Energy Secretary Chu's Vision of Coal

America's Energy Czar Is Taking a New Look At Coal Technologies. 

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu is really an academic. But he's is learning the art of politics while on the job. The Nobel-prize winning scientist, who had once called coal his "worst nightmare," spoke to a largely pro-coal audience in West Virginia.

Chu, who was tapped by President Obama to serve, has never shied away from his belief that coal is largely responsible for creating climate change. His views have evolved, however, to the point where he realizes that the nation - indeed the world - is not going to just replace the preponderance of its generation supplies overnight.

That's why he has subscribed to the White House's position that the U.S. will become a leader in the development of clean coal technologies and specifically carbon capture and sequestration. With financial assistance from the federal stimulus act, the secretary said that as many as 10 projects could be commercialized within 8-10 years and that electric prices would only increase 10-20 percent because of it.

He went on tell the audience in Charleston, WV that the level of heat-trapping emissions has increased by 40 percent since the start of the industrial revolution. However, the White House has allocated $3.4 billion to clean coal technologies that will help keep coal relevant. Without that, it would lose ground to higher-priced natural gas.

Climate change is "man-made" and "human fingerprints are all over it," intoned Chu. But he then repeated the administration's official position, saying that "these new technologies will not only help fight climate change, they will create jobs now and help position the United States to lead the world in clean coal technologies, which will only increase in demand in the years ahead."

The energy secretary was joined on stage by U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, who has proposed legislation to block for two years efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to write regulations that would curb carbon dioxide emissions - a right bestowed on it by the U.S. Supreme Court a couple years ago. But while Rockefeller said that such rules would likely be delayed, they could not be stopped. 

Rockefeller, who said he was in the business of preserving jobs for coal miners, referred to EPA regulations that are set to take effect early next year as "harmful regulations." At the same time, he said he was not one of those who believed that global warming was a myth and then went on to urge those who espouse such thinking to quit "burying their heads in the sand."

"I agree with the science of climate change," Rockefeller told the audience. "Greenhouse gas emissions are not healthy for the earth. It will not go away if we ignore the issue. There will be some additional regulations within a couple years."

Commercializing Technologies

With the EPA's newfound authority, it holds the bargaining power. And it is under pressure from green groups and some Democratic lawmakers to exercise its rights and to enact tougher restrictions on carbon emissions. Others, though, think it is simply trying to use its authority as a lever to force Congress to write its own rules.

As it stands now, power plants and other factories that emit 25,000 tons or more of carbon dioxide a year will operate under the new rules. If such facilities are modernized, or if new ones are built, they would then be required to install "best available technologies." EPA estimates that 10,000 plants would be affected -- units that produce about 85 percent of all emissions.

An earlier but similar rulemaking also requires the formation of a registry to force the same industrial concerns to not just tabulate their heat-trapping emissions but to also consider ways to reduce them. In effect, what gets measured gets managed. That, in turn, would make it more feasible to enact national policy that would require cuts in those releases and could facilitate the implementation of a cap-and-trade system.

While the U.S. Senate seems unable to muster the super-majority needed to pass a climate change bill, it does seem poised to block EPA's latest rulemaking. The U.S. House, by comparison, has passed an energy bill that would enact a cap-and-trade program that sets emission limits for carbon. Industries that exceed those requirements could then acquire credits and either bank them or sell them to those that are unable to meet those goals.

Supporters of cap-and-trade that include the Obama administration say it will work. The best example of just how effective the strategy can be is the program used to reduce sulfur dioxide, or acid rain. Since the measure was enacted as part of the Clean Air Act of 1990, such pollutants have fallen by 50 percent from 1980 levels while the benefits of the program are four-to-five times greater than the costs.

But Secretary Chu focused his talk on carbon capture and sequestration. He pointed to the 10-megawatt trial by American Electric Power at its Mountaineer plant in WV - a project that got $334 million in federal funds. If it is successful at burying the carbon, the utility will then try a 200-megawatt project in Oklahoma. And if that works, proponents say that the technology that uses chilled ammonia could be commercialized by 2015.

Making carbon capture and sequestration commercially viable and widely deployable may be crucial to the future of coal, says Charles McElwee, a West Virginia-based attorney, and Gary Spitznogle of AEP. West Virginia, they say, is dependent on such progress; it has the fourth largest recoverable coal reserves in the country and it generates 97 percent of its electricity from coal.

With such forces coming at him, Secretary Chu has pulled back from his earlier views on coal. Now, the secretary is part of an administration that is committed to reducing carbon emissions while also commercializing the technologies to enable such progress.

Article by Ken Silverstein, EnergyBizInsider

6 Lessons the Green Movement Can Learn From MLK (In His Own Words)

Justice, Commitment, And Solidarity Remain Crucial For All Activists

 1.    Speak Out
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

2.    Tap Into the Spiritual
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom ... Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." 

3.     Planet Before Profits
"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." 

4.    Community Before Technology
"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood...We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools."

5.     Be Radical, Be Extreme
"When you are right, you cannot be too radical ... The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists." 

6.    Commit
"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'"

Article courtesy of post by Mickey Z – Planet Green.com: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/work-connect/green-movement-mlk-words.html?campaign=daily_nl 

If Done Right, Biomass Energy Could Help Combat Global Warming

Jeff Gibbs is right to be concerned about using trees and "woody" biomass for renewable electricity. As he correctly points out, timber harvesting too often is destructive, and we need to save some dead trees and limbs to recycle nutrients and feed the soil and forest ecosystem.

That said, Gibbs jumps to the mistaken conclusion that biomass can never be worthwhile. In fact, there is a consensus among the scientists Gibbs cites that burning numerous types of biomass can reduce net carbon emissions. These types of biomass include:

• Sustainably harvested forest residues, such as the limbs left after logging, which would emit a significant fraction of their carbon upon decay;

• Energy crops that don't crowd out food production, such as switch-grass planted on marginal lands;

• Farm wastes, such as manure and crop residues; and

• Municipal and industrial wastes

Leading scientists agree that burning these types of biomass would not add to atmospheric carbon levels and thus would not contribute to global warming. In fact, because these low-carbon biomass sources often displace high-carbon coal, they can reduce carbon emissions significantly.

In addition to starting with the most beneficial biomass resources, we also need to ensure that we harvest woody biomass sustainably without degrading forests. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is pressing Congress to ensure that federal policies protect critical lands, such as wilderness areas, and establish standards that prevent degradation of wildlife habitat, enhance soil productivity, and protect biodiversity when biomass is harvested.

To try to make his case, Gibbs cherry-picks the data. He cites the worst case scenario in which biomass use and agricultural expansion destroy forests. Many of the same scientists who came up with that scenario -- which they concede is extreme -- also posit another scenario in which biomass use could jump 800 percent from today's levels, make a major contribution to curbing global warming, and increase forested land at the same time. With the right policies, we can, in fact, develop beneficial biomass resources and protect forests.

Finally, besides his miscalculation of biomass' value, Gibbs erroneously dismisses the contribution that solar, wind and other renewables could make today to reliably power the grid and cut global warming pollution. Numerous assessments by the Department of Energy (DOE) and other credible agencies and organizations demonstrate that renewable energy sources are ready today to make a significant contribution. A 2008 DOE study, for example, found that wind power could provide 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030 with no adverse impact on reliability or the need for storage. In addition, UCS's 2009 Climate 2030 Blueprint found that if the United States adopted a suite of smart climate, energy-efficiency and renewable-energy policies, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass could provide 40 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030 and reduce electric bills across the country.

Article by Ben Larson - Courtesy of Huffingtonpost.com http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-larson/if-done-right-biomass-ene_b_401023.html

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to +3°C or the Year in Climate Change Politics

When Barack Obama was elected I, like many people in the United States, placed many hopes in him in terms of climate change policy. Intellectually I knew he was constrained by the office of the presidency, by congress, but all his choices for prominent policy positions indicated he was serious about climate, serious about environment. Indeed, compared to the previous White House tenant, it is indeed night and day. But the last year has shown that, in many ways, it's a still a rather cloudy day:

US Still Doesn't Quite Get the Serious of Climate Change
Obama showed up in Copenhagen today and spoke to an audience, both in the plenary hall and to we reporters without, all waiting with bated breath. Those of us not in the room itself huddled together around television monitors waiting, in vain it turns out, for some sign that the United States would change its still de facto obstructionist position on climate change.

It seems the nation that is the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and foremost consumer of natural resources, can't get out from underneath the pile of money oil and coal industry lobbyists have shoveled on top of it and take meaningful action on climate change.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed with a straight face the US's proposed emission reductions: 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. We've known these for some time, watching the climate bill laboriously move their way through the House and Senate. But never mind that.

Never mind that the rest of the world uses a baseline of 1990 levels. Never mind that when recalibrated to that baseline, the US is pledging a 3-4% reduction, depending on how you want to round fractions. Never mind that the world's leading climate scientists say ten time those reductions are needed to head off sealing in 3-4°C temperature rise, even though G8 nations agreed that 2°C was the correct goal (even lower would be better) back in August at their meeting in Italy; and that those higher temperature rise figures seal the doom for hundreds of thousands, millions, of poor people in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Forget all that. The United States is committed to leading the world on climate change and all that holds that back is China not being quite transparent enough when it comes to its own climate change efforts. Yeah, right.

Dirty money aside, how did we get into this position?
Was it just the unfortunate fact that the United States locked its own horns around a debate about healthcare that the rest of the developed world settled nearly half a century ago? I have to say that, contrary to received wisdom, it doesn't entirely ring true.

I'm tempted to say it's national psychosis, frankly. A pimple on our collective brain, one which continues to push pollution off to the future, continues to assume some bit of technology will come to the rescue, some financial mechanism raising the money. And ignoring that, just perhaps, we have a very basic problem with our relationship to the natural world; with the amount of natural resources we consider entirely necessary for a comfortable life; with humanity's place in the cosmos.

Climate Change is But Symptom of Greater Problem
George Monbiot laid it out accurately three days ago at the Fresh Air Center: Our problem is that, and I'm referring to the every nation now (perhaps save Bhutan and its Gross National Happiness), we continue to cling to the notion that more is better, bigger is better, economies can keep expanding disregarding ecological limits -- when in fact optimum efficiency is often less than maximum efficiency when it comes to business sizes and communities, smaller and specialized is better than one size fits no one, and that the scale of human civilization is such that prior economic theory no longer holds valid (if it ever really did, from an ecological perspective).

Yesterday Gordon Brown, in touting the same $100 billion in climate financing Hillary Clinton did later in the day, he spoke of nations being able to avail themselves of high economic growth without high carbon growth. He failed utterly, as every head of state seems to, that it is high economic growth itself that is the problem, of which rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is but a symptom, that is the problem. Increasing ecological throughput, beyond the rate of natural replenishment, that is the problem. 
 

In slightly more simple terms, it is growing ecological footprints of both individuals and nations that is the problem. We are depleting the natural capital that is the grand trust fund laid down for us in previous millennia.

Let's Hope I'm Proven Wrong...
Whoa... whither climate politics in 2009? Ultimately, as various Oxfam spokespeople have been saying the gap between science and conscience with political reality has not narrowed appreciably in the past year. There's been some movement on climate financing in the past 24-48 hours, but that's it. 

I hope I am proven horribly wrong in the next hour, as the rumor mill says Obama is about to have a press conference. Any guesses on what shade of greenwash has been chosen.

Article by Matthew McDermott Care of TreeHugger.com

Reforesting 20 Million Square Kilometers by 2020 (Video)

It looks like a global anti-deforestation deal may be the most positive thing to come out of the Copenhagen climate talks. And while cuts to fossil fuel use and other emissions are still vital, there's no doubt that tackling deforestation is key to reversing climate change. But what about reforestation? Peru has already committed to replanting 40 million trees, although some worry about the species mix. Now an online effort is seeking to create a global movement for reforestation and permaculture food forests.

WeForest is building a global movement through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to reforest 20 million hectares of land by 2020. Work has already begun on reforestation in Brazil working with the Open World Foundation, and the organization put together the following videos on their vision, and what is already being done. Spread the word.

Article by Sami Grover, Courtesy of Treehugger.com

What do the Arctic, a Thermostat and COP15 Have in Common?

The year was 1972 and my father Philippe Cousteau Sr. was filming another episode of the famed series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. This particular installment, A Smile of the Walrus, chronicled the story of a changing Arctic ecosystem and the struggle of the various creatures such as the walrus to adapt. But 37 years ago, the changes being investigated by my father and grandfather were of a very different sort than those we struggle with today. At that time, the Inuit people were trading their dogsleds for snowmobiles, and their spears for rifles. The questions being asked were about the sustainability of a species in the face of man's technological advancements. Today, those advancements have given way to a whole new arsenal of problems that threaten not only the Arctic and its indigenous species, but the entire planet and humanity as we know it.

The Arctic is among the least understood places on the planet; however, we do know that its landscape is changing and evolving as quickly as cell phones and the Internet. You have probably heard or said at some point, "I could not live without my cell phone." Well, the world cannot live without the Arctic; it affects every living thing on Earth and acts as a virtual thermostat, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet.

Now imagine, for a moment, if you lost control of the thermostat in your home or office; you would be pretty uncomfortable, right? Thankfully, most of us are fortunate enough to resolve this with a phone call or two (or three, depending on your maintenance guy). The Arctic isn't so lucky. It's warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, causing seasonal ice to melt at an astounding rate. According to NASA, since 1979, the average decline of sea ice per decade is almost 10 percent.
You're probably asking, "what does this have to do with me?" Well, if we continue pumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere, which is causing the sea ice to melt at the current rate, here are just some of the consequences (in the Arctic and in your backyard):

• Further decline of public health. According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology; from 1980-1994, the prevalence of asthma increased 75% in the US population, amongst children under the age of five it increased more than 160%. Contributing factors include poor air quality and pollution. In fact, the fastest growing school clubs in Atlanta are asthma clubs. I have met mothers who struggle to keep their jobs because of their children's constant visits to the hospital, many of whom are uninsured; we all know how costly this is to our healthcare system. In my opinion, this is unacceptable and unnecessary collateral damage of our environmental neglect;
• Droughts and dwindling water supply. As the ice melts, the resulting salinity and temperature changes in the ocean will continue to cause shifting ocean currents and thus more severe and frequent climate disruptions from storms to drought, the kinds of droughts that are causing people to fight over dwindling water supplies from Darfur to the Middle East;
• Loss of jobs and food sources. The carbon output that melts the ice in the Arctic also causes ocean acidification, which results from the ocean absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (the same carbon dioxide that is the primary cause of global warming, hence the nickname 'the other carbon problem'). Often referred to as osteoporosis of the ocean, higher acidity prevents shell building creatures such as lobster, oyster, crab, shrimp, and coral from extracting the calcium carbonate from the water that they need to build their shells and are thus unable to survive. This will cause ocean eco-systems to collapse with disastrous consequences for not only the multi trillion dollar fisheries business, but also depriving the more than one billion people who rely on seafood as their only source of protein.

The Arctic is one of many issues that elected officials and policymakers are currently discussing in Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of the United Nations' (UN's) climate change summit. From December 7-18, representatives from countries around the world are debating ways to build a cleaner and more livable world than the one we live in today.

Whether you're on the ground in Copenhagen or not, you can affect the outcome by signing the UN Climate Petition and becoming a citizen of Hopenhagen (http://www.hopenhagen.org/home/showform). Hopenhagen is a movement, a moment and a chance at a new beginning. The hope that we can build a better future for our planet and a more sustainable way of life. It is the hope that we can create a global community that will lead our leaders into making the right decisions and fulfill the promise that by solving our environmental crisis, we can solve our economic crisis at the same time.

It's time that we stop debating the science as Earth grows sicker and our welfare is put into jeopardy. I'm all for debate and discussion, but we can do this and implement solutions simultaneously. Hopenhagen is a quick and easy first step but petitions alone won't solve this crisis, we must also individually and collectively consider the consequences of our behavior; from driving gas-guzzling SUV's that emit far more CO₂than they should, to demanding that our elected officials institute the effective legislation that we need to combat this crisis.

My grandfather opened the first chapter of his story, A Smile of the Walrus, with an old nursery rhyme, "Did you ever see a walrus smile all these many years? Why yes I've seen a walrus smile, but it was hidden by his tears." As we open this new chapter in the battle against climate change, I fear that if we do not take action, then the smiles of our children, like the walrus, will be hidden by the tears they shed as they pay the consequences of our inaction, our apathy and our greed.

Article by Philippe Cousteau. Courtesy of HuffingtonPost.com: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philippe-cousteau/what-do-the-arctic-a-ther_b_389440.html

Follow Philippe Cousteau on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@pcousteau