Bill's Big Diamond Blog

The Electric Horseman

You have to hope that we’re seeing the advent of an era of challenge and effort on clean energy and cleaner transportation. If we aren’t, we’re all surely cooked (literally). Perhaps, Al Gore’s declaration about moving to a carbon-free energy grid in the coming decade will set down a piece of the challenge.

Gore has demanded an Apollo-scale effort towards changing the energy grid over. As the former Vice President laid out in his address yesterday, our geopolitical and economic problems have a direct overlay with our climate problems:

…when you connect the dots, it turns out that the
real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same
measures needed to renew our economy and
escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices.
Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we
need to guarantee our national security without
having to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

Al Gore says what politicians who are running for office can’t— that our culture is running out of time to change our ways. He can afford to point out the drastic nature of the energy shift required. If we don’t stop burning up all the carbon on the planet for electricity and transportation, heating it up and disrupting the climate, our progeny won’t be around for long. While transportation is a huge portion of the problem, the energy grid is related. Gore’s goal addresses this important piece of the carbon puzzle and the economic needs of consumers:

We could further increase the value and efficiency
of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling
auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in
electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply
reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution,
and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid. At
the same time, of course, we need to greatly
improve our commitment to efficiency and
conservation. That’s the best investment we can
make.

The economic fallout of the climate crisis is huge— and getting Americans in line with facing it also means supporting economic justice in the process. Gore is cognizant of this:

Of course, we could and should speed up this
transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based
energy include the costs of the environmental
damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp
reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made
up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not
what we earn.

According to Gore, there’s even more good news for strapped consumers in electric power renewal from a transportation perspective:

…there actually is one extremely effective way to
bring the costs of driving a car way down within a
few short years. The way to bring gas prices down
is to end our dependence on oil and use the
renewable sources that can give us the equivalent
of $1 per gallon gasoline.

One can hope he’s getting through to enough decision-makers to open up some political space for discussion about the biggest crisis we face as a species. However, if press and blogosphere reaction to Gore’s speech yesterday is any indication, we have a long way to go in the U.S. before we take climate change seriously. Gore himself may be partly responsible for the mixed reaction to his speech (with comments like those on tornado activity), but largely, it’s the inertia in our political system that’s to blame for a lack of MSM-ruckus today.

Gore’s yardstick— a total, decade-long shift to carbon-free energy production, may not be totally achievable, but it’s only possible to motivate the nation with a complete goal (50% of something only inspires people halfway, no?).

In the end, with due respect for honest critiques and realistic qualifications, any goal to clean up the energy grid has to aim high and take the risk of falling short. The only way to put this challenge in context is to consider the other option:

To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I
respectfully ask them to consider what the world’s
scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we
don’t act in 10 years. The leading experts predict
that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic
changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose
our ability to ever recover from this environmental
crisis.

Gore points out that a decade may be as far away as Americans will believe in a goal being meaningful, especially to a political system which responds not at all to longer-term goals, but at least has experience with the space program:

Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a
nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.
When President John F. Kennedy challenged our
nation to land a man on the moon and bring him
back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we
could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2
months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
walked on the surface of the moon.

The telling factor for energy success may be seeing how much Gore has learned about realpolitik since the 2000 Florida debacle. Whether the We Campaign creates enough leverage as a movement to address climate crisis depends heavily on whether the once-would-be President Gore is still willing to step politely aside for those who would grab power more rudely— or whether he’s learned what a street fight is all about.

Whether Gore is the perfect leader or not, we ought to hope he’s ready to fight and win this battle. When it comes to global warming, the loser won’t be around long to look dignified in defeat.

A Sustainable Refrigerator for the Developing World

Here is venture capitalist Adam Grossner's brief TED talk on an inexpensive refrigerator for the people, utilizing only exposure to heat, which will cool a liquid container for 24 hours. This item, which his crew believes can be manufactured for $25-40 each, could radically change the lives of millions of poor people globally. It uses no electricity, only the campfire so many people light daily to cook with.

All that seems to remain is financing the manufacture and distribution of the product to people who need it. Maybe you know someone at a development non-profit who would like to underwrite a test program.

Links: Adam Grossner TED bio, David Roberts' Gristmill post and reader discussion

Hansen's Warming Warnings: Twenty Years Later

From Dr. James Hansen’s HuffPo piece:

Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks
spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current
example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt,
exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight,
melting more ice. As a result, without any additional
greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the
summer.

More ominous tipping points loom. West Antarctic and
Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small
additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths
respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well
under way, it will become unstoppable. Debate among
scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by
a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a
business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two
meters is likely within a century. Hundreds of millions
of people would become refugees, and no stable
shoreline would be reestablished in any time frame that
humanity can conceive.

James Hansen and 350.org

James Hansen has spent a good deal of his career as a climatologist sounding the alarm about global warming and climate change. Now he’s convinced that we’re almost, if not already, out of time. Hansen isn’t waiting for others to suggest solutions anymore. He’s blunt and clear about what has to be done.

Hansen wants the oil industry turned into the 21st century equivalent of tobacco kings, frequently charged with hiding the effects of their products on the health of consumers. His accusation is that the heads of companies like Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy consciously spread disinformation about the causes of global warming in the interest of keeping regulation at bay and profits huge.

Hansen first testified twenty years ago before Congress that global warming, caused by man-made carbon emissions, was threatening to cause planetary upheaval. Today, his prescription includes a moratorium on new coal-fired plants, the transformation of the US power grid to include renewable sources, and an Apollo-like program to discover and improve technologies for storing and accessing renewable energy sources.

Hansen has also moved into the political arena. He finds it necessary to call out legislators who stand in the way of finding solutions and will work to list legislators who do so as worthy of defeat. His new organization, 350.org, has a full-page ad in today’s NY Times and in other newspapers, calling for a pledge to reduce the carbon emission levels in the atmosphere to levels below those when he first signaled the danger to our Congress in June of 1988.

Check out the links below to learn more about Hansen’s new effort to put global warming at the top of our political and social priority list.

Grist Magazine

NY Times

Firedoglake

350.org

Nova Highlights German Renewable Energy Incentives

Nova’s episode, “Saved by the Sun” is a fascinating study of the solar power industry and its potential to help combat the climate crisis that threatens human civilization on planet Earth.

One part of the program that is of significant interest is the piece on German legislation, designed to stimulate the growth of renewable energy. The German Renewable Power Act, intended to increase the percentage of renewable energy sources in the country’s power supply to at least 12.5 per cent by 2010 and to at least 20 per cent by 2020, is already ahead of target after a few years in effect.

How did the Germans do it? Financial incentives. They offered power producers, large and microscopic, a fee for the power they generated by renewable means which was higher than the going rate consumers paid. They also guaranteed the selling price over time, making investments in solar and other renewable generation infrastructure safe to finance for anyone with the resources and the will to do so.

While Germans pay more for power than most Europeans, the legislation remains popular and has created a thriving solar industry, putting back money into the economy and cutting into the cost of cleaning up the environment, as well as cutting the health costs which inevitably accrue from using dirty power. Imagine what kind of solar energy industry the US, with more available space and desert areas ideal for solar power generation than Europe, could support with incentives like Germany's.

Returning to Job 1

I’m just back from a week on the road at film festivals, promoting Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story. Getting away from the day-to-day of American politics sometimes helps a person gain perspective on what really matters, even what matters politically.

What comes to mind as I return to the blog, aside from imagining some of the other things I might do with all the hours I spend thinking about politics, is that we need to concentrate some serious grey matter on dealing with climate change.

Recently, the President of a small Pacific island nation, Kiribati, delivered a message that sounds like the opening of a ‘B’ science fiction film of the 1950’s. His plaintive call to an international conference is to protect his nation, which might soon cease to exist, unless something radical is done to stop the rise of the sea level over the 33 coral atolls that make up Kiribati.

President Anote Tong told the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that, “It's not an issue of economic growth, it's an issue of human survival.”

"Villages that have been there over the decades, maybe a century, and now they have to be relocated. Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded."

Tong’s problem isn’t theoretical, nor is it inconsequential, but it does offer a harbinger of things to come if we don’t act now and with vigor.

Tong’s most poignant quote wasn’t data-packed, but it reflects the feelings many people carry about the global increase in extreme weather and the various unmistakable signs in the environment that something is amiss.

He told the gathering, “I am not a scientist but what I know is that things are happening we did not experience in the past."

A Global Warning?

If you’re looking for a good science documentary on climate change issues, Gristmill’s JMG has a suggestion. A Global Warning? is a History Channel offering that seems to have slipped by most reviewers. JMG says, “It does an excellent job illustrating the chaotic nature of terrestrial climate and explaining the theories behind some of the most dramatic climate transitions.”

Another commenter described it this way:

"This is perhaps the best 90 minutes you can spend
if you want a basic, clearly conveyed overview of
climate change, both past and present. This
documentary looks at global climate change in a
clear, vivid, documented way that takes the viewer
from 650 million years ago right up to current times.

Either way it sounds worth the time to check it out.

EPA Cooking Science

The Union of Concerned Scientists released the results of an investigation at the EPA yesterday and the findings are extremely troubling. Even after the Administration was outed for having pressured scientists to make their studies conform to the Administration’s political ends, the practice continues to be rampant.

Here are the top findings:

– 889 scientists (60 percent) said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years.

– 394 scientists (31 percent) personally experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."

– 285 scientists (22 percent) said they frequently or occasionally personally experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome."

– 224 scientists (17 percent) said they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document."

– Of the 969 agency veterans with more than 10 years of EPA experience, 409 scientists (43 percent) said interference has occurred more often in the past five years than in the previous five-year period. Only 43 scientists (4 percent) said interference occurred less often.

– Hundreds of scientists reported being unable to openly express concerns about the EPA's work without fear of retaliation; 492 (31 percent) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency.

Fat Bush Theory With Gas Added!

The good people at Gristmill (which, by the way we’re adding to the Left Field Bloglinks here forthwith) point out that Gail Collins’ “Fat Bush Theory” actually gives the President too much credit on greenhouse gases. If it wasn’t bad enough to pat himself on the back over slowing the increase in greenhouse gases, how about the goal he actually announced back in 2002? That goal was that intensity of greenhouse gases would fall by 18% by 2012, not that the total increase would slow by 18%.

That’s what the EPA says, reducing emission intensity. OK, sounds vagely positive, right? Not so much. Greenhouse gas intensity is the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to economic output.

So, falling greenhouse gas intensity means only that the level of economic output dependent on emitting greenhouse gases falls. Maybe you’re more efficient at making money, but you can still be emitting more greenhouse gases at the same time your intensity falls.

The statistic really means almost nothing.

It’s not hard to understand how Gail Collins was snookered into thinking the President was doing less badly than he really is on the issue. When your unit of measurement is gamed so well, it’s hard not to meet your goal. Essentially, the President is now saying that he’s meeting his goal of doing absolutely nothing, save hoping that energy efficiency will allow the US economy to make money more efficiently over time. It will emit more and more greenhouse gas, but do it on a more cost-efficient basis.

God help us all.

(See Memorandum for discussion)

Climate Change- We Can Solve It!

Go to wecansolveit.org to look at some solutions, changes, and the political and other actions we can take.

Do it!