Climate Climate & Energy

Globalization of the fuel vs. fuel debate

Last Thursday, Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, announced substantial subsidies to boost Canada's production of biofuels. Under its "ecoENERGY for Biofuels" program, the government will provide up to C$ 1.5 billion (US$ 1.4 billion) in the form of incentives over nine years to producers of renewable alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel.

"With leading-edge technology and abundant supplies of grains, oilseeds, and other feedstocks, Canada is uniquely positioned to become a global leader in the production of biofuels," said the prime minister.

Today, the BBC ran a story explaining that, in part thanks to the increasing diversion of Canadian durum wheat into biofuels, supplies of this very special grain are getting tight. The result: the price of pasta, one of Italy's staple foods, is forecast to go up by about 20 percent this autumn.

Send me your questions before tomorrow

Tomorrow, I’m interviewing Amory Lovins, Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. I suppose Lovins needs no introduction here, but if you want a compact summary of his contributions, Wikipedia’s got a decent entry. If you’d like to read some of his stuff, check out Winning the Oil Endgame, which promises a […]

Blue plus green equals sustainability

Manufacturing can be a source of pollution, and the iconic image of manufacturing is the smokestack hurling smoke into the atmosphere. But in order to create a sustainable economy, we're going to have to manufacture the necessary windmills, solar energy systems, trains, and electric vehicles. We have a negative demonstration of the necessity of manufacturing in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled "Alternative Energy Hurt By a Windmill Shortage" (attention web surfers: the Wall Street Journal is free all day today!):

The race to build new sources of alternative energy from the wind is running into a formidable obstacle: not enough windmills.

In recent years, improved technology has made it possible to build bigger, more efficient windmills. That, combined with surging political support for renewable energy, has driven up demand. Now, makers can't keep up -- mostly because they can't get the parts they need fast enough.

It turns out that mostly European utilities have locked up the consumption of most of the wind turbine builders in the world, so if in particular a small U.S. utility wants to expand its wind power base, it has one alternative: sell itself to a European utility. The wind turbine manufacturing capacity in the U.S. is so small that much of our wind turbine industry could soon be mostly European:

Trees are good for a lot of things; carbon offsetting isn’t one of them

The first rule of offsets, according to Joseph Romm, is "no trees." This is a pretty good rule, as these thing go. The TerraPass offset portfolio contains no tree-planting projects, despite the fact that most consumers love trees and the fact that tree-planting projects are typically cheaper than offsets from renewable energy projects.

So if trees are both consumer-friendly and cost-effective, why avoid them? There are lots of reasons, and Romm chooses to focus on one of the more minor ones: a recent study suggesting that trees outside of tropical zones actually cause a net increase in global warming by absorbing sunlight.

Rocking the Cradle of Democracy

Energy debate leads to unprecedented government shutdown in Pennsylvania More than 24,000 state workers in Pennsylvania are back on the job today, after a fierce debate over budget issues — including transportation and clean energy — led Gov. Ed Rendell (D) to enact an unprecedented partial government shutdown yesterday. At a late-night press conference, Rendell […]

Monbiot: We can provide all or most of our electricity from renewable sources

In his July 3 column, George Monbiot reminds us of how much worse the threat of global warming may be than the consensus IPCC position. But he also reminds us that there are reasons for optimism too. He cites three studies that point to the fact that there is every reason to believe Europe and the UK can supply between 80 percent and 100 percent of electricity needs completely sun, wind, water, wave, tide, and minor amounts of biomass and geothermal energy, V2G Vanadium flow batteries, and pumped storage.

Given that electricity can drive just about all energetic processes of our civilization -- domestic, commercial, industrial, and transport, that means that we have economically reasonable substitutes for just about all carbon use now.

And the Peanuts Are Free-Range

With fans and fanfare, Boeing unveils new fuel-efficient aircraft Yesterday, Boeing unveiled a new fuel-efficient airplane to a crowd of more than 15,000 workers and onlookers, as tens of thousands more watched by satellite. The 787 Dreamliner — nicknamed the “greenliner” — boasts a body that’s half carbon-fiber composite; because the material is lighter than […]

Hope There’s a High Ceiling for the Kangaroos

Australia to build 1,740-mile corridor for wildlife affected by climate change State and federal leaders in Australia have agreed to create a 1,740-mile wildlife corridor spanning the east coast of the continent — in part to allow plants and animals to flee the effects of global warming. “The effects of climate change will likely be […]

The LA Times reports on global warming and skinny whales

Kenneth Weiss, a surfer/reporter who last year headed the team that won a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times for a series on our trashed oceans, returns to the front page today with a story about how global warming appears to be damaging the arctic feeding grounds of the gray whale, leading to "skinny whales" and unusual behaviors.

The whales are journeying far to the north of their usual territory looking for the sea-bed crustaceans that make up the bulk of their diet -- and foraging off California and along the western coast as well.

The story tops the front page of the print edition, but for some reason is buried in the California/local edition online. Nonetheless, it's worth a look, for the graphs, maps, and photographs, as well as the text. Here's the bottom line:

Leaving Dustbusters in the Dust

High-tech gadgets will overtake appliances as energy-suckers, says report Primed to overtake kitchen appliances and lighting as the biggest drain on domestic power, high-tech gadgets — we’re talkin’ to you, iPhone — will use nearly half an average household’s energy by 2020, according to U.K. nonprofit Energy Saving Trust. In a report cleverly titled “The […]