Warren Buffett’s coal problem

April 21, 2013
Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett

Last winter, I traveled to southeastern Montana (brr!) to report on a battle over a coal mine being proposed by Arch Coal, America’s second-biggest coal company, and a coal-carrying railroad that’s needed to transport the coal from the mine to coal-burning power plants, either in the U.S. or in Asia. The railroad, called the Tongue River Railroad, is owned by Arch Coal, by the BNSF Railway, which is a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and by the candy billionaire Forrest Mars Jr.

It’s a fascinating story, for a bunch of reasons. The coal mine and the railroad are interdependent; both will be built, or neither will be. They need the approval of state and federal regulators. And opposing them are an unlikely coalition of Montana cattle ranchers, members of the northern Cheyenne tribe, a small Amish farming community that recently moved to to the state in search of peace and quiet, and some very determined environmental activists from the Northern Plains Resource Council, the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club.

My story was as just published in the May/June issue of by Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, under the headline, Warren Buffett’s Coal Problem. Like the Sierra Club, I think this coal mine is a bad idea–a very bad idea–and that’s one reason why I wanted  to write the story. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Business Ethics, Climate Change, Energy, NGOs, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Hurricane Sandy: A climate Pearl Harbor?

October 31, 2012

Only after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor did the US mobilize to enter World War II.

Might Hurricane Sandy mobilize the US to tackle global warming?

This isn’t my metaphor. People have been talking about “climate Pearl Harbors” for years. (Here’s a Joe Romm post from 2008.) The theory is that, because global warming is a slow-moving threat  that for a variety of peculiar reasons is incredibly difficult to resolve politically — for more on that, read my climate ebook, Suck It Up — a dramatic event, involving death and destruction, will be required to awaken a citizenry that is largely indifferent, confused or otherwise occupied.

Of course we’ve had plenty of extreme weather in recent years. Hurricane Katrina. A Russian heat wave that killed 700 in 2010. Floods in Australia in 2011. Disasters in places like Pakistan and Mali that barely made headlines.

But those involved black people, poor people, faraway people or, in the case of the wildfires and droughts that plagued the US this year, trees and crops.

Hurricane Sandy is affecting New Yorkers. New York, along with Washington, is the power center of the US. Wall Street. The news business. Media, fashion, advertising, PR. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Thoughts on being power-less

July 2, 2012

No one pays much attention to electricity.

Until we’re forced to go without it.

I’ve not blogged for a while because I’ve been intermittently without electricity–first, by design, for a couple of days last week, when I took a rafting and camping trip off the grid in northern California, and then after I returned home to Bethesda, where a summer storm that killed 22 people also left more than 1.8 million people without electricity in the mid-Atlantic states.

Being power-less does interesting things to people.

Before leaving on the rafting trip, I confess, I was uneasy about doing without a cell phone, Internet access, email, Twitter and baseball scores, not necessarily in that order. I try to turn off my computer on Saturdays, to observe the Jewish sabbath, but I rarely succeed. Even when traveling overseas, I try to check in at least once a day. On an ordinary day, I rarely go more than an hour without checking email. This is an addiction, plain and simple.

Once I got out on the middle fork of the American River, none of that mattered. (Well, I did think about my beloved Washington Nationals now and then.) I was traveling with a group of fun and interesting people, assembled by Jib Ellison of the BluSkye sustainability consulting firm. The rafting was enormous fun. I camped for the first time in more than 30 years. (The technology of tents has improved nicely since then.) We ate well, and marveled at the beauty of the Sierra Nevadas.

Being off the grid was liberating–and restorative.

As it happened, we talked some about electricity. This was a group of sustainability people, after all. David Crane, the ceo of NRG Energy, talked about how he’d like to see solar panel on the roofs of half of the homers in America, roughly 50 million in all, but lamented the fact that most people aren’t aware that the cost of solar has fallen dramatically, that you can lease panels rather than buy them and avoid the high upfront costs, and that in some states the owners of solar-powered homes can sell electricity back to the grid. Most people, we agreed, just turn on their TV or plug in their laptop without thinking about how they are powered.

That wasn’t the case, of course, after a powerful storm struck Washington, D.C., and its suburbs on Friday. Many people took the inconvenience in stride, especially those of us, like my wife and I, who were fortunate enough to be able to check into a hotel for a couple of nights. But others griped incessantly about Pepco, the local power company, and a few treated the power outage as a hardship, which, to be fair, it can for older people or small children which suffer from the heat.

Hundreds of people flocked to malls and coffee shops to feed their Internet habit, sometimes squabbling over outlets.

 

That there might be a connection (no pun intended) between their electricity usage and the extreme weather — particularly the sweltering heat that has enveloped the DC area — probably did not occur to many. Burning coal, which generates more than 40% of the electricity in the US, is the biggest single contributor to climate change.

In a very real sense, the storms that cause us to lose electricity are caused, in part, by the fact that we use electricity that’s produced by burning fossil fuels.

To be sure, it’s not possible to link any particular weather event to global warming. But according to the National Climatic Data Center, more than 16,300 daily high temperature records were broken through June this year in the U.S. Whew! For more on the relationship between climate change and extreme weather, check out this update on Heat Waves and Climate Change from a nonprofit group called Climate Communication.

Don’t blame Pepco, folks; blame us.

Being without power is, of course, a more than an inconvenience for many. It’s a way of life. An estimated 1.3 billion people, or about 20 percent of the world’s population, live without regular access to an on-off switch of any kind, according to the International Energy Agency. About 85% of people in rural sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have no electricity in their homes.

Their kids can’t study at night. And they can’t plug in at a neighborhood Starbucks.

Maybe instead of whining when we’re powerless, we should try to be grateful that we live in a country where the electricity is nearly always on. Be even more grateful when we have an opportunity to unplug. And give some thought to installing  solar panels on the roof.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Energy, Environment, Sustainability, Workplace Tagged With: , , , ,

Suck It Up: My book about climate change, geoengineering and air capture of CO2

March 2, 2012

I’m pleased to let you know that my book, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis, is being published today as an Amazon Kindle Single. Please buy the ebook here for just $1.99.

The book reflects two years of reporting and my best thinking about three topics that matter: climate change, geoengineering and a technology called direct air capture of CO2. It explains why we’ve made so little progress (none, actually) in dealing with the climate threat, and how that might change. Part of the answer is to look for ways to recycle and reuse CO2.

I’m going to print the introduction to the book below, but first a word about the publishing process. As the newspapers, magazines and book publishers that traditionally support long-form journalism are struggling, exciting new outlets like blogs and ebooks are opening up. I’m the publisher as well as the author of Suck It Up, with a big assist from Amazon, which has selected the book as a Kindle Single.

The Kindle Single allows writers to tell stories that are longer than a magazine article and shorter than a book. Suck It Up is about 17,000 words long, the equivalent of 60 to 70 double spaced typewritten pages. It’s intended to be read in one or two sittings, and it’s priced so the ideas in it will spread. If you don’t own a Kindle, you can read the book on your smart phone, iPad or laptop. Just download the free Kindle software here.

I’d like to sell lots of copies of Suck It Up not just because I think it’s a good read about an important topic, but because I want to make the ebook business model work. It’s an exciting new platform for in-depth reporting.

So, please read the intro, check out the book and if you like it, help me spread the word through social media or the old-fashioned way–tell a friend about the book. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Geoengineering, Media, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The eerie quiet of the insurance industry

January 5, 2012

If there’s one industry that ought to be concerned about the threat of global warming, it’s the insurance industry. OK, the ski industry, too, but I digress.

Dave Jones, California’s insurance commissioner, recently put it this way: “Climate change is an obvious physical threat to us all, but increasingly it also poses a serious financial threat to the insurance industry…” When extreme weather causes damage, insurers pay.

So you’d expect insurance companies to be among the most forceful voices in corporate America calling for the regulation greenhouse gas emissions.

Uh, no. They’ve been eerily quiet.

And, at the least, you’d expect them to be proudly steering some of their massive investments to clean energy or energy efficiency projects aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Wrong again.

“It’s surprising, in a sense, because they have so much to lose from climate change,” says Sharlene Leurig, senior manager of the insurance program at Ceres, a nonprofit coalition of investor and environmental groups. But, she notes, insurance is a conservative business. The industry is all about risk, but it doesn’t want to take the risk of speaking out on climate change. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Politics, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Rick Perry, lyin’ and denyin’

September 1, 2011

How can Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry talk so irresponsibly about global warming–and get away with it?

Have we really reached a point where, in order to appeal to the hard core of the Republican Party, candidates have to ignore the fact that the earth is getting warmer, and that human activities are responsible?

Let’s hope not. Because if true, that’s sad and worrisome. Without Republican backing, no serious effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions can be enacted by the U.S. Congress.

To be sure, Democrats aren’t much better when it comes to straight political talk. Just ask Barack Obama, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi how they plan to close the federal deficit. But they are at least operating in a universe that resembles the one in which we live.

Not so Perry, who describes evolution as “a theory that is out there,” who rails against an “idiotic” federal regulation of tractors that does not exist, and who would have us believe that climate crisis is being drummed up by scientists who fudge their data to keep research grants rolling it. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Economics, Politics, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , ,

Brighten clouds, cool the air, save the planet!

June 12, 2011

John Latham

In 1990, a British cloud physicist named John Latham wrote a letter, [PDF, download] to the journal Nature, in which he suggested that injecting tiny droplets of water into marine clouds to increase their reflectivity might be a way “to inhibit or neutralize global warming.

And then? “Nothing happened for 10 years except for a couple of angry letters saying it was a horrible thing to play God and why didn’t I go knock on the door of the president and tell him to stop burning fossil fuels,” Latham recalls.

But as greenhouse gas emissions kept growing,  Latham’s odd idea gained traction. It spawned a succession of peer-reviewed scientific papers, sparked debate in the scientific community and eventually led to the organization of a loosely-knit group of international scientists who now want to see if brightening marine clouds might actually be a feasible way to slow down or stop global warming.

“We’d like to move towards a limited area field experiment,” Latham says. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Geoengineering, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Dengue fever: coming to a neighborhood near you?

June 9, 2011

Meet the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Actually, you don’t want to meet this little lady, who bites for blood that she needs to mature her eggs.

The Aedes aegypti spreads dengue fever, which affects about 100 million people a year. Most are in tropical and subtropical regions–South and Central America, southeast Asia and Africa. Dengue fever is rare in the U.S. except along the border with Mexico.

That’s changing–in part because of climate change. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Health, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , ,

The long-range forecast? Stormy weather

June 8, 2011

Commerce, Missouri: April 27, 2011

It’s sometimes said that no individual storm, flood, drought or wildfire can be specifically attributed to climate change.

That may be true but Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, says it misses the point.

Sure, we’ve always had extreme weather events. But, he argues, they are more frequent and more intense because of climate impacts. And that’s important.

“The environment in which all storms form has been changed by human activity,” Trenberth says. Thus the storms have been affected, too.

Kevin Trenberth

Trenberth spoke to a group of reporters at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where I’m on a fellowship this week. An MIT-trained meteorologist and a native of New Zealand, he was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports and he has led NCAR’s Climate Analysis Section since the late 1980s. In other words, he knows his climate science.

Let’s be clear about the claim he is making: Trenberth is not saying that climate change caused this year’s severe Mississippi River flooding, Texas drought, Arizona wildfire, heavy rains in Memphis or tornadoes in Joplin or Tuscaloosa.

He is, however, saying that those extreme weather events — those storms, as well as last year’s floods in India and Pakistan, and a heat wave in Russia — were almost surely made more extreme because of climate change. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Environment, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Can a coal-carrying railroad be green?

June 24, 2010

UNION_PACIFIC_Y2513_20070228Recently, FORTUNE sent me to Omaha to write this story about the Union Pacific, America’s biggest railroad. Impressive company in a fascinating industry without which our lives would be very different. Here’s how the story begins:

The strawberries on your cereal. Your laptop, cell phone, and TV. The coal that’s burned to power them. The car you drive. The roof over your head. We may work in a knowledge economy, but Madonna had it right: We live in a material world.

That’s why the Union Pacific railroad, No. 164 on the Fortune 500, has played a vital role in the U.S. economy since 1862. With $14.1 billion in revenue last year, the UP, which is based in Omaha, is America’s largest railroad. Close behind is its chief rival, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI) (2009 revenues: $14 billion), headquartered in Fort Worth, which was acquired this year by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) for $26.4 billion. The deal put a spotlight on the often troubled railroad business — in a good way. “It was a vote of confidence in the industry,” says Jim Young, the 53-year-old chairman and CEO of Union Pacific. “He sees the long-term value in the rail franchise — how unique it is in America.”

The story goes on to talk about how Young led a turnaround at the railroad, which suffered from lousy service, not once but twice–in the late 1990s after its merger with the Southern Pacific and again in 2004-2005 when the company cut back too deeply on equipment and staff and wasn’t prepared for a burst of economic growth. As Young told me: “We were the best marketing arm of our competitor.” The UP’s competitors include the Burlington Northern, which also operates in the west, and, interestingly, long-haul trucks.

In its battle for market share with trucks, the railroad industry is touting its environmental advantages. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , ,
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