Climate Change

Climate and energy, rhetoric and reality

November 28, 2011

Listening to executives of the International Energy Agency discuss  their World Energy Outlook 2011 report this morning (Nov. 28) at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, even as the COP17 global climate negotiations begin in Durban, I found myself recalling Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady when she sang:

Words! Words! Words!
I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through, first from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?

Why? Because the cold, hard data in the authoritative IEA report underscores the yawning gap between the words that we hear from the world’s political and business leaders and what is actually happening on the ground (and in the air).

Here are a few examples:

Rhetoric:  Virtually every world leader and CEO says anthropogenic climate change is a serious problem. Thousands have traveled in Durban to talk, interminably, about climate justice, climate finance, post-Kyoto, etc.

Reality: Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history. They’ve grown, in large part, because roughly half of the growth in energy use during the last decade came from coal, as this chart shows. Most countries and most companies emit more greenhouse gases today than ever.

Rhetoric: Just about everyone – business people, enviros, Democrats, Republicans — supports energy efficiency. What’s not to like? [click to continue…]

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Climate policy: big ideas are dead

November 16, 2011

Right, left or center, most agree that U.S. climate and energy policy today is, at best, an ineffective and inefficient patchwork.

Better get used to it, said a bipartisan panel of Washington insiders today (Nov. 16) at the Atlantic Green Intelligence Forum.

For now, and for the rest of the Obama administration, when it comes to energy and climate, the White House and Congress will use the tools at hand, and not invent new ones.

“We all agree–big bills are dead,” said Carol Browner, the former White House climate czar and a Democrat.

“I never want to hear the word comprehensive again because once you hear the word comprehensive, you know a bill is never going to pass,” said James Connaughton, the former Bush II White House environmental adviser.

What this means, unfortunately, is that the U.S. won’t get an energy and climate policy that is sufficient to deal with the threat of global warming until 2013 at the earliest, even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise rapidly. Just a week ago, the International Energy Agency warned that it will be impossible to hold global warming levels to safe levels without dramatic shifts towards low-carbon energy sources in the next few years. [click to continue…]

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What’s wrong with economic growth?

November 13, 2011

Dave Gardner is a gutsy guy.  Gardner, who is 56, a former corporate filmmaker, set his career aside a few years ago to run for office in his hometown of Colorado Springs, CO, and make a documentary film called Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth that puts forth an unpopular idea–that economic growth is bad for the environment and bad for human happiness.

“I want to make it OK for people to be against growth,” Dave says, when asked why he ran for office and made the movie.

Dave and I fundamentally disagree. I think economic growth is vital, not just to lift billions of people out of poverty–global per capita income is currently about $10,700, if Wikipedia is to be believed–but because societies that are more prosperous are better able to deal with the issues of environmental and social justice that matter most to me.

Nevertheless, I would urge you to see Dave’s film (screenings are listed here, or you can buy the DVD) both because he raises a number of important questions and and because, to his credit, has managed to capture on film some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the topic of growth–Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor and author of the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, sociologist Juliet Schor, whose books include The Overworked American, the heretical economist Herman Daly, environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, and the charismatic political economist and author Raj Patel. [click to continue…]

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Time for a carbon tax?

November 9, 2011

“I was a huge supporter of cap and trade,” said Wayne Leonard, the CEO of Entergy, a $11 billion utility company.

“We developed enormously elegant solutions, but they couldn’t get done.”

Taxing carbon emissions is the next best way to deal with the threat of global climate disruptions, he said, in part because it would give the energy industry a degree of certainty about how to deploy its capital.

“A simple tax on every one is a starting point,” Leonard said. Proceeds could be used to reduce the federal deficit or rebated to consumers.

Leonard spoke today (Nov. 9) at a launch event for the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a new organization that is succeeding the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Eileen Claussen, who has directed the Pew Center for 13 years, will lead the new group, which has raised money from three so-called strategic partners — Entergy, HP and Shell — as well as Alcoa Foundation, Bank of America, GE, The Energy Foundation, Duke Energy, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Pew is no longer a backer.

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Daniel Yergin: Why shale gas is like Walmart

November 8, 2011

The breakthrough energy innovation of the 21st century is not thin-film solar, sophisticated wind turbines, advanced biofuels or small-scale nukes.

It’s shale gas.

So says Daniel Yergin, the energy guru and author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, $35), who was interviewed today (Nov. 8) by Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Washington. Yergin, the best-selling author, consultant and all-around energy guru, is right: The ability to extract natural gas from shale, using a controversial technique known as fracking, is reshaping America’s energy landscape.

“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” Yergin said. He likened its impact on the energy business to the arrival of a new Walmart in town, which shakes up competitors, big and small.

The impact of cheap, abundant natural gas on energy usage has enormous implications for the climate crisis.

Cleaner-burning gas could replace dirty coal as a fuel to generate electricity. Then again, Yergin said: “It’s does create a more challenging marketplace for wind and solar and everything else.” [click to continue…]

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Flying green? Yes, say Alaska and United

November 7, 2011

Technological progress is impossible to predict, but it’s safe bet that we won’t be flying solar- or wind-powered airplanes anytime soon. So the best hope of flying without emitting large volumes of greenhouse gases lies with biofuels.

This week, there’s good news on bringing biofuels in the air. Beginning Wednesday, Alaska Airlines will fly 75 commercial passenger flights in the U.S. powered in part by biofuels. “This is a historic week for aviation,” declared Alaska Air’s CEO, Bill Ayer, in a press release. Today (Nov. 7), United Airlines make the first U.S. commercial flight using an advanced biofuel made from algae, according to Reuters.

Keith Loveless, vice president of corporate and legal affairs, who oversees sustainability, told me: “These fuels will make a meaningful contribution towards reducing the aviation industry’s environmental impact, and towards reducing fuel volatility, which is an incredible problem for the airline industry.”

But–and you knew there would be a but–biofuels remain way too expensive to replace jet fuels today. That’s why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, got on the phone with me last week so that the Obama administration will do all it can to advance progress on aviation biofuels. “We are engaged right now in aggressively promoting research to determine the most efficient non-food feed crop that can be used,” he said. [click to continue…]

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Sierra Club’s Brune: We’re stopping coal

October 23, 2011

Michael Brune

“We are starting to create the ecological U-turn that David Brower talked about, decades ago. On coal, it’s dramatic. We’ve seen a halt to the coal rush.”

“Primarily because of regulations (from)  the Obama administration, we can now project a future where our oil consumption will decline.”

“It’s not sufficient to address the problem, but it’s a positive trend.”

So says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. [David Brower, who was made famous in John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, was one of his predecessors.] Others fret that the environmental movement is on the defensive these days. Mike, an optimistic, sees progress.

Indeed, Mike argues that the effort by Republicans in the House to roll back a slew of environmental regulations as a sign that the enviros are winning.

“Republicans in Congress and their corporate benefactors are worried about the threat to the status quo in the energy industry,” he says. “That’s the reason this is happening. We’re making progress.” [click to continue…]

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Google: Why the cloud is green

October 20, 2011

Google’s Gmail spells trouble for the U.S. Postal Service and, if you’re not careful, it can be a risky place to store your data. Aside from that, Gmail is good for the rest of us—and, importantly, for the planet.

Indeed, cloud-based computing—the way Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook and others provide you with data storage and software from their servers—turns out to be a great way to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions…if those companies run their businesses right.

That’s because in computing, as in so many other industries, scale drives efficiency. Bigger is greener.

Urs Hölzle

That, at least, is my takeaway (as they say in the tech world) from a conversation this week with Urs Hölzle, a top Google executive who oversees company operations, particularly its data centers.

Urs (rhymes with Coors), who is 48, left an academic job in 1999 to become one of the first 10 people hired by Google. Smart move. He did so, he told me, because after meeting founders Larry Page and Sergie Brin, he decided that “they were very clue-ful.” Huh?  “Most of the people starting Internet companies then were clueless,” Urs explained.

A computer scientist with a Stanford PhD, Urs wasn’t an energy guy. But he had  worked on processor architecture and understood engineering and operations. “My first job was making Google scalable,” he said. Google’s  first servers, which the company leased, were terribly inefficient, he found. “The manufacturer had saved a few cents and it was costing us tens of dollars per server,” he said. Buildings housing the servers, which need constant cooling, were wasteful, too.

Since then, energy use has become an obsession for Google, Urs says. The company designs its own servers and data centers. “We’ve saved, easily, over $1 billion for Google,” he says. [click to continue…]

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Do green groups need to get religion?

October 18, 2011

Peter Lehner

“Americans actually do care about their health. They don’t want their kids have to be poisoned in order for them to get a job. They value their natural heritage.”

“One should not read what’s going on the House of Representatives as an indication of where America wants to be.”

That’s Peter Lehner talking. Peter, a 52-year-old environmental lawyer, is executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of America’s most important environmental groups. The NRDC has a $95 million budget, about 400 employees and about 1.3 million members. They’re big and they represent a lot of people.

And yet the NRDC and its allies are getting nowhere in Washington.

They’re struggling to protect the EPA against unrelenting Republican attacks.

And, as Elizabeth Rosenthal wrote the other day in the Times, climate change–arguably the biggest problem facing mankind–has devolved into a non-issue. The “fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon,” she wrote.

Why?

That was the question on my mind when I met recently with Peter, who is thoughtful and smart, to talk about the politics of climate. That’s not my  specialty, but I came with an idea: The green groups that try to persuade Americans that environmental protection is good for their jobs and pocketbooks–that is, that green is in our self-interest–have missed opportunities to frame the environment and especially climate as moral issues, in ways that would appeal to our higher and better selves. Put another way, the big NGOs that focus on policy are not as comfortable talking about culture and religion.

So I wondered what the NRDC had learned from the failure of cap-and-trade—the scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that was rejected by Congress—and whether its leaders are rethinking their message.

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Wendy Schmidt does damage control

October 11, 2011

Wendy Schmidt

The Schmidt Family Foundation, which was established in 2006 by Wendy and Eric Schmidt—he was the longtime CEO of Google—has taken on a very big job: It wants to help transform the world’s environmental and energy practices in the 20th century.

In the meantime, there are messes to clean up.

So in July of 2010, as the BP Deepwater Horizon continued to spill oil, Wendy Schmidt joined forces with the X PRIZE foundation to create the $1.4 Million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a competition to find better, faster and more efficient ways to capture crude oil from the ocean’s surface.

Today (10-11) in New York, they announced a winner—a private company from Illinois called Elastec that specializes in oil spill recovery. Team Elastec won the $1 million first prize in the competition by developing technology that sucked up oil at a rate of 4670 gallons per minute – more than three times the industry norm.

“The point here is to have a better first response,” Wendy Schmidt told me by phone last week. “We can keep the immediate damage from the next oil spill from being so damaging.”

I spoke to Wendy Schmidt last week because I was curiously to learn more about the Schmidt Family Foundation and its mission. The foundation reported assets of about $168 million, as of December 2009 and it has made about $13 million in grants in 2011.

Why focus on energy and the environment?, I asked Schmidt. She replied:

We look at the world and say we have a 150 year old energy infrastructure that can fail. It’s not designed well enough not to fail, catastrophically. We look at how we can commit our creativity to help safeguard the living systems of the world, to protect them and protect us, from the failures of a system of extraction and combustion that we know will have to end anyway.

To that end, the 11th Hour Project, which was started by Schmidt and is financed by the foundation, makes grants to a long list of  advocacy and educational groups including The Regeneration Project, Green for All, the Rocky Mountain Institute and Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff project. All are designed to help people better understand their connection to the planet.

But changing attitudes takes time, and Schmidt said she felt a sense of urgency to do something as oil gushed during the summer of 2010 from the Deepwater Horizon spill. [click to continue…]

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