Realities of Renewables.” PIER, California Energy Commission, Gerry Braun, Renewables Team Lead SAIC, Chris McCall, Program Manager Sterling Planet, Mel Jones, CEO I really wanted to see all of this one. But let’s jump […]

Bush administration push for drilling in Colorado angers GOP constituency

Republicans in western Colorado, long a GOP stronghold, are losing patience with the Bush administration’s relentless push for resource extraction in the state. According to a new report from the Wilderness Society, western Colorado currently has 4,500 oil and gas wells on federal public lands, and 22,000 more are in the proverbial pipeline. A total […]

Can planting trees offset your carbon footprint?

When my wife and I bought our house, the yard was typical for our neighborhood: a mostly barren plain of lawn so sunbaked that you could bounce a tennis ball off it. So being eco-groovy types, we've tried to improve the place: we put in a rain barrel, built a natural drainage system, and added topsoil planting berms. But I'm most proud of the trees we've planted: a pair of akebono cherries in the parking strip and a white-star magnolia in the front yard; and in the backyard, a shore pine, a Chinese dogwood, a couple of vine maples, a Japanese maple, and a limelight cypress.

I recently began wondering how much carbon our new trees are soaking up. Since tree planting is the sine qua non of carbon offset programs, how much of my emissions are offset by my yard? Enough, perhaps, to justify moving from a dense, highly walkable neighborhood to a still-urban but less foot-friendly place? (My Walkscore dropped from 92 to 80.)

The answer, I'm afraid, is "no."

I estimate that in an average year my nine trees will soak up right around 100 pounds of carbon-dioxide combined. (Brief methodology note at the end of this post.) That's the emissions equivalent of burning five gallons of gasoline -- or actually just four gallons, if you consider the "lifecycle" emissions of gas. In other words, my tree planting allows me to burn about one-third of a tank of gas guilt-free each year.

That's certainly better than nothing. But then again, the average American is responsible for about 45,000 pounds of yearly CO2 emissions from energy use alone. Nine trees like mine offset about 0.2 percent of those emissions -- and much less when nonenergy sources are considered.

Even giving myself a big benefit of the doubt -- my electricity is carbon-free hydropower and I take other steps to reduce my climate footprint -- it's highly unlikely that my trees are offsetting more than half a percent of my annual emissions. Plus, half of those tree offsets belong to my wife. So that means at the very, very most I'm offsetting about one-quarter of one percent of my own emissions.

I could do more for the climate by simply avoiding a couple of trips in my car.

More on climate skepticism

I often get weird but enjoyable e-mails forwarded to me. This week, it's an exchange between well-known climate skeptic Fred Singer and a group at MIT setting up a climate change seminar. It seems that some members opposed the idea of inviting Fred, which Fred found offensive:

It has come to my attention that Mr. XXXX has addressed a long letter to members of the committee organizing the MIT Seminar series "The Great Climate Change Debate." Apparently, he considers any debate superfluous and strongly objects to my participation.

Mr. XXXX appeals to 'authority' and 'consensus'; I prefer to examine the actual evidence. I believe that's how science works -- or is supposed to work.

A panel discussion on how much plug-ins rule

Today at lunch: “Squeezing the Balloon — The Opportunities and Challenges in Plug-In Hybrids,” by conference moderator P.S. Reilly. Also: Andy somebody from UC Davis, John Baker from Austin Energy Andy: Oil prices are rising, peak oil’s on the way, automakers are worried they won’t be able to sell their cars. Plug-ins offer redundancy — […]

Native Americans likely to be hit especially hard by climate change, says report

Climate change is likely to hit disadvantaged groups the hardest, and that includes Native Americans, according to a new report. Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder predict that rising seas will flood tribal lands in Florida and droughts will involve tribes in water wars in the Southwest; coastal towns in Alaska are already […]

Grid experts discuss why the grid is broken and how to fix it

Next up, “A Brilliant Energy Grid for North America.” Geek heaven! Here’s the line-up: California Energy Commission, Merwin Brown, Director of Transmission Research, PIER (moderator) Modern Grid Initiative, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Steve Pullins, Team Leader, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Clark Gellings, VP of Technology Innovation IBM, Ron Ambrosio, Global Research Leader — Energy […]

PETA VP argues vegetarianism is the best way to help the planet

This is a guest essay from Bruce Friedrich, vice president for campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It was written in response to Alex Roth's essay "PETA's dogma is all bark and no bite." Friedrich has been an environmental activist for more than 20 years.

In 1987, I read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé and -- primarily for human rights and environmental reasons -- went vegan. Two decades later, I still believe that -- even leaving aside all the animal welfare issues -- a vegan diet is the only reasonable diet for people in the developed world who care about the environment or global poverty.

Over the past 20 years, the environmental argument against growing crops to be fed to animals -- so that humans can eat the animals -- has grown substantially. Just this past November, the environmental problems associated with eating chickens, pigs, and other animals were the subject of a 408-page United Nations scientific report titled Livestock's Long Shadow.

The U.N. report found that the meat industry contributes to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity." The report concludes that the meat industry is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

A review of Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus

This piece, which appears in the October 11, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.

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CAN ANYONE STOP IT?
Bill McKibben

During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO2.

The authors of the first two books under review have some doubts about a strategy that emphasizes limits on carbon emissions, Lomborg for economic reasons and Nordhaus and Shellenberger for political ones. Since any transition away from fossil fuel is likely to be the dominant global project of the first half of the twenty-first century, it's worth taking those qualms seriously.

In his earlier book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, attacked the scientific establishment on a number of topics, including global warming, and concluded that things were generally improving here on earth. The book was warmly received on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, but most scientists were unimpressed. Scientific American published scathing rebuttals from leading researchers, and its editor concluded in a note to readers that "in its purpose of describing the real state of the world, the book is a failure." A review in Nature compared it to "bad term papers," and called it heavily reliant on secondary sources and "at times ... fictional." E.O. Wilson, who has over the years been attacked by the left (for sociobiology) and the right (for his work on nature conservation), and usually responded only with a bemused detachment, sent Lomborg a public note that called his book a "sordid mess." Lomborg replied to all of this vigorously and at great length,¹ and then went on, with the help of The Economist magazine, to convene a "dream team" of eight economists including three Nobel laureates and ask them to consider the costs and benefits of dealing with various world problems. According to his panel, dealing with malaria ranked higher than controlling carbon emissions, though again some observers felt the panel had been stacked and one of the economists who took part told reporters that "climate change was set up to fail." Lomborg later conducted a similar exercise with "youth leaders" and with ambassadors to the United Nations, including the former U.S. emissary John Bolton, with similar results.

In his new book, Cool It, Lomborg begins by saying that the consensus scientific position on climate change -- that we face a rise in temperature of about five degrees Fahrenheit by century's end -- is correct, but that it's not that big a deal. "Many other issues are much more important than global warming." In fact, he argues, it would be a great mistake either to impose stiff caps on carbon or to spend large sums of money -- he mentions $25 billion worldwide annually on R&D as an upper bound -- trying to dramatically reduce emissions because global warming won't be all that bad. The effort to cut emissions won't work very well, and we could better spend the money on other projects like giving out bed nets to prevent malaria.

Lomborg casts himself as the voice of reason in this debate, contending with well-meaning but woolly-headed scientists, bureaucrats, environmentalists, politicians, and reporters. I got a preview of some of these arguments in May when we engaged in a dialogue at Middlebury College in Vermont²; they struck me then, and strike me now in written form, as tendentious and partisan in particularly narrow ways. Lomborg has appeared regularly on right-wing radio and TV programs, and been summoned to offer helpful testimony by, for instance, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, famous for his claim that global warming is a hoax. That Lomborg disagrees with him and finds much of the scientific analysis of global warming accurate doesn't matter to Inhofe; for his purposes, it is sufficient that Lomborg opposes doing much of anything about it.

Talking to Bill Scher

I was on Bill Scher’s radio program on Saturday for about 20 minutes. It was broadcast on WHMP-AM in western Mass.; you can listen to the podcast here. Or if you like, you can watch Bill talking to me: One amendment, for those who actually listen to the whole thing: I praised renewable portfolio standards […]