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Ignore This

Don’t even think about the fact that 2010 saw the largest spike in global warming gases in 50 million years:

Harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels made their biggest ever annual jump in 2010, according to the US Department of Energy’s latest world data released this week.

China led the way with a spike of 212 million metric tons of carbon in 2010 over 2009, compared to 59 million metric tons more from the United States and 48 million metric tons more from India in the same period.

“It’s big,” Tom Boden, director of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Environmental Sciences Division at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, told AFP in an interview.

“Our data go back to 1751, even before the Industrial Revolution. Never before have we seen a 500-million-metric-ton carbon increase in a single year,” he said.

Mm Hmm. So there’s at least two levels here: what you are doing personally to address this fact (it counts) plus what are the useless politicians who represent you doing. Unless I’m mistaken (and/or you’re reading this from another country), that’s two levels of apathy. Blaming China and India isn’t going to do anything about your commute, your inefficient house, the amount of waste you generate. Find some place that seems just beyond manageable and start there. At first, it seems true; you can’t do anything. Until you start doing something, even a little, and wanting to do more. Nothing to gain but a little superiority and the transferable right to bitch.

via Juan Cole.

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Climate Debate: Over

In a quadruple over-time thriller that went so far past the wire it might be too late to do anything, climate change deniers are now providing evidence that climate change is actually happening and the scientific community was actually, uh, right:

In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.

The BEST report is purely an estimate of planetary warming, and it makes no estimate of how much this warming is due to human activity. So in one sense, its impact is limited since the smarter skeptics have already abandoned the idea that warming is a hoax and now focus their fire solely on the contention that it’s man-made. (And the even smarter ones have given up on that, too, and now merely argue that it’s economically pointless to try to stop it.) Still, the fact that climate scientists turned out to be careful and thorough in their basic estimates of temperature rise surely enhances their credibility in general. Climategate was always a ridiculous sideshow, and this is just one more nail in its coffin. Climate scientists got the basic data right, and they’ve almost certainly gotten the human causes right too.

Graphs and other keys to the idiocy at the link.

Well-funded liars = still liars.

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Back at the Front, part MCMLXVI

We diddle about whether there is anything to do anything about, meanwhile Australia (highest per capita carbon emissions) passes a tax on carbon.

The legislation would force about 500 of the biggest polluters to pay for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.

The tax is central to the government’s strategy to combat climate change, but the opposition says it will cause job losses and raise the cost of living.

Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter and one of the biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitters.

“Today is a significant day for Australians and the Australians of the future who want to see a better environment,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard said before the vote.

It can be done and people (and people fromerly known as companies) will adjust. As they will to a tax on trading stocks, bonds and derivatives.

The jobs’ bill filibuster… look into it and you’ll see how completely captured our (odd pronoun choice, more needed) legislators are to the will and wishes of corporate interests. They can’t even discuss voting on a jobs bill, much less a carbon tax.

But Australia did. Maybe they decided to put the sharks back in the water where they belong.

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Killing ‘carbon-capture’ Softly

You often hear – and I often write – about the unfashionable ‘need for more government regulation.’ Whether it is exotic financial instruments or greenhouse gas emissions, there is really no other entity who can handle reigning in our excesses at the scale of their own destructive impacts. The discussion is often set up as a public vs. big business, easy-to-understand (if not swallow) debate. But what gets less attention is how much big business needs sustained government policies, too.

American Electric Power, a huge utility company providing electricity mainly in the Midwest, is postponing or killing plans to build a full-scale “carbon capture” facility at its Mountaineer plant, in West Virginia.

Then Fallows hits on the implications:

Companies can’t do this without a sustained government policy. AEP, which is by no means a pinko organization — it is running acampaign now of complaint about burdensome EPA regulations — said the reason it was calling off the plans was governmental failure to set a clean energy/climate policy. By definition, any “cleaner” form of using coal will be more expensive than the current dirty approach, at least in the short run. This is true “by definition” because if the cleaner approaches were cheaper, the utilities would already have switched to them; because the cleanup technology is still in its developmental phase; and because in many places cleaner systems mean new capital investment.

You should also read his cover story on our future with coal, but this is an important addendum to it. It’s the other side of the story of companies needing to know what the regulations will be in order to plan. And whatever they are, companies will adapt. That means even if they hate it, which they will, they will still find a way to profit. Hint to EPA, Congress and the WH: go ahead and do something.

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Gooooaaaaaalllll!

brazil-wind-turbines

A new national 10-year plan from Brazil shows that the country will triple its use of renewable energy by 2020 and that a lot of that energy will be wind energy.

Going from 9 GW of wind, biomass and small hydropower in 2010, the country intends to hit 27 GW by 2020. It wants to have 16% of its electricity supply coming from renewables in 10 years.

On wind energy, the country hit the 1 GW milestone in May but plans to get to 12 GW by 2020. Last year’s 10-year plan only had the country getting 6 GW from wind by 2019, so you can see that the country is really stepping up its wind energy goals.

Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/12CMD)

By comparison, renewables met 8% of total energy demand in the U.S. during 2009 and 10% of total electricity generation. We don’t expect to hit the 17% mark until 2035. Which is not a goal, but more like a foul.
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The Wearing of the Funny Hat

The Vatican is shrill.

We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life. We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish.

So there’s that. The Pontiff makes all kinds of pronouncements all the time and is also against birth control of any kind, so I’m not sure what kind of impact this will have. And besides, I don’t endorse his/their views on all things just because he agrees with me on this one thing.

But you do wonder about the role this kind of endorsement has on the low-lying populace. JR calls it the ‘pray for science’ approach.

Saw it first here.

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Now this is… cool(ing)

Sorry, no pun intended. But, via IC, just to show how much they are not really Americans, the good people of Honolulu are going to use sea water for air conditioning.

Sea water with a temperature of 45 degrees Fahrenheit would be pumped to a cooling station makai of Ala Moana Boulevard along Keawe Street, where it would undergo a heat exchange with fresh water circulating in a network of pipes to various buildings.

…

Company Senior Vice President Michael Ahern said the proj ect, whose investors are mainly from Hawaii, Sweden and Minnesota, is scheduled to start construction late this year and begin providing serv ice to customers in 2013.

He said a similar system has been designed in Sweden by engineers with his company.

Ahern said the system will reduce Hawaii’s consumption of oil by some 178,000 barrels a year and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 84,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Meanwhile in other news, the good people of South Carolina bombarded Fort Sumter and Charleston Harbor with millions of dollars worth of live fake ordnance on Tuesday in an epic demonstration of solidarity with our Imperial past.

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Renewable You

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AFP – Getty Images

The whole idea of renewable energy sources – wind, solar, tidal, pedal – has only been in our viewfinder for a short while. This is because fossil fuels have become increasing problematic – not only in terms of long-term ecological catastrophe, but also human error-plagued bottom line-oriented short cutting and, not to be left out, geopolitical events that compromise our ability to secure said fuels. On top of this and not unrelated to the last point, the physical infrastructure, economy and energy policy of the United States were all developed when the country was a net exporter of fossil fuels.

Needless to say, nothing has changed and we continue to do things the same way, perhaps not even yet expecting different results, as one way of hanging to the last vestiges of any semblance of sanity.

And yet an expectation of different results is very much needed. As the above plus the nuclear meltdowns as a result of the devastating earthquakes in Japan attest, the need to pick up the pace in advancing toward a renewable energy present will not wait. The low-info dead-enders rising political stars waste capital and human resources debating settled issues at our collective peril and should be considered armed clueless and dangerous.

To repeat an unpopular refrain: these things are connected.

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Counting Carbon Calories

Now there’s an idea, from Amanda Little in the Times:

Americans use more oil than people in any other developed country, about twice as much per capita, on average, as Britons. Indeed, our appetite for petroleum, like our fondness of fast foods, has spawned a kind of obesity epidemic, but one without conspicuous symptoms like high blood pressure and diabetes. And because we don’t see how much energy goes into the products and services we purchase, we’re shielded from knowing the full extent of our personal energy demands — and unprepared when rising fuel prices increase the cost of everything else.

This illusion stems, in part, from a measurement problem: while we expect and understand labels on our food products that quantify caloric, fat and nutrient content, we have no clear way of measuring the amount of energy it takes to make our products and propel our daily activities.

There are lot of paths to using less, everything from profit incentives to utility companies to sell us less juice, to this one; we just need to start walking. Instead we can only call for more drilling or use congressional hearings to debate whether the planet is really warming.

They should have those hearings using only half the lights in the room – they’re already using only half (the) wits.

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Today in Incoherence

So Newscorp declares its global operations to be carbon neutral. The question is, why?

The News Corporation, the media conglomerate and parent company of Fox News Channel, has gone carbon-neutral, fulfilling a goal set four years ago, Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman, announced this week in a companywide memo.

“We have become carbon-neutral across all of our global operations, and we are the first company of our kind to do so,” Mr. Murdoch wrote. “We made a bold commitment in 2007 to embed the values of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability into all of our businesses — for the benefit of our communities and our bottom line.”

Mr. Murdoch added that improving the energy efficiency of the company’s day-to-day operations had not only curbed emissions but also “saved millions of dollars.”

Meanwhile its most visible media properties continue to serve as a refuge for climate change deniers and carbon trading skeptics. Someone is being played here – Newscorp understands that renewable energy and reducing their carb on footprint is smart business, as is publicly trashing environmental concerns – at least for a while longer. My guess is that if you surveyed the most successful multinational corporations, you’d find most of them doing the same thing, even as they continue to support rightwing causes like the Tea Party and the Chamber of Commerce. It’s all good. Business.

Next up: Liberty University to provide same-sex partner benefits.