Articles by Joseph Romm

Three non-tech essentials for combating climate change

Of course not. We need at least three other things:

1. Major political change, to deploy the technologies fast enough. My first take on this is here ("Is 450 ppm [or less] politically possible? Part 1").
2. Major price change, to add a cost to emitting greenhouse gases that approximates the terrible damage done by them. All of the technology advances in renewables (or nuclear, or coal with carbon capture) that you can plausibly imagine in the next decade won't make coal cost-uneffective -- this is a critical point to understand.
3. Major behavior change; most people need to understand at a visceral level that unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are the gravest threat to the health and well-being of future generations that we face, by far. If we get the needed political and price change, much of the behavior change will follow. But not all. Climate change is probably going to have to get much more visibly worse before we see widespread and significant behavior change -- much as few people make a dramatic change in their diet and exercise before the heart trouble occurs.

I'll be blogging more on these three points in the coming week(s).

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

State’s governor pursuing clean energy and GHG reductions

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Kari Manlove, fellows assistant at the Center for American Progress.

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Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has prioritized clean energy policy and aims to reduce the state's energy consumption 15 percent by 2015. In addition, Maryland is a part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electric utilities.

With those goals topping the governor's agenda, Maryland's Senate chambers have been a hot spot for progressive policy lately, juggling a handful of issues that will become magnified this summer as we launch into the national debate on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.

Research finds (once again) that climate change is not caused by cosmic rays

One more denier talking point has been debunked by scientists using actual observations. You can read the Science News article here, which explains, "New research has dealt a blow to the skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases."

You can read the original article, just published by the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters, "Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover," online here. The major finding:

[N]o evidence could be found of changes in the cloud cover from known changes in the cosmic ray ionization rate.

Here is the full abstract:

Corn hits a new record — $6 a bushel

At the end of February, I blogged on a Fortune article that had the subhead "The ethanol boom is running out of gas as corn prices spike." That article noted:

Spurred by an ethanol plant construction binge, corn prices have gone stratospheric, soaring from below $2 a bushel in 2006 to over $5.25 a bushel today. As a result, it's become difficult for ethanol plants to make a healthy profit, even with oil at $100 a barrel.

Just six weeks later, we have an AP article with the subhead "Corn Prices Jump to Record $6 a Bushel, Driving Up Costs for Food, Alternative Energy."

And it gets better worse: