The Loyal Opposition
The Waxman-Markey bill that the House Energy & Commerce Committee's approved on last week is flawed. But it represents the first serious step to examining one of the most pressing issue of our time.
Fights over social issues like gay marriage, abortion, and health care, are trivial when you consider the future of the billion people who depend on water Asian glaciers that could disappear in a matter of decades.
It is against this backdrop that I must comment on the state of the country's opposition party, the Republicans.
I'm not the first. Frank Rich and Jim Hightower, as well as many others, have made this observation in the past few weeks. But when it comes to climate change, the GOP's performance is particularly unsettling.
Paint the Roofs White
A low-cost, low-tech solution to fight climate change just won an endorsement from Energy Secretary Stephen Chu yesterday: paint the roofs white.
The idea is simple: Black roofs absorb most radiation as opposed to white roofs which reflect a good bit more. A two-page summary of a technical paper done by an old colleague of Chu's at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a commissioner on the California Energy Commission advances the concept:
Most existing flat roofs are dark and reflect only 10 to 20 percent of sunlight. Resurfacing the roof with a white material that has a long-term solar reflectance of 0.60 or more increases its solar reflectance by at least 0.40. Akbari et al. estimate that so retrofitting 100 m2 (1000 ft2) of roof offsets 10 tonnes of CO2 emission. (For comparison purposes, we point out that a typical US house emits about 10 tonnes of CO2 per year.)
So painting 1,000 square feet of black rooftop white can offset the emissions of a typical US household. Or in the big picture, as Chu pointed out, lightening the color of roads and roofs could have the equivalent effect of taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years.
Continue Reading...Auto Mileage and Carbon Emissions Agreement: Harbinger of Good Things to Come?
This week, President Obama announced a plan to increase national automobile emissions and mileage standards for cars and trucks in the United States starting in 2012. If it survives a public review process, this agreement will create a single new national standard for the US car and light truck fleets that is almost 40 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016 than it is today -- an average 35.5 miles per gallon (as reported in the NY Times).
The announcement resonates loudly in national climate change policy, because it marks the first federal regulatory standard for carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. It will also mean federal regulation of a sector (transportation) which accounts for a third of the nation’s carbon emissions.
The announcement also resonates in the energy community, since President Obama predicted that as result of the agreement, demand for oil would fall by 1.8 billion barrels over the lifetime of the vehicles sold over the next five years.
It is also significant in the broader national quest for overall air quality improvements because per-mile-traveled particulate, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions will drop as well.
Continue Reading...Chairman Waxman's Climate Bill
To paraphrase German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, don't ask how legislation or pork pies are made.
Think of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's new compromise on climate legislation as freshly baked pork pie.
Let's first consider the US emissions reductions goals. Did the Committee bake a pie small enough to get the US on the track to meeting scientifically defensible emissions reductions targets? No.
The bill would cap emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, instead of the original draft’s 20 percent below. Committee chair/chef Henry Waxman essentially promised (again with some poetic license to your author) to bake a smaller pie -- later. He noted the bill retains its original target reductions in the future: 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050. We will see -- later.
Breaking News: Climate Compromise in the House
The big news today in Washington is that the House committee working on climate change legislation has actually reached a major compromise that allows significant progress toward federal climate legislation this year.
The new deal calls for a 15 percent renewables target for a Renewable Electricity Standard by 2020, with an additional 5 percent to come from energy efficiency measures. The deal will expand the amount of biomass generation included, a crucial concession for southern lawmakers who worry their region might suffer economic impacts dispropornal to the rest of the nation.
Continue Reading...Climate versus Growth?
The Obama Administration says it is laying the groundwork for a long, green, economic recovery. But plenty of people argue that the recovery part and the green part contradict each other.
One piece of evidence to support the pessimists emerged from Washington last week. Inside EPA reports that the administration environmental champions are not getting their way when it comes to the ongoing restructuring of Chrysler and General Motors.
Four Bright Green Spots in the Budget
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been spending a lot of time this year helping clients see how the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) can help support their environmental initiatives.
But last week, when the President sent Congress the fine print of his proposed Fiscal Year 2010 budget, even I had a start: Never before has US government set out to make its spending so green. Not even the stimulus.
Continue Reading...Is a Climate Deal Imminent?
Here in Washington, every day brings a new rumor about the fate of the attempt to pass comprehensive climate change legislation this year.
Today, the same day The New York Times ran an editorial supporting quick action on climate change, the Capitol is abuzz with the possibility that a deal is in the works.
Storing the Sun
Last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed repeating an old mantra for those who try to dampen enthusiasm for renewable energy. The authors complain solar and wind energy are intermittent and that they are of limited use without the technology to store energy.
The search is on for breakthroughs on storage technology -- indeed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) has money to support this work.
I expect to see more and more evidence to overcome these objections in the months and years ahead, but here's a start reported today in the Guardian: The Andasol 1 solar thermal plant near Granada, Spain, has the ability to provide nearly round-the-clock power using energy from the sun.
