Climate Climate & Energy

As snowy peaks get warmer, ski industry tries to stave off extinction

With the Olympics starting this week, all eyes are on the slopes of Turin. But skiing and snowboarding could disappear from our collective culture in about 50 years, if global-warming […]

What’s the most energy-efficient crop source for ethanol?

Biofuel is the hot topic lately in the green blogosphere. There's legitimate dispute about the political and environmental wisdom of plant-based fuels, but at the very least everyone should be starting from a valid, shared set of numbers (oh, to dream).

In an attempt to offer up such numbers, I'm going to ... rip off somebody smarter than me. Namely, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, and author of the recently released Plan B 2.0, which is the best big-picture summary of our environmental situation I've ever read (and I'm only 2/3 through it!). The entire thing can be downloaded for free from EPI's site.

There are two key indicators when evaluating various crops for biofuel: fuel yield per acre and net energy yield of the biofuel, minus energy used in production and refining. This table (taken from Chapter 2) compares crops based on the first indicator:

Meter Aid

New power meters help customers cool juice use Millions of California households will soon be able to see at a glance how much electricity and money is being gobbled up […]

This Global Thing Is Everywhere!

Weird weather is messing with marine ecosystems along the West Coast Tens of thousands of starved seabirds washed up on West Coast beaches last spring, and researchers are blaming — […]

Maybe oil from elsewhere?

In an earlier post, I calculated (based on 2004 figures -- I may update them shortly) that Bush's "great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" would involve lowering U.S. oil consumption by 10.5% over 19 years. Not very ambitious.

But it's worth noting that even there I may be giving Bush too much credit. I'm assuming that he means to "replace" the Middle Eastern oil with alternatives -- biofuels, electric cars, hydrogen cars, whatnot.

It's at least possible, though, that he means to replace Middle Eastern oil with non-Middle Eastern oil. I'm no oil geologist, so I don't have a good sense of whether this is possible. But it's not outrageous to think we could cover that amount (10.5% of our oil use) by increasing imports from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria -- and by increasing domestic production (read: drilling in Alaska and off the coasts). Since Canadian tar sands are under furious production, it's likely that Canadian imports are going to rise anyway.

So, it's possible that Bush's "great goal" could be accomplished without reducing U.S. oil consumption at all. We could, to use his own addiction metaphor, get our fix elsewhere.

But even I'm not that cynical.

Book Your Guilt Trip Today!

British enviros curb flying to protest airplane emissions A growing number of British enviros are quitting or cutting back on air travel, resisting the siren song of low-fare, no-frills airlines. […]

A coalition plugs (ha ha) for plug-in hybrids

How did everybody miss this?

Declaring the country's economy, environmental health and national security at risk, a grassroots coalition of cities including Austin, Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle as well as electric utilities and national policy organizations today kicked off a nationwide campaign to urge automakers to accelerate development of plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Click on the webcast if you want to see a bunch of stuffed shirts give speeches. Even Senator Hatch (the ultra conservative Republican from Utah) shows up late to throw in his two cents. The only real expert on the panel was Dr. Andrew Frank, the mechanical engineering professor at UC-Davis who has been studying this concept for decades.

The goal is to convince automakers to build plug-in hybrid electric cars by promising to subsidize purchases of such cars. The usual excuses are given as to why it is OK for government to subsidize, namely, because everybody else does it! Sometimes government drives me crazy. The tax credit for buying hybrid cars is completely unnecessary. I trip over a Prius every time I go out my door. Note in this link that an all-electric car would get a tax credit of $4,000. This would knock about $1,200 off the purchase price of one of these $14,000 high-end golf carts (if you are in the 33% tax bracket).

A story on the suppression of climate scientist James Hansen

Wow. Here it is only Saturday night and already the weekend's seen two stellar pieces of reporting on global warming, from two of environmental journalism's top stars, on page A1 of their respective newspapers.

First up is Andy Revkin's latest revelation on the Bush administration's ongoing defensive maneuvers against, uh, reality. In this case, reality was being described by the closest thing climate science has to a wise man: James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Administration officials have -- not officially, but clearly, in informal phone calls and memos -- let it be known that he needs to shut up about policy responses to global warming.

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 ... he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."

..

In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.

I have trouble working up umbrage about this stuff any more, it's so routine. What strikes me most is the absurdly counterproductive politics of it is. Hansen's going to have 10 times the soapbox now -- and they can't touch him.

Update [2006-1-29 15:26:20 by David Roberts]: More inside details from RealClimate.

Solution Finds New Problem

Republicans in Congress reanimate efforts to drill in Arctic Refuge Iran — the world’s fourth-largest oil producer — has threatened to cut oil exports if other nations impose economic sanctions […]

But It’s Still Friggin’ Raining in Seattle

2005 is hottest year on record, and 2006 weather is wacked We know you’ve been waiting with bated breath to hear the outcome of the competition between 1998 and 2005 […]