Green Options

An inter-agency work group headed by the White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to find the real cost of a ton of carbon emitted. It turns out to be a hard number to agree on.

Would our grandchildren really miss Florida if it was under water? How about no more fruit or nuts from California? What about the loss of our breadbasket? Would the end of corn and soy from the Midwest really bother the grandchildren of our children? How much?

Cost/benefit analysis. Economists do it all the time. So, just what is the cost to society of a ton of carbon?  The Institute for Policy Integrity consulted 144 top economists and released the result: (pdf) Economists and Climate Change: Consensus and Open Questions. By sensibly limiting the sample to economists with the most expertise on climate change, the survey was able to avoid the ignorance of economists who have not studied climate change.

84 percent agreed that the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies. A near unanimous 98 percent agreed that putting a price on carbon through a tax or cap-and-trade will increase incentives for efficiency and innovation. 55% preferred a tax, and 35% preferred cap-and‐trade.

But they came up with very widely divergent numbers for both the costs and the benefits. The cost estimates ranged from $10 a to $10 million a ton, with a median of $50 a ton. The benefits of prevention also ranged between $383 billion and $5.5 trillion over the next five decades.

Despite the fact that Mount Kilimanjaro is located in one of the world’s warmer climates, like any other mountain with such high altitude, it has snowy peaks and glaciers that add interest to climbers, (although it doesn’t do much for the wildlife on the mountain); however, according to research, as a result of climate change, we can expect that snow atop Mount Kilimanjaro is a fleeting thing.

Lester R. Brown
Can we change fast enough? When thinking about the enormous need for social change as we attempt to move the world economy onto a sustainable path, I find it useful to look at various models of change. Three stand out. One is the catastrophic event model, which I call the Pearl Harbor model, where a dramatic event fundamentally changes how we think and behave. The second model is one where a society reaches a tipping point on a particular issue often after an extended period of gradual change in thinking and attitudes. This I call the Berlin Wall model. The third is the sandwich model of social change, where there is a strong grassroots movement pushing for change on a particular issue that is fully supported by strong political leadership at the top.

The surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a dramatic wakeup call. It totally changed how Americans thought about the war. If the American people had been asked on December 6th whether the country should enter World War II, probably 95 percent would have said no. By Monday morning, December 8th, perhaps 95 percent would have said yes.

In 2006 I attended a BIO meeting in Toronto focused on the new bio-based economy.  Oil had just risen to $70/barrel and it was a time when environmental NGOs, biotech companies and even oil companies seemed to be on the “same page” in terms of their enthusiasm for moving to plant-based feedstocks as the perfect alternative to oil dependency.  With the very obvious international security costs of the oil economy, and what were then thought to be unimaginable energy costs, it was a remarkable sort of celebration event for all the alternative energy and materials folks who has suffered under the decades of cheap oil.  As much as I was happy to see such “multi-stakeholder” agreement, I was sad because anyone with an agricultural perspective could see a train-wreck coming.

People were making presentations about cool second generation innovations like “Cellulosic” ethanol from sources like switchgrass or Miscanthus and also about ethanol alternatives like butanol.  People were talking about bio-materials for even things like the auto industry.  However; the side conversations were about the huge boom underway in the corn ethanol industry.  Orders for stainless steel tanks were back-logged two years.  What had started as a local, farmer-cooperative funded industry had become a venture capital frenzy.  I could see that long before the promise of “second generation” biofuels could be realized, corn ethanol would get to be big enough that it would end up fracturing the amazing consensus about the bio-economy that was functioning at that conference. 

Maldives, one of the most beautiful nations on earth, held the artistic, theatrical event of an underwater government meeting last month, to try to bring more attention to the threats of climate change. Now, they are getting more practical but still grabbing headlines — they are looking to build a wind farm that will generate 40% of the island nation’s electricity needs.

The wind farm plans were announced earlier this week. The project will include 30 turbines and is expected to provide the nation with 75 MW of power, powering the capital city, their international airport, and more!

Did you hear the one about the man who didn’t like his blue pumps? So disgusted was he with the color that he cut off his legs and bled to death.

I know, as a joke it’s either sick or bad or both. However it’s not too bad an analogy for the conclusions the chaps at the Charles Darwin University School for Environmental Research (SER) are reaching.

[Darwin, for those not familiar with Australian geography, is the capital of the Northern Territory in Australia, the harshest region in the country].

SolarReserve; a California start-up spin-out from United Technologies’ Rocketdyne has filed an application with the CPUC to build a 150-megawatt heliostat solar farm with seven hours of after-sunset energy stored in molten salt. These are the rocket scientists responsible for our solar-powered space exploration.

Theirs would be the first heliostat type of solar array to produce grid power in California. Abengoa has several in Spain, and plans one in Arizona. United Technologies has licensed the original technology to the new company SolarReserve and its wholly owned subsidiary Rice Solar Energy, LLC, (RSE).

This post was written by Stacy Feldman (reporting from Barcelona, Spain), and originally published at SolveClimate.

The United States must deliver concrete mid-term greenhouse gas reduction targets by next month or it will destroy efforts to achieve a framework for a global climate change deal in Copenhagen, United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer said Monday as a week of international talks on global warming began in Barcelona.

“I do not think the international community will accept an agreement that lacks clarity from the U.S. on targets,” de Boer said.

The Barcelona talks are the final five days of two years of global negotiations leading up to the crucial UN Climate Change Conference, from Dec. 7-18, in Copenhagen. De Boer’s worst fear now is that the Copenhagen conference will end with a lack of clarity on key issues and lead to a protracted political standoff.

“Negotiations must stop at Copenhagen. Otherwise negotiations will drag on when only the technical work should be going on,” he said.

A decision by the Obama administration to put a concrete 2020 target on the table could be the game changer for the world, he suggested.

An ecologist and an engineer at Michigan State University are working together to create robot fish that can better monitor various factors in aquatic environments.

Combining the brilliance of nature with some top-notch engineering, these two scientists are on to something and getting the funding for it.

The researchers are breaking ground with this and looking to raise water monitoring to another level.

We are actually the second planet-altering species. Three billion years ago, Cyanobacteria were the first. They totally changed this planet to one that is safe for oxygen breathers. That was a big change for species at the time, and most species didn’t make it. Nearly all of them went extinct.

If we’re lucky, we won’t change our environment as much as Cyanobacteria did.  That’s the goal of the US Department of Energy ARPA-E. Inspired by the success of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; ARPA-E will fund high-risk, high-reward advances with the potential to completely change the way our species generates and consumes energy.

Arizona State’s Wim Vermass was of the 37 recipients of the DOE ARPA-E funding. He is teaching the ancient species to make our future fuel and to custom-make it just the way our species wants it.

As the Senate version of pending climate legislations, Kerry-Boxer’s CEJAPA, heads for mark-up on Tuesday, voices calling for $15 billion annually for clean energy research and development are starting to gain traction. Earlier this week, Google’s Director of Climate Change and Energy, Dan Reicher joined the ranks of think tanks such as, Brookings Institution, Third Way, and the Breakthrough Institute, not to mention President Barack Obama, when he called on the Senate EPW committee to include this funding in the bill.

According to Reicher’s testimony (emphasis in original):

“Chairman Boxer, it is essential that Congress address this serious energy R&D short-fall by incorporating President Obama’s goal of $15 billion per year in federal energy R&D spending in final climate legislation.”

This testimony followed on the heals of a letter and discussion paper from the nation’s leading universities to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, emphasizing the need for a bottom line investment of $5 billion dollars annually in R&D, significantly more than would be allocated under both House and Senate version of climate and energy legislation.