Articles by Joseph Romm

That ain’t good

A stunning new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that the growth rate of CO2 emissions has tripled in recent years:

CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1 percent/year for 1990-1999 to >3 percent/year for 2000-2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s.

That's right. CO2 emissions are rising faster than in the most pessimistic U.N. scenario. So much for all those ostriches and global warming delayers who say that economic growth is the key to solving global warming or that the U.N. scenarios are too extreme.

Conservative blog doesn’t read studies it writes about

As discussed last week, Planet Gore's Sterling Burnett was upset with the media for supposedly ignoring "the recent reports by MIT and the CBO [PDFs] detailing the substantial costs and regressive nature of the costs that are estimated to arise if any of the current domestic proposals restricting carbon emissions to combat global warming are enacted."

Given that the MIT report in fact concluded the exact opposite of what Sterling claimed -- and given the fact that the National Review typically doesn't complain about the regressive nature of, say, tax cuts for the wealthy -- I'm guessing you won't be surprised to learn that the CBO report also comes to a different conclusion than Sterling claims.

All about hydrogen

Probably half the media queries I get concern hydrogen -- thanks to my last book, The Hype about Hydrogen. Yesterday's New York Times Magazine had an exceedingly long article, "The Zero-Energy Solution," on a solar-hydrogen home. The author refers to me as "an environmental pragmatist," no doubt because I don't automatically embrace every environmental solution that comes along, but judge each on its technical and practical merit.

I have written a number of articles arguing that hydrogen has been wildly overhyped as an energy and climate solution, when in fact it holds little promise of being a cost-effective greenhouse gas reduction strategy for at least the first half of the century, if not forever. Since ten years ago I ran the federal office that does hydrogen research, I am one of the go-to guys for a skeptical quote or two.

The two don’t mix well

This story deserves singling out because it is on an important but too-neglected subject -- the connection between energy and water.