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Heading to Denmark in December? Book a room now

The average December in Copenhagen has 17 days of rain and a temperature of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius. So, those readers planning to travel there for the U.N. Climate […]

Friday music blogging: Slumdog Millionaire

In honor of the Academy Awards, here's a song from the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire.

I've had somewhat mixed feelings about the movie itself. I enjoyed it immensely while I was watching it (how could you not?). Later I read a bunch of grumpy backlash -- it's manipulative; it romanticizes poverty; the female character is inert; etc. -- and found myself revising my original assessment. And later still, I said to myself, you know what? Screw you grumpy backlashers. It was a fairy tale, an effort to marry the exuberance of Bollywood with independent American filmmaking; social realism wasn't the point. It was a celebration of life and transcendence amidst suffering, and I'm by-god going to trust my gut and love it.

(Yes, I'm extremely neurotic.)

One thing was never in doubt, though: the music is awesome. It is absolutely an essential character in the movie, as much a polyglot, life-affirming mess as the film itself. It's easily one of the best soundtracks of the last five years, and one of my favorite albums of the year. Incidentally, the producer, A.R. Rahman, is an enormous international celebrity -- but no one in America knows his name. Hopefully this album will change that.

While we're at it, we might as well use this thread for Oscar thoughts and predictions. Who are you rooting for/against? What are your predictions? Did you see any of the movies this year?

Chu creates team to distribute stimulus cash 'wisely but also quickly'

Greenwire ($ub. req'd) reports:

The Energy Department has created a "special organization" to distribute $40 billion contained in the economic stimulus package for energy projects, Secretary Steven Chu said today.

"It's a challenge and something we take very seriously: how to spend that money wisely but also quickly," Chu told reporters after speaking at DOE's National Electricity Delivery Forum in Washington. Chu said he has assembled a team to start streamlining ways of delivering the cash. "We are looking at everything," he said.

Leading the advisory team is Matt Rogers, director at McKinsey & Co.'s San Francisco office, Chu said. Rogers consults in many fields, including electric power, oil and gas, and private equity, as well as strategic transformations for industrial companies. Rogers is also a leader of McKinsey's North American Petroleum Practice.

This is a very encouraging sign that the administration takes this seriously, since they have a staggering amount of clean tech to deploy (see here). The story continues:

Urgent letter from Bo Webb on Coal River

Bo Webb, a Vietnam veteran and Coal River Mountain resident in West Virginia, just penned this urgent appeal to President Obama. His family's homeplace, dating back to the 1820s, is being rattled by explosives from mountaintop removal operators today. This letter bears witness to the terror of mountaintop removal on American citizens.

Every American should be forwarded this letter, and then they should go to ilovemountains.org, put in their zip code, and see if their coal-fired plant electricity comes from coal stripped from West Virginia. And then they should contact their member of Congress to support the Clean Water Protection Act.

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Dear Mr. President,

As I write this letter, I brace myself for another round of nerve-wracking explosives being detonated above my home in the mountains of West Virginia. Outside my door, pulverized rock dust laden with diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives hovers in the air, along with the residual of heavy metals that once lay dormant underground. The mountain above me, once a thriving forest, has been blasted into a pile of rock and mud rubble. Two years ago, it was covered with rich black top soil and abounded with hardwood trees, rhododendrons, ferns and flowers. The under-story thrived with herbs such as ginseng, black cohosh, yellow root, and many other medicinal plants. Black bears, deer, wild turkey, hawks, owls, and thousands of birds lived here. The mountain contained sparkling streams teeming with aquatic life and fish.

Now it is all gone. It is all dead. I live at the bottom of a mountain top removal coal mining operation in the Peachtree community.

Mr. President Obama, I am writing you because we have simply run out of options. Last week, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond, Va. overturned a federal court ruling for greater environmental restrictions on mountaintop removal permits. Dozens of permits now stand to be rushed through. As you know, last December, the EPA under George W. Bush allowed an 11th hour change to the stream buffer zone rule, further unleashing the coal companies to do as they please.

States agree to mercury treaty talks

NAIROBI — More than 140 countries agreed Friday to launch negotiations establishing a treaty on mercury to limit pollution affecting millions of people across the world, the UN environment body […]

… and all we got were ‘clean energy’ promises …

Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper get dual climate fingers this week for a thoroughly disappointing meeting in Ottawa on Thursday. Rather than coming forward with fightin’ words […]

Climate change is here and now and getting personal

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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A disturbing development in the march of global warming, revealed in science's use of the English language.

Not long ago, most climate scientists stuck to the future tense when they talked about the impacts of global warming. Now, they are using the present tense -- and using it more and more often. Now, they tell us the damages have arrived in the United States.

In other words, climate change isn't just a problem for our kids anymore. It's here and now and getting personal.

What concerns climate scientists today is not only that the adverse impacts are showing up faster than they expected; it's that political leaders are moving slower than they should. Climate scientists from around the world will meet next month in Copenhagen "to warn the world's politicians they are being too timid in their response to global warming," according to The Guardian.

They'll also introduce information to update the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose findings now are considered conservative and "wishy washy" by many in the science community, in light of more recent research and its more extreme conclusions. As Michael Lemonick reports in Yale Environment 360:

Since (2007), new reports have continued to pour in from all over the world, and climate modelers have continued to feed them into their supercomputers. And while a full accounting will have to wait for the next IPCC report, which is already being assembled (but which will not go to the printer until 2014), the news is not encouraging.

The new reports, many of them documented in an October 2008 paper by the World Wildlife Fund, include estimates that sea level rise may be triple what scientists projected just two years ago; that we should start preparing for an average atmospheric temperature rise of 4°C, twice the level the European Union defines as "dangerous"; that the Arctic Circle may be ice-free 20 years ahead of the most pessimistic IPCC projections; that carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating faster than expected; and that some of these adverse impacts already are locked and irreversible for the next 1,000 years.

Last year, the United Nations invoked the present tense in its finding that "nine out of 10 disasters recorded are climate-related, while the number of disasters has doubled to more than 400 annually over the past two decades." John Holmes, the Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, concluded:

Activists slam Finnish paper maker for logging ‘virgin forest’

HELSINKI — Environmental groups on Thursday blasted Finnish paper maker Stora Enso for logging old growth forests in northern Finland, insisting the unique trees should be protected. Environmental groups Greenpeace, […]

Oscar-related news and musings

The Oscars are this weekend! With the usual amount of Hollywood splashiness -- though p'raps less than in years past -- there are green efforts going on, from Global Green's star-studded pre-party on Thursday to the first-ever use of dry-cleaning bags to hold swag (!) at an after-party. Eco-leaning films have garnered nominations, including Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World and the I-was-there Katrina film Trouble the Water. Ultimate eco-lesson-with-a-heart Wall-E even got a few nods, though it was -- as one Grist staffer put it -- "screwed over for best picture."

On top of that, yummy host Hugh Jackman has racked up some eco-cred of his own over the years.

Alas, none of the five films nominated for best picture are particularly greenish. But just for fun, I've reimagined them as such below the fold, with a little help from Oscar's own synopses.

What is the 'best available control technology' for CO2 from coal plants?

My monster post on EPA regulation of CO2 yesterday seems to have scared everyone away. So let me ask a simpler question.

As things stand, regulating CO2 at power plants under the Clean Air Act would require that such plants install "best available control technology" (BACT) for reducing or eliminating CO2 emissions.

Here's my question: for a coal-fired power plant, what is the best available technology for limiting CO2 emissions?

Carbon sequestration might be "best," but it's not "available," despite all the hype. It hasn't been tested; there are no clear regulations governing it; it's horribly expensive; etc.

Far as I know, though, that's basically the only way to reduce CO2 emissions at a coal plant.

So if that's not available, and nothing else is available, what can a coal plant do but ... stop burning coal?

Does that mean a BACT requirement under the Clean Air Act would effectively shut down every coal plant in the country in one fell swoop, thereby eliminating 50 percent of the country's electricity generation? Will it force all coal plants to switch to natural gas, causing natural gas prices to skyrocket? If not, what does it mean? Anyone? Bueller?