Climate Climate & Energy

The latest on smart grids, microgrids, and nerd grids

Three good bits from the smart grid front. First up, there’s a new report out from the California Energy Commission called Distributed Generation and Cogeneration Policy Roadmap for California (PDF). Hot reading! The New Rules Project has a nice write-up on it. See also the NRP’s section on barriers to distributed generation. Next up, five […]

CO2 rise lags temperature rise, redux

One of the most persistent climate skeptic talking points has to do with how temperature rise seems to lag behind CO2 rise in the historical record, raising questions about the direction of causality. Maybe temperature rise causes CO2 rise rather than the other way around! Our own Mr. Beck addressed the point here, but today […]

Biofuel environmental rating

People are slowly beginning to realize that not all biofuels are created equal. A group of UC-Berkeley researchers are proposing a five star fuel rating system:

The debate over whether biofuels like ethanol are better for the environment than fossil fuels has left many consumers confused and unsure where to fill their gas tanks.

Tell me about it. My guess is that these researchers use biodiesel and are hoping to put a few Stars on Thars, right next to the biodiesel sticker they already have. But what are the odds that after studying this topic in great detail they find that all crop-based biofuels being produced today are worse for the environment than fossil fuels? Trust me, true or not, that isn't going to happen.

Why we should ban compressed chemical dusters

I have an untidy habit of eating while I'm working on my computer. Heck, I'm eating a doughnut while I write this post.

Unfortunately, my habit inevitably results in little crumbs of sandwich or potato chips or whatever making their way onto my computer keyboard. Every once in a while I look down at my crumb-ridden keyboard, get disgusted, and embark on a cleaning frenzy. And as many office workers may know, one of the easiest ways to clean a keyboard is with those compressed chemical canister thingies (pictured above). So the other day, while I was merrily blasting away at my keyboard I decided to read the contents. Big mistake.

My little 10-ounce canister contains 100 percent tetrafluoroethane, a greenhouse gas that's sometimes known as HFC-134a (meaning it's a form of hydrofluorocarbon). Before your eyes glaze over, just keep in mind that over a 20-year period, HFC-134a is roughly 3,300 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Nice.

So unless I missed something in the number crunching, using up my 10-ounce can of cleaner will have the same climate-changing effect over the next 20 years as burning at least 100 gallons of gasoline. With that much gas I could drive my trusty Honda Civic from Seattle to New York City. And then back to Chicago. And I would likely still have plenty of fuel left over for side-trips.

All that, packed into a canister retailing for $10.99 at the Office Depot around the corner.

This is not a good idea.

And it strikes me as an instance where the best remedy is pretty simple: just ban it.

Bad news from down south

Scientific and observational data from Antarctica are driving home the message that we have entered a period of consequences.

Most recently, scientists have discovered ice streams hiding bigger reservoirs of water in West Antarctica. The evidence has "major implications for glacial melt rates and associated sea-level rises" and the rate of warming.

And their PM is still in denial

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in a sticky, yet dry, situation.

Even though a drought has caused Australia's agricultural production to fall 25 percent in the last year, Howard may have to ban irrigation so that urban centers can have drinking water.

The targeted river basin, the Murray-Darling, is known as Australia's "food bowl" because it houses 72 percent of Australia's farm and pasture land. If insufficient rain continues through the next few weeks, this year's harvest will be devastated and cities will need to implement water usage restrictions.

Prime Minister Howard doesn't accept the connection to global warming, but scientists and farmers disagree, saying "this drought has the fingerprints of climate change all over it." In climate models, Australia is predicted to be one of the first areas seriously impacted.

America is Dragon

China’s carbon-cutting more ambitious than many assume Used to be, the U.S. couldn’t do anything about climate change because climate change wasn’t real. Now the U.S. can’t do anything about climate change because … China’s not doing anything about climate change. But surprise! Turns out China, despite being the huge energy-sucker that slipped through the […]

Shenanigans everywhere

The WSJ has a story today about the high hopes riding on the few large-scale carbon-capture demonstration projects under construction. The entire global political and economic elite desperately wants carbon sequestration to work, so they can keep us hooked up to the fossil fuel mainline. But as the WSJ notes, it’s a tough row to […]

Happy birthday!

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

"Sustainable development" is 20 years old this week.

On April 27, 1987, after four years of deliberation, the World Commission on Environment and Development released its report. The inquiry -- also known as the Brundtland Commission -- was led by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland.

I was at university then, and devoured the contents of the report, which was later published as the book Our Common Future. Here, at last, was someone tying together the environment and development agendas. The report had much to say, too, about the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. And as a female leader, Brundtland was such an antidote to our own prime minister; she was pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher was not.

The report gave us an enduring definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need."

So 20 years on, what is the legacy of sustainable development as a concept?

Some miscellaneous but connected items

The daily news is never short of articles on biofuels these days, but these three caught my eye today.