Month: November 2011

The IPCC’s new statement on freak event weather due to climate change has leaked. But the real freak event is that the media got the story right, see video above.  No false balance with a climate-denial nutcake, just the facts.

Is this a one-off random variation? or a sign of things to come?

Associated Press:

WASHINGTON — Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.

The final draft of the report from a panel of the world’s top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars.

The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become “increasingly marginal as places to live.”

The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda.

It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.

This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze freak events that grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people.

The video above from Bloomberg shows the best and worst of energy/economics communications.

First you’ve got a next-quarter obsessed wall street wonk, incapable of stepping out of market-speak, or group-think, even for a microsecond. Then you’ve got a time pressed journalist who allows an outrageous unsupported talking point to go by unanswered at the end, as time runs out. (if time is short, cut to the chase at 7:25)

Fortunately, Amory Lovins uploaded a correction to the misinformation the same day, which I’ve spliced in at the end.

Although I quibble about the 3 cent/kw figure Lovins gives for new wind contracts, – there is a spread there that goes up to (still very competitive) 9 or 10 cents – Lovins is correct about the overwhelmingly favorable logic of renewables, as Moore’s law like price drops on key components of solar materials continue to drive down prices faster than anyone would have predicted.

Scientific American:

 Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a “Moore’s law” in solar energy. In computing,  Moore’s law dictates that the number of components that can be placed on a chip doubles every 18 months. More practically speaking, the amount of computing power you can buy for a dollar has roughly doubled every 18 months, for decades. That’s the reason that the phone in your pocket has thousands of times as much memory and ten times as much processing power as a famed Cray 1 supercomputer, while weighing ounces compared to the Cray’s 10,000 lb bulk, fitting in your pocket rather than a large room, and costing tens or hundreds of dollars rather than tens of millions.

If similar dynamics worked in solar power technology, then we would eventually have the solar equivalent of an iPhone – incredibly cheap, mass distributed energy technology that was many times more effective than the giant and centralized technologies it was born from.

So is there such a phenomenon?

Continue reading “Lovins: The Myth of Baseload, Moore’s Law and the Renewable Advantage”

The tea-party congress, in it’s frenzy against the DOE’s loan guarantee program for renewable energy, is missing a detail.  If they succeed in poisoning the idea of Loan Guarantees, they kill off the primary finance mechanism for their ‘future energy” of choice, huge nuclear power plants.

Even with the Guarantees, private capital is shunning nuclear projects – not so renewables, which have compelling long term economic advantages.

Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey, and Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute, writing in Forbes:

Critics have seized on the news of Solyndra’s bankruptcy to condemn the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program, which provided a $535 million loan guarantee in 2009. TheNational Review’s Greg Pollowitz writes that Solyndra’s failure shows “why the government should not play venture capitalist.” Yet the fact is that, when judged by its entire diverse portfolio of investments, the LGP has performed remarkably well. Indeed, with a capitalization of just $4 billion, DOE has committed or closed $37.8 billion in loan guarantees for 36 innovative clean energy projects. The Solyndra case represents less than 2% of total loan commitments made by DOE, and will be easily covered by a capitalization of eight to ten times larger than any ultimate losses expected following the bankruptcy proceedings.

The broad success story of the LGP shows why federal investment in clean energy is necessary to help early-stage clean energy technologies achieve scale and reach commercialization. The inherent uncertainty in investing in novel technologies, coupled with the high capital costs and long time horizons, prohibits most venture capital funds from investing in large-scale clean energy projects. Financing tools and direct investment from the federal government can help bridge this well-known “Commercialization Valley of Death,” and the LGP is an effective way of doing that.

Instead of “picking winners and losers,” as the program’s critics allege, the program actually reduces risk for a suite of innovative clean energy technologies and allows venture capitalists and other private sector investors to invest in the best technology. Rather than picking winners, the LGP enables innovative companies to compete in the marketplace, allowing winners to emerge from competition. And while Solyndra is shutting its doors, companies like SunPower, First Solar, and Brightsource Energy, which also received loan guarantees and other support from the federal government, are industry leading success stories.

Think Climate change won’t effect you? The catastrophic Thailand flooding described here yesterday is affecting the price of everything from sushi, to hard drives. Add cotton and cattle to the list.

NYTimes:

AUSTIN — The drought map created by University College London shows a number of worryingly dry areas around the globe, in places including East Africa, Canada, France and Britain.

But the largest area of catastrophic drought centers on Texas. It is an angry red swath on the map, signifying what has been the driest year in the state’s history. It has brought immense hardship to farmers and ranchers, and fed incessant wildfires, as well as an enormous dust storm that blew through the western Texas city of Lubbock in the past month.

“It’s horrible,” said Don Casey, a rancher in central Texas who sold off half his cattle after getting only about two inches of rain over a one-year stretch and may sell more. “Even if it starts raining, it’s going to take so long for the land to recover”

Because it covers a huge and economically significant area, the Southwestern drought is having effects across the United States and even internationally, particularly in the food and agriculture sectors.

Some of the farthest-reaching effects may be on world cotton markets. Texas produces about 50 percent of U.S. cotton, and the United States in turn grows between 18 and 25 percent of the world’s cotton, according to Darren Hudson, director of the Cotton Economics Research Institute at Texas Tech University. This year, however, yields even from irrigated crops have fallen about 60 percent on the high plains where the bulk of Texas’s cotton crop grows, Mr. Hudson said. Farmers have given up on their “dry-land,” or unirrigated, cotton crops.

World cotton prices, which had been at historic highs, have fallen recently, Mr. Hudson said, but that is mainly because the sluggish economy and other factors have outweighed the loss of supply.

John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas state climatologist, featured in the video above, blogged in August:

Can you spot the outlier?  The year 2011 continues the recent trend of being much warmer than the historical precipitation-temperature relationship would indicate, although with no previous points so dry it’s hard to say exactly what history would say about a summer such as this one.  Except that this summer is way beyond the previous envelope of summer temperature and precipitation.

Continue reading “Texas Drought’s Global Ripples”

I don’t drink the stuff, but I hear a lot of the kids like it these days.

Note the TV spot does not mention the words “climate”, “change”, “global”, or “warming”. Nevertheless, I’m for anything that makes Rush Limbaugh blow a nut.

World Wildlife Fund:

First Ever White Packaging Encourages $1 Text Donation to WWF

This holiday season, more than 1.4 billion white Coke cans will help raise awareness and funds to protect the polar bear’s home. White bottle caps also will be on bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Sprite, Nestea, Minute Maid and more. Coca-Cola has never before changed the color of the red can to support a cause.

Beginning November 1, 2011, the familiar red can background will be replaced with an all-white panorama, highlighted by the iconic Coca-Cola script printed in red. The eye-catching cans will feature the image of a mother bear and her two cubs making their way across the Arctic. White packaging will be on store shelves through February 2012.

Coca-Cola is making an initial donation of $2 million to WWF and inviting others to join the effort. Anyone who wants to help the polar bears can text the package code to 357357 to donate $1 to WWF. They also can donate online at ArcticHome.com, starting November 1. Coca-Cola will match all donations made with a package code by March 15, 2012, up to a total of $1 million.

Dittoheads may prefer to register their protest by changing beverages. See below.

Continue reading “Coke Helps Bears. Limbaugh blows nut.”

Washington, DC – October 31, 2011 – Today Scientist Marco Kaltofen of Worchester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) presented his analysis of radioactive isotopic releases from the Fukushima accidents at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Mr. Kaltofen’s analysis confirms the detection of hot particles in the US and the extensive airborne and ground contamination in northern Japan due to the four nuclear power plant accidents at TEPCO’s Fukushima reactors. Fairewinds believes that this is a personal health issue in Japan and a public health issue in the United States and Canada.

Paper at website