Climate Feedback

Cross posted by Katharine Sanderson on The Great Beyond

Two papers in Science yesterday have poured cold water on the promise of second generation biofuels.

Biofuels derived from the cellulosic, woody parts of plants are not having their greenhouse gas emissions properly accounted for, says Jerry Melillo from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Melillo’s study suggests that changes in the way land is used, as a consequence of growing crops for biofuels, is not taken into account, and if it were then those biofuels would be shown to actually cause more greenhouse gases to be released than fossil fuels. Nitrous oxide emissions from increased use of fertilisers are a big part of the problem.

"The problem is, we have a finite amount of land where new crops could be grown. Melillo and colleagues now report that if biofuel crops replace food crops on current farmlands, then the clearing of forested land for additional food crops will release more carbon from the soil there than in the areas where the biofuel crops themselves are being grown," says the press release.

In a related policy forum article, Timothy Searchinger from Princeton University and a bunch of colleagues point out flaws in the ways that carbon emissions are counted for cap-and-trade schemes in both Europe and the US.

They say that the assertion that fuels made from biomass can be counted as carbon neutral is wrong. “Harvesting existing forests for electricity adds net carbon to the air,” the report says. “If bioenergy crops displace forest or grassland, the carbon released from soild and vegetation, plus lost future sequestration, generates carbon debt, which counts against the carbon the crops absorb.”

"In the near-term I think, irrespective of how you go about the cellulosic biofuels program, you're going to have greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating the climate change problem," Melillo is reported as saying in Reuters.

Energy efficiency news says the report is damning for biofuels.

More bad news comes from a UNEP report, highlighted by the New York Times. The report calls for greater debate about biofuels before ploughing headlong into a completely biofuel-powered society, although it focuses mainly on first generation fuels, unlike the Science papers.

Image: Chris Neill, MBL

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 23, 2009
Categories: Energy, Katharine Sanderson, Research | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology – an international body that traditionally has represented marine industry and more recently, scientists too – today released its position statement on climate change.

The institute has been somewhat slower than many scientific bodies to release such a statement, perhaps given that much of its member base is in shipping, oil and gas. I was involved in helping to ensure the scientific accuracy of the statement, and I joined a panel discussion at the institute this morning, together with oceanographer Ralph Rayner of the London School of Economics (and various other institutes), Colin Summerhayes (executive director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research), commercial oceanographer Mark Calverley (who instigated IMarEST’s observer status with the IPCC), Ian Leggett (formerly with Shell, now the head of Metocean Engineering for Europe) and Malcolm Newell (marine engineer and former consultant for Shell, Golar, Exxon Mobil, among others).

I was prepared for a certain amount of scepticism from the audience, which may seem surprising in this day and age (or maybe not, given the recent news coverage). But reassuringly this morning’s discussion suggested that views in the industry are now aligned with the scientific evidence. Without exception, members were keen to discuss the practicalities of how to reduce emissions from shipping, and how to move to a low carbon economy.

The institute now has the task of putting together detailed synopses on the science, impacts, mitigation, and adaptation, with specific relevance to the marine sector. I’ll update as and when those reports come out.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 13, 2009
Categories: Business, Communicating Climate Change, Energy, Ocean science, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This week in Nature you can read the first (subscription) of four articles unpicking the business of biofuels. First up is jatropha – the shrub that promised to give drought-ridden countries boundless oil supplies. The reality has turned out to be somewhat different. After a period of hype and over enthusiasm, investments have dried up, somewhat like the promise of oil from arid land.

Jatropha definitely still has a future, but the plant genetics really need to be better developed and a number of companies are now doing this, including London-based D1oils – a company which hit trouble earlier this year when a deal with oil giant BP fell through.

We also catch up with Pushpito Ghosh, director of India’s Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute. Nature first encountered Ghosh in 2007 when jatropha was still promising the Earth. His project seems to have benefited from a realistic approach from the start. Here we see a photo taken just last week at a CSMCRI plantation in Mahuda, Orissa. Each plant in this kind of harvest gives 1.75–2.25 kg of seeds, which have the oil extracted and the waste turned into briquettes.

The series continues next week with a look at bioalgae as a potential fuel source. After that comes cellulosic bioethanol, followed by the potential for a ‘green gasoline’ to be used as a simple drop-in-fuel replacement.

Katharine Sanderson

Image: CSMCRI

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 17, 2009
Categories: Energy, In the News, Katharine Sanderson | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A new reservoir of fossil fuel could be ready to tap much sooner than previously thought. R&Ders have been talking up natural gas extraction from methane hydrates - a solid form of the greenhouse gas, found tucked away beneath the sea floor where low temperature and high pressure keep it stable.

Following an enthusiastic Congressional testimony, Ray Boswell of the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has a commentary in Science on hydrates’ potential as an energy source. But methane hydrates are also making headlines this week as a worrying harbinger of climate change. Some scientists have warned that ocean warming could destabilize hydrates and send methane gas bubbling into the ocean. Now a team led by Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham has spotted over 250 such gas plumes near Svalbard, Norway - echoing a similar observation from a group in Siberia earlier this year.

Much of the released gas dissolves in the water column, but any portion that reaches the air could amplify warming.
By drilling for hydrates, could we wake a sleeping giant? Boswell doesn’t tackle this question head on, but he offers some relevant points.

First off, hydrates in the Arctic - where gas plumes have been seen - are hard to get at. Before they go messing with the permafrost lid that protects the vast northern stores of methane, prospectors will find more enticing targets, says Boswell. Specifically, it’s hydrates found in sandy deposits in the Gulf of Mexico that are raising hopes at NETL.

Hydrate-bearing sands were first spotted off Japan in 1999. By recent estimates the Gulf of Mexico holds 190 trillion cubic meters of natural gas in such sands - over 300 times the amount of gas the US burns annually. An April expedition to probe the Gulf's deposits found promising pockets of highly saturated hydrates. There are technical and economic hurdles to extracting this gas, says Boswell, but many could be overcome with existing technology. That's a big difference from the hydrates known a decade ago, which were dispersed across muddy fields or packed into solid mounds.

Methane from sandy hydrates may also be easier to control. Boswell writes:

These resevoirs are commonly buried many hundreds of meters below the sea floor and enclosed in a matrix of impermeable sediments that help to prevent the escape of released methane. The most prospective gas hydrate deposits are also those that are most effectively buffered from environmental change.

Speaking of which, does the world need another fossil fuel reservoir? Not if you’re hoping our supplies will run out in time to save the climate. But with the world facing dwindling oil reserves and a sluggish start on renewables, Boswell implies the gas could fill an important gap: “hydrates may offer an important ‘bridging’ fuel that will help ease the transition to the sustainable energy supplies of the future.”

Anna Barnett

Image: Methane actively dissociating from a hydrate mound / National Energy Technology Lab

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 21, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, Energy, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s Tuesday in Lindau and a morning session on renewable energy has just finished. The panel, which featured some serious heavyweights, looked at the role of chemistry in developing renewable energies.

Two challenges exist in deploying renewable technologies on a large scale, said the panelists. Namely, these are storage and transport of energy. “ We cannot create energy. We can only transform the energy coming to earth from the sun. So it’s just a question of how we can transform and store this energy”, said Gerhard Ertl, who won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Robert Grubbs of Caltech, the only organic chemist cum-laureate on the panel, said that materials scientists could play a critical role in solving these problems, such as by designing lightweight, large blades for wind turbines.

There is a huge amount of solar energy available and a smaller amount of wind energy available, said theoretical physicist Walter Kohn, who received the 1998 Prize for his contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. Kohn said that the challenge is turning this vast amount of energy into something usable.

But that something will also have to be safe, suggested Kohn, who expressed particular concern about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. “I’m old enough to have witnessed the affect of nuclear bombs, and I’m a young enough that I can still read the newspapers”, he said, referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. “If this became a major source of replacing fossil fuel, the number of power plants needed would create…a huge probability of leading to a catastrophe”, said Kohn, who worries that “there will a tremendous pressure to go for nuclear” none-the-less.

Laureate Harold Kroto agreed that the pressure to use nuclear energy will be “irresistible” and raised the issue of whether scientists need a new Manhattan project to develop new technologies. Kroto argued that blues skies research will be perhaps more valuable than applied research here, because often the accidental leads to new discoveries.

“Do we need some kind of new chemistry”?, asked Kroto. In developing new technologies “we have a responsibility to society that our discoveries should not be misused”, he added. “This is a worry that many of us have”.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 30, 2009
Categories: Energy, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 2009, Olive Heffernan, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

A gargantuan plan of supplying European consumers with electricity generated in the Saharan desert could see the light of day earlier than even the most optimistic solar energy aficionados had expected.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a group of 20 large German companies, led by the reinsurance giant Munich Re, and also including Siemens, Deutsche Bank and RWE, is determined to go ahead with an €400 billion project known as Desertec. If fully realized, the envisaged network of huge solar thermal power plants across North Africa could provide up to 15 % of Europe’s overall electricity needs by mid-century.

Next month already, the group plans to create a consortium that is to look in more detail into the technical and financial feasibility of the envisaged project. Developing concrete plans could take two to three years, Torsten Jeworek, a Munich Re board member, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Continue reading "Europe looks to draw power from the Sahara" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on June 17, 2009
Categories: Categories, Business, Energy, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from In the Field

A leader of the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago on Saturday that the world's climate is likely to change much faster than predicted, leaving the world with two choices: start cutting carbon emissions earlier, or make the cuts deeper.

The comments came the morning after former U.S. Vice President Al Gore called on scientists at the meeting to help convey a sense of urgency about climate change to policy makers and the public.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," said Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC's second working group and a professor at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science.

This is because the rate at which carbon is entering the atmosphere is increasing much faster than the IPPC modeled in its last report, issued in 2007. That report estimated that world temperatures could increase by between 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsius by 2100. But the surge in the use of coal to generate power in developing countries, combined with climate impacts on natural carbon sinks, such as oceans, forests and tundra, mean that future climate impacts will likely be more severe than the IPPC realized, Field said.

"We have higher emissions, and we have a less friendly natural system to picking up these higher emissions, and they both mean that looking forward, the challenge of stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide is getting more complicated than we thought it was before," Field said.

Continue reading "AAAS: Climate issue getting "more complicated"" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 16, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Climate prediction, Deforestation, Energy, Erika Check Hayden, GHG emissions | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Whose opening lines are these: "The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable ... but that can - and must - be altered.”

Sound like another renewables naysayer upholding the fossil-fuel status quo? That's what the International Energy Agency is being accused of in a report picked up by the Guardian on Friday and endorsed by Grist today.

The IEA is slammed by an international group of legislators and scientists called Energy Watch, best known previously for their oil-has-peaked stance. The group’s new report, on wind-power prospects, is one of a handful it has to its name. In the wind report, the Guardian’s David Adam writes,

The experts … say the International Energy Agency (IEA) publishes misleading data on renewables, and that it has consistently underestimated the amount of electricity generated by wind power in its advice to governments. They say the IEA shows "ignorance and contempt" towards wind energy, while promoting oil, coal and nuclear as "irreplaceable" technologies.

Continue reading "IEA responds to attacks" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 12, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Energy, In the News, Mitigation, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from In the Field

This according to Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson, who has compared various energy technologies in terms of not only greenhouse gas emissions but also conventional pollutants, land use, water resources and more. Speaking after a news conference here, Jacobson said he is trying to provide a more holistic analysis of the various energy options. "There's a lot of misinformation out there," he said.

A few of the key results follow:

Life cycle emissions -- Wind and solar thermal come out on top; tidal, wave and hydro all beat out solar photovoltaics, geothermal and nuclear, thanks to energy spent on equipment and installation; coal was the big loser, even with carbon sequestration (CCS), thanks to energy spent on mining and transport.

Mortalities due to air pollution from US vehicles -- For gasoline, projected deaths drop from 20,000 to 15,000 annually in 2020 due to improved technology and air quality standards. That figure would remain steady or perhaps even rise if ethanol (corn or otherwise) made up 85 percent of the transport fuels. Assuming electric transport takes off, wind reduces mortalities to almost zero, although the full suite of renewables fared almost as well. Coal with CCS would cut mortalities by upward of two-thirds. Nuclear falls between coal and renewables (assuming non-proliferation regimes hold and there aren't any explosions).

Footprint required to power US vehicle fleet -- Accounting for the base of the turbine alone (not roads), wind could power the entire vehicle fleet using less than 3 square kilometers of land. Corn ethanol and concentrated solar power are the big losers, with each requiring a chunk of land that is larger (and perhaps significantly larger) than the state of California.

Water usage -- Wind, solar photovoltaic, geothermal, tidal and wave all come in around zero; coal, nuclear and concentrated solar do well; hydropower gets a poor rating, thanks to evaporation rates from reservoirs (Jacobson divvies up the losses among energy and other uses). But the clear loser is ethanol, whether the source is corn or something else.

Jeff Tollefson

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 19, 2008
Categories: AGU, Energy, Jeff Tollefson, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Whether peak oil is good news for the climate ultimately depends on what replaces oil as our staple fuel source. It will be unsurprising to most that replacing dwindling oil reserves with coal would do little to solve the climate problem, but how much coal remains is also highly uncertain, according to Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech, who spoke to the press at the AGU this morning.

Andy Dessler of Texas A&M touched on this in a guest commentary posted here last month. In short, Dessler called for a global IPCC-like assessment of our fossil fuel reserves, pointing to a new analysis by Rutledge that shows the world’s available coal reserves are far lower than traditional estimates would suggest. If Rutledge’s estimates are correct, combustion of all remaining conventional oil, gas, and coal reserves would produce an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of approximately 470 ppmv in 2100, near the stabilization target that many climatologists argue we must achieve to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

While Rutledge’s estimates suggest that the worst-case scenarios of the IPCC may be unachievable, Ken Caldeira of Washington’s Carnegie Institute had a more sobering message. Caldeira and colleagues used a climate and carbon cycle model to look at how running out of oil could affect future climate scenarios. Their analysis showed that if we replaced oil with liquefied coal fuel promptly, we would reach 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures in 2042 instead of 2045. Replacing oil with renewables, however, would delay reaching 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures by 11 years. This is simply because per coal emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil; add to that the energy costs associated with conversion of coal to liquid fuels, a likely option if we run out of oil.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: Peak fuel reserves " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 17, 2008
Categories: AGU, Climate prediction, Energy, GHG emissions, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This evening at AGU there was a special screening of Crude, a film about our love affair with petroleum– oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.

The documentary won Richard Smith of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this year’s AGU Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, a prestigious prize for outstanding reporting that makes geophysical science accessible and interesting to the general public. In Crude, Smith explores the geological formation of oil, its discovery and ascendancy in society and the potentially catastrophic consequences of our absolute dependence on it. Ironically, the very conditions under which oil was originally formed – a greenhouse world with elevated CO2 levels – are exactly those that its consumption could return us to.

Smith does an excellent job of conveying how oil, formed from the compressed remains of tiny plants and animals, could cause the demise of the most sophisticated species to have ever lived. And although we may be running out of the stuff, its pervasiveness in society means that weaning ourselves off oil will be no mean feat. There are no clear estimates of exactly how much oil is left in the ground, but the overwhelming message in Crude is that there are easily enough fossil fuel reserves to radically alter our climate should we use them all.

Overall, well worth a watch…

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 16, 2008
Categories: AGU, Communicating Climate Change, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama's Environmental Protection Agency may not have a director yet, but it already has its hands full. In the final year of the Bush administration, the EPA has simply procrastinated on greenhouse gas control: the Supreme Court in 2007 ordered the agency to assess the dangerous impacts of emissions under the Clean Air Act, or else justify its lack of action, but the result was a hopelessly conflicted report with a comment period that outlasts the presidential turnover. Now adding pressure to sort this out, pronto, are an EPA decision on coal plants last week and the threat of a new lawsuit over ocean acidification.

On Thursday the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board rejected the permit for Utah’s new Bonanza Coal Power Plant - a ruling that could halt as many as 100 other coal plants on the EPA docket until the agency can decide how to regulate their carbon dioxide output. For details, see the thorough coverage on Wired Science and Climate Progress. AP summarizes:

The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.

The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order limits on carbon dioxide. This is "an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting process," the panel said.

The Sierra Club conservation group filed the Bonanza appeal and argued it on the basis of the Supreme Court ruling. Their victory wasn't absolute, explains Alexis Madrigal on Wired Science:

The Board did not actually side with the Sierra Club's interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but in deciding to send the decision back to the EPA with the instruction to come up with a nationwide plan for regulating greenhouse gases, the Sierra Club effectively stopped new coal plants in their tracks.

"It's going to stop everything while EPA mulls over what to do next," Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder told the AP. "And that will be decided by the next administration."

Meanwhile, the Center for Biological Diversity has appeared to the EPA as the Ghost of Lawsuits Yet to Come. Skipping the Clean Air Act (and other federal laws cited in past cases against carbon, as noted by Dot Earth), the CBD say they will invoke the Clean Water Act in defense of acidifying oceans. The group petitioned last year for an update in the EPA's pH standards, which haven't been revised since 1976 - a problem flagged in a July 2007 Science commentary (subscription required).

Their followup is a notice of intent to sue. A win in court could open yet another door to EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions - something the CBD is going after explicitly in separate, state-level petitions.

Continue reading "Bonanza of carbon cases at the EPA" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 17, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

The Paris-based International Energy Agency came out with its annual World Energy Outlook report yesterday. And it makes for gloomy, and expensive, reading (Press release, Calgary Herald, Greentech Media).

The agency bases its findings on a reference scenario that assumes no new government policies are introduced. In this scenario, the IEA says that between now and 2030 world energy demand will grow by 1.6% a year, requiring energy-supply investments of $26.3 trillion (yep TRILLION dollars). “Yet the credit squeeze could delay spending, potentially setting up a supply-crunch that could choke economic recovery,” says the press release.

A week ago, Reuters pre-empted the report, with a story focusing on the slim chance we have to limit warming of the planet to 2 degrees Celsius. “The scale of the challenge ... is immense,” IEA has warned.

Continue reading "Oil crisis, financial crisis, total crisis" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 13, 2008
Categories: Energy, In the News, Katharine Sanderson | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Commentary by Andrew Dessler

There is an emerging view among some experts that recoverable fossil-fuel reserves are far smaller than previously thought. If so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) highest emissions scenarios could be unrealistically high, thus limiting the worst-case climate change during the 21st century. This view of a constrained fossil-fuel supply points to a potential convergence of thinking about policies and actions needed to address the seemingly divergent problems of energy supply and climate change.

One of the standard techniques for estimating future oil production is the method pioneered by M. King Hubbert. Briefly, Hubbert’s theory involves fitting historical production data to a logistics curve; extrapolation of the curve allows estimation of future production. Hubbert successfully predicted domestic U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s, and his theory predicts that world oil production should be peaking about now, which production figures seems to be confirming. Application of Hubbert’s theory to world-oil production suggests that total future recoverable conventional oil is ~1.2 trillion barrels or 7 Zeta Joules (ZJ). Figure 1 shows oil consumption from emissions scenarios produced by the IPCC, along with this estimate based on Hubbert’s method. All IPCC scenarios assume integrated oil production greater than the Hubbert estimate of recoverable oil.

For coal, the canonical wisdom is that there are hundreds of years of availability. However, several recent analyses have cast doubt on this. A recent NRC report on U.S. coal availability concluded, “… there is probably sufficient coal to meet the nation’s needs for more than 100 years at current rates of consumption. However, it is not possible to confirm the often-quoted assertion that there is a sufficient supply of coal for the next 250 years.” Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech has applied a Hubbert-like analysis to coal production data and concluded that the availability of coal is overstimated. The Energy Watch Group, a German think tank, has performed a detailed country-by-country analysis of coal reserves. Integrating their estimate of future coal production, we get 11 ZJ for world coal production from 2008 to 2100 — about one-ninth of the coal reserves cited by the IPCC (Table 4.2 of the fourth assessment report). As is the case for oil, the IPCC’s scenarios’ projected coal consumption generally exceeds this estimate of available resources.

Continue reading "Energy vs Climate: A surprising confluence of goals" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 11, 2008
Categories: Andrew Dessler, Energy, Mitigation, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Following Obama’s landslide victory in the US presidential elections last night, pundits are already speculating on how he will deal with the formidable challenges in his in-tray, not least of which will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the economy into clean-energy mode.

The news that Obama will be the 44th President of the US has been met with jubilation by environmentalists (as reported here and here), who are hopeful that the new administration will come good on promises to protect the planet.

Over on the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog, James Kanter reports that hopes have soared in Europe toward global cooperation on climate change following Obama’s appointment as President-elect. Earlier today, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, welcomed a new start for transatlantic relations on issues including climate change and invited Mr. Obama to address the European Parliament next spring. That would be the first time a U.S. president has spoken at the European Parliament since Ronald Reagan’s address in Strasbourg in 1985, writes Kanter.

Back on the home front, corporate carbon giants are less happy about the potential impacts of an Obama administration. CNNmoney says that companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp are concerned that policies such as windfall profits tax and market intervention will target the fossil fuel industry unfairly. Some southern utility companies, such as Duke Energy Corp have lobbied against a federal renewable portfolio standard, though some encourage state mandates, writes Ian Talley.

Continue reading "Obama victory brings new hope for climate policy, dark days for fossil fuels " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 05, 2008
Categories: Business, Climate Policy, Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The third and final debate in the US Presidential elections took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York last night. Moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS news, it took as its theme domestic policy.

As pointed out over on Gristmill, the debate yielded nothing new from either candidate on climate and energy issues, though it did serve to highlight the differences in the candidates’ positions as well those topics where they differ from their party positions.

John McCain set himself aside from the GOP is taking credit for "bringing climate change to the floor of the Senate for the first time", while Barack Obama noted that his support for clean coal technology “doesn't make me popular with environmentalists."

The discussion on climate and energy focused almost exclusively on energy independence, and on the timescale to eliminating foreign oil imports. Here’s the transcript of that part of the debate (taken from CNN politics):

Continue reading "Focus on energy independence in final debate " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 16, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Parliament’s environment committee yesterday voted largely in favour of the ambitious European climate action plan (subscription) proposed in January.

The decision, although preliminary, allows the European Union (EU) to go into the upcoming next round of international climate negotiations with a common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across Europe by at least 20 % by 2020. The European commission, Council and Parliament must yet formally agree on details of the plan, but substantial changes are now considered unlikely.

Power plants in Europe will no longer receive free allowances for their greenhouse-gas emissions.TRAVELPIX/GETTY

Most hotly contested were the amendments to the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) which the European commission had proposed in January to strengthen the effectiveness of the scheme.

Introduced in 2005, the ETS is as yet the only mandatory emissions trading system in the world. Until now, power stations and other large European industries have benefitted from generous supply of free permits to release carbon dioxide. Much of the commission’s proposed reform was aimed to end the over-allocation of emission allowances.

The compromise now agreed upon in parliament doesn’t pull the teeth out of the original plan. As of 2013, power stations will not receive free emission allowances anymore. Instead, they will have to obtain 100% of allowances at auction.

Other energy-intensive industries, such as steel and cement facilities which, unlike the power sector, have to compete with suppliers outside the EU, will in a first phase merely have to obtain 15% (rather than 20 % as the commission had initially proposed) of emission allowances at auction. But the allocation of free allowances to manufacturing industries is to be gradually phased out by 2020.

The environment committee did make some concessions to industry, though. The threshold for facilities – currently around 10,000 - which participate in the ETS is to be raised from 10,000 to 25,000 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Continue reading "EU Parliament backs climate plan" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 08, 2008
Categories: Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Energy, GHG emissions, In the News, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With climate change as environmental problem number one, the nuclear industry has proclaimed itself as part of the solution and is starting to enjoy a reputation as a green power provider after decades of bad press.

As a result, political support for nuclear energy is reaching at all time high – the US government is offering the nuclear industry $18.5 billion in loan guarantees and billions more in production tax credits and both US presidential candidates have voiced their support for nuclear power as a means of meeting climate goals. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain is bracing itself for a revival of the nuclear industry now that EDF and British Energy have agreed a deal whereby France will help the UK develop a new generation of nuclear power stations.

But as the ‘nuclear renaissance’ comes to fruition, many are starting to question whether nuclear energy is a feasible part of the solution to global warming.

Several studies have queried the low-carbon credentials of the nuclear industry, an issue that Kurt Kleiner explores over on Nature Reports Climate Change. While it's understood that an operating nuclear power plant has near-zero carbon emissions, it's the other steps involved in the provision of nuclear energy that can increase its carbon footprint.

Critics claim that other technologies would reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions more drastically, and more cost effectively, but the nuclear industry and many independent analysts respond that the numbers show otherwise, writes Kleiner.

"The fact is, there's no such thing as a carbon-free lunch for any energy source", says Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace in Washington DC. But "for every dollar you spend on nuclear, you could have saved five or six times as much carbon with efficiency, or wind farms", concludes Benjamin Sovacool, author of a recent study in Energy Policy on the lifetime emissions of nuclear power plants.

And as Oliver Morton pointed out here last week, even if nuclear does the job of reducing emissions from the generating sector, if the rest of the economy keeps growing and burning fossil fuels in cars and heating systems and factories, the overall reduction of emissions will be pitiful.

Continue reading "Nuclear energy: falling out of favour? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 03, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Mark Lynas, whose Six Degrees (Amazon UK | US) has been a great success, had a piece in the New Statesman last week about nuclear power. It was a pretty standard, pretty well executed I'm-a-green-who's-much-more-freaked-out-about-climate-than-about-nukes piece, much in the long travelled Lovelock vein, not that unlike some things George Monbiot has recently been writing. As such it obviously got up the noses of some greens. I thought it was pretty sensible, myself; but there's a depressing kicker.

Continue reading "The difficulties of going pro-nuclear" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 26, 2008
Categories: Energy, Oliver Morton, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

When Nature (subscription) looked over the whole portfolio of carbon-free electricity options last month, it left wave power for last. In contrast to mature technologies like hydropower and up-and-coming ones like solar, most ideas for capturing the energy of pounding surf “remain firmly in the testing phase”, they wrote.

One project moving out of that phase involves three ‘wave snakes’ that the company Pelamis has just installed off the coast of Portugal - long, cherry-red tubes that wiggle in the waves and use the motion to drive generators, whose electricity passes onto the Portuguese grid. This video hosted by the Guardian shows how they work (and couples soothing music to the animated undulation - I may save the link for next time I’m up at night worrying about the energy crisis).

Continue reading "Snakes on a wave" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 25, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Energy, Features, In the News, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Commuting in this morning on the boat, I was struck by a Guardian article on a new McKinsey report (pdf) about carbon capture and storage:

The study shows that such plants could be economically viable by 2030 at the latest. But it would require substantial public subsidies to get 10-12 plants running by the EU target date of 2015...McKinsey said that, with coal still likely to make up 60% of EU power generation by 2030, CCS could be a vital solution to ensuring security of energy supply and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It could reduce emissions by 400m tonnes a year by 2030, or a fifth of planned European savings. The consultants' report, published yesterday, showed that with an aggressive commercial push from the middle of the next decade, CCS costs could come down from as much as €90 for a tonne of CO2 initially, to about €30-45 in 2030 - or in line with expected carbon prices then.

But of course we can't; not now. Spending $700 billion + on bailing out banks is going to make the US, at least, less able to spend comparatively small amounts on other things. As my old boss Bill Emmott but it, also in the Guardian:

The true impact of this expansion of public spending lies in politics, and in what this rescue will now make more difficult or perhaps impossible: the expansion of other areas of public spending, such as healthcare or public programmes for alternative energy. If Barack Obama is elected president in November, he will find his fiscal hands tied a lot tighter than he may have hoped, even with a Democratic Congress alongside him - unless, of course, he wants to raise taxes.

Continue reading "Damn, a trillion dollars would have come in handy" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 24, 2008
Categories: Business, Climate Policy, Energy, Oliver Morton, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week NASA climatologist Jim Hansen came to London to testify on behalf of activists who defaced the Kingnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which we recently blogged about here on Climate Feedback. Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen in a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered. You can read the full story over on Nature News.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 08, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was lucky enough to spend last weekend at this year's SciFoo, and took in a number of sessions on climate and energy. There was a lot of sometimes quite heated debate, but what was struck me most forcefully was the common ground that the optimists and pessimists share -- specifically, a belief that the challenge in front of us is utterly huge. I almost said mind-numbingly huge, but people like Dan Schrag and Saul Griffith and Chris Uhlik have minds too active and well-exercised to numb easily...

In Nature this week we had a look at that hugeness with a big feature on ways of generating electricity that involve no intrinsic fossil-fuel emissions. Though I say so myself, it's a pretty good look at the options, from those that are already significant (hydropower and nuclear) to those that people like Chris and Saul are trying to make significant (solar and wind). Here's what we came up with as take home verdicts:

Continue reading "Get your terawatts here" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on August 15, 2008
Categories: Energy, Mitigation, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Protests at the climate camp in Kingsnorth, Kent, the site of a proposed new coal fired power plant, reached a climax this weekend, as reported by various news sources. Demonstrators, who promised to reach the site by air, land and sea, reached about 3,000 in number during the course of the week, but – met by some 1,500 police officers - failed to halt business at the site’s existing plant.

There was an excellent article in Saturday’s Guardian on how the outcome of Kingnorth will have implications for similar plants under development worldwide. In total, approx 100 similar plants are in the planning stage – more than half of these are in China, with the others split between the UK, Germany and the US – and governments are watching closely to see what decision is taken in the UK.

The main question is whether the UK government, which has argued for tough international regulations on climate change, will allow the power plant to go ahead without carbon capture and storage (CCS). UK energy minister Malcolm Wicks argues that new coal fired power plants such as the one being proposed in Kent are needed to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS technology, which remains unproven. This may be true, but if demonstrating CCS really is the priority, then why is it that there is no obligation for the owners of Kingsnorth to use CCS, should it be proven?

Continue reading "Debate on coal heats up as climate protests reach climax" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 10, 2008
Categories: Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of weeks into the early reporting for a story on the prospects for advanced coal use in China, which I wrote for the latest issue of Nature, I started to get nervous. I had already talked to several Western researchers and observers, but our first major contact in China fell through (for reasons that were never entirely clear) and the dozens of emails I sent out to Chinese scientists and policymakers simply disappeared into a void.

But our thesis seemed sound, and everybody I talked to who had experience in China suggested that things would fall into place once I got on the ground, made a few contacts and then started working the network via cell-phone. In the end, we decided to give it a go.

Jane Qiu, a Nature correspondent stationed in Beijing, was able to set up several interviews in advance, and we had a clean coal conference in Shanghai as a backstop. And earlier reporting eventually paid off in a big way as a few key industry and university contacts came through, just days before I hopped on the plane.

Continue reading "Nature takes a closer look at coal in China" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 28, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Twenty-five Nobel laureates convened early this month on the island of Lindau, Germany, to meet with 567 talented young physicists from universities and laboratories around the world. After several lectures on Bose-Einstein condensates, high-energy particle physics, and carbon nanotubes, as well as presentations on biophysics from the winners of the 1988 Nobel prize in chemistry, seven laureates got on stage for a panel discussion of climate change and energy challenges.

Though they were all admittedly speaking beyond their fields of expertise, the scientists offered unfiltered political and social advice.

Continue reading "Nobelists talk energy" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on July 15, 2008
Categories: Christina Reed, Conferences and Meetings, Energy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thin-film solar cell technology is starting to get hot. This week in Science, a paper by Marc Baldo and friends at MIT applies thin films, stuffed with organic dyes, to a piece of glass. This concentrates the light to just the edges, where small amounts of expensive PV materials can soak up the rays as much as they like. (see Nature news story)

This, the authors say, could provide solar power at, or below, the magic US$1 per watt that everyone in the industry talks about. But they had better get a move on because other firms are claiming to almost be there already. And the industry is full of competition for heavy investment, even in flaky economic times.

Continue reading "Solar cells: thin is in" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on July 14, 2008
Categories: Business, Energy, Katharine Sanderson, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From claims that obese Westerners are devouring the world's produce to pleas that panicked developing nations stop hoarding it, recriminations were flying at a two-day UN conference focused on soaring international food prices this week - and The Guardian reports that anger ran highest over US policies aggressively promoting biofuels farming. Small wonder: the International Monetary Fund has estimated that the trend toward farms producing fuel instead of food is responsible for 20-30% of recent price spikes, the International Food Policy Research Institute, a US think tank, came up with 30%, and the clean-energy research firm New Energy Research offered a more conservative 8%. But US agriculture secretary Ed Schafer would own up to only 3%.

And while the food riots resulting from price rises are easy to see, the environmental benefits of biofuels are not. Report after report this year has warned that flight from fossil fuels to biofuels could see forests cleared and cropland diverted while both food costs and greenhouse emissions rise.

Ethanol fuel made from corn - big business in the US - has taken particularly heavy blame for food prices, as it uses up grain that could feed people and livestock, and fields that could be planted with other edible crops. Last year's US energy bill included a full-steam-ahead target to quintuple ethanol production in 15 years - a commitment that John McCain and 23 other Senate Republicans last month urged the EPA to ignore because of the food crisis. Across the pond, the EU is still trying to figure out how to insert sustainability caveats into its controversial plan to make 10% of all transport fuel renewable (i.e. plant-based) by 2020.

Aside from the ethanol acrimony, the UN meeting heard another strident message: Ban Ki-moon's call for 50% more agricultural production by 2030 to support a rising global population. To make this much food, the world may not be able to spare many fields for ethanol.

For more on what's driving food prices - including the possibility that we've lost some arable land to global warming and are set to lose more - Grist's breakdown and this International Food Policy Research Institute report are good places to start. And this recent Nature News story (subscription required) has a look over the biofuel industry's horizon.

Anna Barnett

Photo: Harvey Leifert

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 04, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Energy, In the News, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The predicted effects of climate change can be counted on to shake up international relations, even far from the impoverished, politically wobbly regions where the most obvious conflicts loom. A case in point is the tranquil Arctic seabed, believed to hold a substantial fraction* of the world's undeveloped oil reserves - which, as the summer sea ice extent decreases year by year, is suddenly set to become accessible for extraction.

As such, the Arctic Ocean is a new source of friction among the five countries that claim portions of it as their sovereign territory: the US, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, the latter of which elicited clucking from some of the others in August when it sent a submersible to the sea bottom and planted a titanium national flag at the underwater North Pole. And more than the pole is up for grabs. In a great piece on the politics of Arctic climate change in Vanity Fair, Alex Shoumatoff writes:

Last summer, Canada’s Northwest Passage was nearly free of ice and completely navigable for a few weeks—for the first time since records have been kept. This fabled route to the Orient, which eluded Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, and was finally navigated by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1905, would reshape global trade, being thousands of miles shorter than most currently used shipping routes, though it won’t be clear long enough to be commercially viable for at least another 15 to 20 years. Canada has claimed the passage as its internal waterway since the early 1970s, but the U.S. maintains that it is an international strait, through which any vessel, including submerged submarines gathering intelligence, has the right of “transit passage.”

On Wednesday, the five Arctic-bordering nations met in the tiny town of Ilulissat, Greenland, with the intention of staving off inconvenient squabbles over the newly unfrozen oil and gas sources. The high-level delegates sent to handle the promise of a new oil rush agreed to proceed in an orderly fashion and allow the UN to decide who owns what (Reuters, New York Times, FT).

When the UN rules on territorial rights, it will be ruling on geoscience. At issue is how far the continental shelf under each nation extends into the ocean - the criterion for sovereignty under the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention (still not ratified by the US Senate, which will apparently have to overcome past reluctance in order to achieve the country's Arctic aims). Wednesday's declaration gives the claimants time to gather scientific evidence to present to a commission on continental shelves.

The agreement also avoids aiming for a treaty like the one concocted to settle wrangling over Antarctica in the 1950s. A 1991 addition to the Antarctic treaty forbids exploitation of mineral resources until 2048, which may be why the delegates in Ilulissat hastened to hand their disagreements over to the UN and emphasize that no special laws would be necessary up north. Environmental groups, excluded from the meeting, would naturally prefer a treaty that could offer strong protection for Arctic ecosystems already stressed by warming.

Anna Barnett

Photo: North Pole sign set up by the crew and scientists of the German research vessel Polarstern; Hannes Grobe

*Often said to be 25% - erroneously, according to Shoumatoff.

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 30, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, Energy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

With much of the corporate world competing to be ahead of the decarbonization curve, it's not uncommon to see investors actually begging governments for more regulations, as a prominent group in the US did this week. More remarkable is witnessing oil goliath Exxon Mobil torn by a climate-driven shareholder revolt and its backlash.

On fossil fuels and climate change, Exxon in the past has not so much failed to read the writing on the wall as actively attempted to efface it. That's changed, but not enough, say the heirs of John D. 'Standard Oil' Rockefeller, whose ancestral ex-monopoly forms Exxon's core. The Rockefellers are sponsoring four shareholder resolutions that will come to a vote at the company's annual shareholder meeting May 28. According to The Independent, they say Exxon needs to research how climate change will affect the developing world, fund alternative fuels, reduce its carbon footprint, and spur more managerial debate by splitting up the roles of chariman and CEO - both posts are currently held by Rex Tillerson. At last year's meeting, says The Guardian, a call to split up Tillerson's jobs got 40% yays, and addressing climate change got 30%. With a vast green tide and 19 institutional investors backing up the Rockefellers (who own only 0.006% of Exxon's stock, the company says), this year could see even greater support.

But the Wall Street Journal - ever the champion of the little guy - noted in an editorial yesterday (subscription required) that blue-collar investors have struck back. According to the Journal, US police union leader Chuck Canterbury wrote to Tillerson that the resolutions

would impose "rigid, ideologically-based conditions on the company's future," would nullify "the judgment of a highly successful management team," and would "undercut every project and business operation." This would "hamstring ExxonMobil's profitability and growth, thus directly harming the police officers, firefighters, teachers and public employees whose retirement savings are invested in the company."

Continue reading "Oil heirs mutiny at Exxon" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 23, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, Energy, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year on Climate Feedback, Kevin Vranes wrote about some of the unintended consequences of climate policy – namely how the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism was increasing greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of HCF-23 in developing countries – as well as increasing ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere.

Now, the drive to tackle climate change – and fast - has landed us back in the land of unintended consequences, though for a whole host of other reasons.

A few particularly noteworthy examples have come across my radar in the past couple of weeks.

First up, is the increasing demand from alternative energies on the world’s water supplies, a factor not helped by the complete lack of cohesion between energy, water and climate policy. A prime example, as reported by Brian Hoyle on Nature Reports Climate Change, is the extensive irrigation required for those waving fields of midwest grain that supply the ethanol for biofuels.

“At least 40 gallons [of water] go into every mile travelled by an ethanol-powered vehicle” according to Michael Webber of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas-Austin.

And gas-electric hybrid vehicles fare little better. “We need to move from our old way of thinking — miles per gallon — to gallons of water per mile," says Webber.

Not only do these golden fields of corn pose a threat to water supplies, the massive amounts of fertiliser used in growing them are increasing nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and worsening the existing ‘dead zones’ in the Gulf associated with fish kills. The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , notes that this is in direct conflict with existing policy targets to reduce the oxygen-depleted area in the region.

And on an unrelated topic…the trail of unforeseen outcomes continues overseas…as highlighted last week in The Washington Post, which reported the toxic waste being left behind by solar energy companies in China, posing a severe threat to human health.

As much as climate policy is urgently needed, it seems it would be worth remembering that climate is not the only sustainability issue.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 14, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston -

Whether technology can cure the world’s ills has been a hot topic at this year’s AAAS conference.

I joined Alok Jah and James Randerson as a guest commentator on the Guardian’s weekly science podcast yesterday to discuss, among other highlights from the AAAS meeting, whether we can rely on technology as our sole solution to climate change.

We recorded in Toscanini’s ice-cream café in Cambridge, MA, an institution as famous for its clientele (nobel and ignoble laureates and the Dalai Lama), as much as for it’s delectable ice-cream….the wort variety comes highly recommended!

The impetus for our technology discussion was the release of a report at AAAS by a specialist panel convened to predict the great engineering challenges that humanity will face in the 21st century.

A select group of big names and big thinkers, the blue ribbon panel included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, entrepreneur, geneticist and billionaire, Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Ray Kurzweil, futurologist, software engineer and alleged recipient of some 14 honorary doctorates.

Kurzweil sees no end to the possibilities of what technology can achieve this century – from creating artificial intelligence to match the human intellect to reversing the signs of aging. His basis for these assertions is the rate at which technology is advancing – a doubling every two decades. Though this may sound modest, its cumulative effect is worth contemplating – that’s 32 times more technical progress over the next 50 years than there has been in the past half-century!

The views of the panel are positively circumspect in comparison to Kurzweil’s, though are none-the-less fascinating.

Continue reading "Can technology stop the world from warming (and my ice-cream from melting)? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 18, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Conferences and Meetings, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Commission's draft blueprint for tackling climate change, announced January 23rd, is praised in today's Nature editorial for hitting "the sweet spot" between politically pragmatic but shortsighted proposals and implausably idealistic ones. Other groups - idealists and pragmatists alike - have reacted differently.

Continue reading "EU climate plan "hits the sweet spot"?" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 31, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Mitigation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Royal Society today released a report on the future of biofuels, which have recently been the subject of intense debate, as Kurt Kleiner reported in Nature Reports Climate Change last month. New UK rules to begin this April require transport fuel suppliers to include a small percentage of 'renewable fuel' in their fuel sales, working up to 5% by 2010. But according to the Royal Society report, this policy intiative (called the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation or RTFO) is not guaranteed to meet its climate-preserving goals. When it comes to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, the report points out, there are biofuels and biofuels. That is, while some plant fuel sources promise as much as 80% greenhouse gas savings over fossil fuels, it's also possible to keep trashing the planet by using unsustainable methods to produce and supply renewable fuels. Unless the UK sets emissions targets per se in its fuel policy, warns the report, the new UK rules and the EU Biofuels Directive that they reflect "will do more for economic development and energy security than combating climate change".

Continue reading "Making biofuels sustainable" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 14, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Energy, Mitigation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you resolve to use less energy for your home appliances in 2008? In a study released yesterday, a lab within the the US Department of Energy found that lots of Americans (or at least lots of Pacific Northwesterners) want to do the same - and given more information, tools, and sophisticated market incentives, they'll actually do it. To the tune of 15% less peak power use and 10% lower household electric bills.

Continue reading "Technology lessens Americans' power hunger " »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 10, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Energy, Personal action, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)