Political Climate Articles
FTC fights "green" claims
The Federal Trade Commission, in its ongoing attempt to crack down on companies claiming the "green" attributes of their products, has charged Kmart Corp (NYSE: KM), Tender Corp. and Dyna-E International with making false and unsubstantiated claims that their paper products were "biodegradable."
Since 1992, the FTC's "Green Guides" have aimed to help marketers avoid making false claims about the origin and make-up of their products. While the guides are not enforceable by law, if a company makes claims that are not in line with the guides, the FTC can take legal action under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices.
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Fossil Fuel's Misleading Campaign Against Clean Energy
In the first three months of this year, the oil industry alone spent $44.5 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies to protect their dirty-energy interests. Two of the biggest coal-burning utilities have spent more than $10 million lobbying against the clean energy jobs bill that would limit coal-plant pollution. The bill has already passed in the House, but ad campaigns based on misinformation and fear are running nationwide to scare Americans from supporting the legislation. These same interests are also lobbying Congress to open up more wild lands – including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – to drilling and to development of oil shale in the Rockies.
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Lucas Says Mountaintop Removal Is An Appalachian Community Service
I'm digging deep, and maybe even stepping on a few toes, but a Guardian report via ThinkProgress (or is it vice versa?) cites coal industry spokesman Joe Lucas as saying that mountaintop removal in Appalachia performs a civic function by creating flat earth.
Whoever scooped it hasn't gotten nearly enough coverage, so let's revisit with envy and ask how she, or he, got Lucas to step on his own tongue, as it were.
Lucas is vice president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, or ACCCE, a group SourceWatch describes as a "front group" for the coal industry.
It's a good label, though I prefer "shill". Another good SourceWatch label describes ACCCE's predecessor, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), as an "astroturf" organization; that is, fake grassroots.
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No Records Broken Today: Climate Change Called Off
It is legitimate to criticize people who use a single weather event to bolster their case for concern about global warming. But how much more bizarre is it to seize upon a single soggy summer (this one) in a very narrow part of the world (Toronto) to argue the opposite?
The purple proseur Rex Murphy did just that in his Globe and Mail column ("So where's the global cooling alert?") a week ago. He wanted to know why we had not all cancelled the climate change alarm on account of Toronto's unusually wet and chilly summer weather. Noting the likelihood that record-breaking hot weather moves people to discuss the risks and evidence of global warming, Murphy says:
Now, however, Toronto in July is cool and I am waiting in vain for the lips of just one forecaster to ask how can this be. Waiting just once to hear the familiar phrase "global warming" in a sentence that even hints that the theory behind it is so much more tentative than we have been urged with such fervour to believe.
It's a little like ending an uneventful motorcycle ride with the conclusion that there is - quite apparently - no longer any danger to cycling and that helmet legislation should be repealed.
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Inhofe: Oil and gas don't cause pollution
Yes, on the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL), said oil and gas are pollution free:
People complain that we are buying - importing from the Middle East - oil and gas. And then they find out that we have it all right here. We don't have to do that.
If their argument there is "Well, we don't want to use oil and gas because we think it pollutes" - which it doesn't - but if that's their argument, then why are we willing to import it from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East?
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Will America lose the clean-energy race? Only if we listen to the disinformers of The Breakthrough Institute
The radioactive disinformers of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) have broken through to the MSM again. This time they got The San Francisco Chronicle to print
their willfully misleading op-ed attacking "Obama and Democratic leaders" for supposedly failing to deliver on clean energy promises. As we'll see, this TBI article
sets a new record for phony "apples and oranges" comparisons - but I think it is worth looking at to fully understand the impressive nature of the clean energy
investments that Obama and the Democratic leaders have done and plan to do.
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Exxon's US lobbying exceeds clean-energy spending
Exxon Mobil, the biggest US oil producer, spent more on Washington lobbying during the first half of the year than all clean-energy companies combined, researcher New Energy Finance said.
Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, spent $US14.9 million ($18 million) lobbying in the six months, 23 per cent more than the $US12.1 million laid out by companies that make solar panels or wind turbines to generate electricity, London-based New Energy Finance said today in a note to clients. Oil and gas companies spent a total of $US82.2 million on Washington lobbyists, according to the report.
Congress is debating legislation that would promote renewable power, limit carbon dioxide emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and expand drilling for oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico. President Barack Obama signed a law earlier this year that allocates more than $US60 billion to promote clean energy.
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CCS shocker: "German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere"
The Guardian reports today:
It was meant to be the world's first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming - a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.
But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.
Ouch. Perhaps CCS is just another (open) pipe dream.
CCS was never going to be a slam dunk. As I explained a year ago, "CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role":
* Cost: This is the biggest problem, and it hasn't gotten better (see Harvard stunner: "Realistic" first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 - 20 cents per kWh!).
* Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy "stabilization wedges" by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes - see "How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)" For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet's entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.
* Permanence and transparency: If Putin's Russia said it was sequestering 100 million tons of CO2 in the ground permanently, and wanted other countries to pay it billions of dollars to do so, would anyone trust them? No. The potential for fraud and bribery are simply too enormous. But would anyone trust China? Would anyone trust a U.S. utility, for that matter? We need to set up some sort of international regime for certifying, monitoring, verifying, and inspecting geologic repositories of carbon - like the U.N. weapons inspections systems. The problem is, this country hasn't been able to certify a single storage facility for a high-level radioactive waste after two decades of trying and nobody knows how to monitor and verify underground CO2 storage. It could take a decade just to set up this system.
* Timing: As Howard Herzog of MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said last year, "How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we're having so much trouble building the first one?"
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The video that Anthony Watts does not want you to see: The Climate Denial "Crock of the Week"
July 29, 2009
This is the video that Anthony Watts demanded YouTube take down. This is what the former TV weatherman who runs a leading anti-scientific website, WattsUpWithThat, is afraid to let the public see:
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Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy
This report examines how the nation can increase energy efficiency in buildings and other non-transportation sectors by using existing technology and methods.
Doing so could yield a 23 percent drop in energy use by 2020, save the U.S. economy $1.2 trillion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 gigatons annually, the study says.
The study also takes a hard look at the barriers to progress, why the changes haven't already been made and what can be done to clear the hurdles.
McKinsey & Company released its 165-page report, "Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy," today. The U.S. Green Building Council and 11 other
governmental, non-governmental and private sector organizations helped sponsor the study.
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Efficiency Drive Could Cut Energy Use 23% by 2020, Study Finds
The biggest opportunity to improve the nation's energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study
released Wednesday by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.
The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country's projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 percent, a savings that would be "greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada," Ken Ostrowski, a senior partner in McKinsey's Atlanta office, said at a forum in Washington on Wednesday. It would also more than offset the growth in energy use that would be expected otherwise.
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Global warming pushes up building insurance costs
Flash floods and giant hailstones help increase claims by 15% and insurance premiums by 10%
Householders face higher building insurance premiums after a sharp increase in property damage blamed on climate change. A rise in insurance claims has been caused by flash floods and storms in areas of Britain previously immune to severe weather events.
The AA, which produces an insurance premium index monitoring costs, reports a 15% rise in claims in the first six months of 2009 over the same period in 2008 "in the number and cost of payments for buildings damaged by flash floods and storms in areas with little or no previous record of such claims."
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Low-Carbon Energy: A Roadmap
In Low Carbon Energy: A Roadmap, Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin outlines how new energy systems can be an engine of industrial development and job creation, while providing developing countries with an opportunity to "leapfrog" the carbon-intensive development path of the 20th century.
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Beijing closing coal plants in environmental move
China has taken advantage of a drop in electricity demand due to the global financial crisis to speed up a campaign to close small coal-fired power plants and improve its battered environment, an official said Thursday.
Authorities have closed power plants with a total of 7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule, said Sun Qin, deputy administrator of the Cabinet's National Energy Administration....
Beijing is trying to improve its energy efficiency and reduce surging demand for imported oil and gas by closing smaller, less efficient power plants and encouraging use of wind, solar and other clean sources.
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China wants climate deal this year: U.N.'s Ban Ki-moon
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - China's leaders told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Beijing wants to reach a new agreement on combating climate change in Copenhagen in December, Ban said on Wednesday.
"I was pleased that President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao assured me that China wants to seal a deal in Copenhagen in December and that China will play an active and constructive role in the negotiations," Ban told a monthly news conference.
The U.N. chief returned on Tuesday from official visits to China and Mongolia at which climate change topped the agenda.
China recently passed the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and together the two countries account for 42 percent of the world's emissions.
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Get Help Understanding the Clean Energy Bill with The Citizen's Guide to Climate Policy
The Citizen's Guide to Climate Policy was written by Lois Parshley and Ben Wessel, two students of TCP presenter and Middlebury College Professor Jon Isham.
With the goal of helping every American understand the political context around the climate change debate, the 44-page booklet explains the major elements of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) and outlines where the policy process may be heading as the Senate takes the reigns. It covers everything from pollution permit auction and allocation to carbon offsets to the intersection of U.S. and international climate policy. To download the PDF file (44 pages),
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Environmental Group: Coal Plant Skirting Pollution Laws
A ruling is expected next week from the Richmond Circuit Court on whether air permits for the power plant under construction outside St. Paul, Va., adequately limit emissions in compliance with the Clean Air Act.
The court heard arguments Friday from the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents several environmental groups seeking to have the permits invalidated.
"The plant contains no limits whatsoever on emissions of global warming pollution or carbon dioxide, nothing whatsoever, and that's just a straight-out violation of the law," said Cale Jaffe, one of two law center senior staff attorneys who argued the case.
Jaffe said the second permit, which deals with mercury emissions, is improper because it includes an "escape clause" that would allow Dominion Virginia Power, which is building the 585-megawatt coal-fired power plant, to ask for a looser limit. Jaffe claims the clause "is expressly designed to get around [the law]."
He said the time to prevent environmental harm is by correcting legal errors now – before the plant is built and operating.
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Clean Energy: U.S. Lags in Research and Development
When Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon 40 years ago, it was a triumph of American scientific skill. It was also the result of the government's willingness to spend more than $125 billion, in today's dollars, to take the country to the moon.
The need to remake our energy economy and replace fossil fuels with renewables like wind and solar is often referred to as the new Apollo project, a challenge to our scientists - and to the federal checkbook - that will be even greater than the moon race. We're moving ahead on installing new clean energy - the U.S. was the fastest growing wind-power market in the world in 2008 - and Congress, with the support of President Barack Obama, is on the road to establishing caps on carbon dioxide.
But according to many energy experts - including Steven Chu, Obama's Nobel Prize–winning Energy Secretary - the science isn't there yet. Significant basic research and development needs to happen before renewables can truly displace fossil fuels.
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