The Obama administration's greenhouse gas ruling Monday was meant to send a warning to industry, the U.S. Congress, and the world: with or without a law, Washington will tackle global warming in a serious way.
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final ruling that greenhouse gases endanger human health, allowing it to put limits on emissions even if U.S. lawmakers fail to pass a law to achieve the same objective.
These are the ramifications of the long-expected decision:
• Timing: as the EPA made its announcement, negotiators from nearly 200 countries met in Copenhagen to work toward a political agreement to address climate change.
The timing was no coincidence: the EPA announcement was aimed at an international audience as much as a domestic one.
The U.S. position at the talks is undermined by not having a domestic law in place to curb emissions, but the EPA ruling should reassure other nations that Washington will force businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution one way or another.
Obama's message to world leaders: the United States is a serious partner in Copenhagen and on the climate change issue as a whole.
• Pressure: The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions but the Senate has not. As lawmakers go back and forth on whether such rules would be good or bad for industry and the country, the EPA ruling will now be firmly in the back of their minds.
Obama's message to lawmakers: hurry up and agree on a law, or the administration will take the reins and accomplish this goal without you.
• Risk: Though the White House has given the green light to the EPA finding, officials near Obama would prefer not to talk about it that much. Why? The president still firmly prefers a legislative solution to the problem of regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
By making the threat that regulation will result if a law fails, Obama risks having to actually follow through.
Politically it will be more palatable for the president to tell Americans--especially in coal-producing states that will be hard hit by emissions curbs--that rules governing climate change were approved by their elected representatives rather than imposed by the executive branch.
If the economy does not recover soon, the short-term costs to industry of regulation could create long-term costs for Obama, whose fellow Democrats could lose seats in Congress.
Practically, EPA regulation could also get tied up in a series of legal challenges from businesses and environmental groups. A law would be less messy and potentially more efficient at cutting emissions quickly.
• Certainty: Companies often say certainty is crucial for business planning. Even those that are opposed to climate legislation or EPA regulation- and there are many--would prefer knowing what's coming to not knowing, even if the ramifications are costly.
With the EPA's announcement, pending legislation in Congress, and the U.S. position in Copenhagen all spelled out, industry can now assume that, one way or another, the United States will aim to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions roughly 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
For those that have not already started, making investments to cut industrial emissions and reduce carbon pollution would make sense...now.
This analysis was written by Jeff Mason.
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Coca-Cola said Thursday that it will eliminate a major greenhouse gas in its new vending machines and coolers, raising the bar for climate-friendly refrigeration in the food and beverage industry.
Coke's Chief Executive Muhtar Kent said that the company, which sells everything from soda and juice drinks to water, will replace hydrofluorocarbon, also known as HFC, in its new vending machines and coolers by 2015.
While Coke's 10 million vending machines, coolers and other refrigeration equipment around the world keep its drinks chilled, they also are the biggest contributor to the company's carbon footprint.
The sticker on this Coca-Cola vending machine reads: "This Cooler is from the Future. Wait, that's Now. This cooler is an HFC-free pioneer, reducing direct green house gas emissions by 99% and energy consumption by up to 40%."
(Credit: Coca-Cola)Together the refrigeration systems emit 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year--about 40 percent of the company's total.
Greenhouse gases from hydrofluorocarbons are partly blamed for global climate change and are expected to make up 28 percent to 45 percent of carbon emissions by 2050.
That has prompted the food and beverage industry to find other ways to cool products and cut their environmental impact. Earlier this year Pepsico launched a pilot program for greener vending machines with carbon-dioxide cooling.
Coke executives said that carbon dioxide is the company's preferred replacement, followed by hydrocarbon refrigeration.
While carbon dioxide is a global-warming gas, proponents point to its lower environmental impact--more than 1,400 times less than conventional refrigerants.
To ramp up the transition to greener machines, Coke and its bottling partners will buy 150,000 units of HFC-free equipment in 2010, doubling the company's current pace for buying the systems.
"Our hope is that our initial investments will trigger adoption by other companies in the food and beverage industry," Kent said in a conference call with reporters.
He added that wider adoption will help drive the cost of the replacement technology down.
Coke has invested $50 million in research for climate friendly replacements. The company expects the move to greener equipment to cut its emissions by nearly 53 million metric tons--the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road for a year--over the 10-year life-span of the equipment.
Even as businesses like Coke take their own initiative, regulations on HFC are needed eventually, Gerd Leipold, former executive director of Greenpeace International said Thursday. The environmental activist group helped jump start Coke's move to greener refrigeration several years ago.
Leipold expects some regulations to come forward from the U.N. climate talks being held this month in Copenhagen and from environmental trendsetter California.
Shares of Coke closed down 1.19 percent at $57.27 each on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.
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Google Earth and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Wednesday that Google is developing a tool to map out disturbing scenarios of how California can be affected by climate change.
The project comes out of a collaboration with the California Natural Resources Agency, Schwarzenegger, and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an organization funded by the California Energy Commission and Google.org.
"There is a serious bottleneck in delivering relevant information, much of which is map-based, to decisionmakers in a manner that allows them to turn climate change research results into effective climate change adaptation decisions and policies," according to a statement from SEI.
The CalAdapt Google Earth tool, which will allow individuals to view how their specific community would be changed, will not be ready for public use until September 2010. But on Wednesday, Google.org released two related videos narrated by Schwarzenegger. Both the three-minute video (see below) and seven-minute video demonstrate the kind of data the Google Earth CalAdapt tool will make more palatable. The extended version additionally highlights Schwarzenegger's concerns and political initiatives.
CalAdapt visually demonstrates the effects of climate change as determined by the current scientific data available to the state of California. It includes past data regarding temperature change and water shortages. It includes data modeling what will happen if, for example, the Sierra snow pack disappears at the various rates predicted. It also includes data on which parts of the state's shoreline would be most effected due to storms and rising sea levels.
Certainly, it's a teaching tool to show average folks what scientists believe will happen to the California climate in the coming years. But it also happens to dovetail into Schwarzenegger's executive order that the state develop a "Climate Adaptation Strategy" on everything from agriculture to commercial land development.
It's not the first time, organizations have turned to the Google Earth platform to give the public a tool for avoiding land misuse or harrowing legal battles.
In April Google Earth released the Path to Green Energy tool. Those layers, developed in conjunction with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society, show which lands in the greater western U.S. are prohibited from commercial development, awaiting approval for inclusion into the federal wilderness system, or considered natural habitats for endangered species among other categories.
It's intended to be a preemptive offering to commercial developers who may rather shy away from the hassle of an environmental fight if there are adequate lands available for their needs elsewhere.
U.S. Senator John Kerry said on Tuesday he will try to "outline" a compromise climate control bill before December's international global warming conference and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave an upbeat assessment of Washington's intentions.
"From what I heard today, there is great support in the Senate for action on climate change," Ban told reporters following a meeting with a small group of senators in the U.S. Capitol to encourage them on.
Ban repeated a prediction that the December 7-18 U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen will not produce a final deal on a new international regime for severely reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
But he said he held out hope for a "robust" foundation being built in Copenhagen and said further progress by the U.S. Senate on domestic goals for reducing carbon dioxide pollution would send a "strong message" to the assembled 192 countries.
Kerry, a Democrat who is coordinating work on a Senate compromise bill, told reporters: "We are engaged in a process that will hopefully put us in a position to go to Copenhagen with a framework or outline of where the Senate will be heading in legislation."
Kerry added that Ban "made it crystal clear that leadership by the United States of America is critical" to Copenhagen and beyond.
Democrats on a Senate environment committee last week approved a bill to reduce U.S. industry's carbon emission by 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
But that measure does not have enough support to pass the Senate. Kerry is working with Republicans and moderate Democrats on a bill that could reduce the 20 percent target as well as give new incentives for expanding U.S. nuclear power generation and domestic oil and gas production.
Despite the upbeat talk, deep political problems were on display in Washington.
Democratic Senator Max Baucus, who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee that will write portions of a climate bill, warned on Tuesday that tough trade protections would have to be part of any legislation.
"We can not allow our manufacturing industries to fade as a result of trade with countries that refuse to negotiate global solutions to global concerns," said Baucus.
Debate over jobs
U.S. moves to protect energy-intensive industries like steel, glass and cement have angered trading partners, including China, and many observers argue such provisions likely would violate international trade rules.
"It may not be what they (China) want to hear, but it isn't anything they don't already know," Dave Hamilton, a global warming expert at the Sierra Club environmental group, said of Baucus' new warnings.
Baucus said a "border measure" would be consistent with Washington's international trade obligations. Such language is seen as key to gaining the votes of moderate senators from industrial states.
Republican Senator Richard Lugar, a moderate who in the past has voiced fears that global warming could lead to conflict and instability in developing countries, had domestic concerns on his mind on Tuesday.
He said the meeting with Ban provided an opportunity to discuss "problems of recession and unemployment in our country." Many lawmakers fear that moving the U.S. away from cheap polluting fossil fuels to cleaner alternative energy will cost jobs and raise consumer prices.
A climate change bill already has passed the House of Representatives, where President Barack Obama's Democrats have a large majority. Although Democrats also control the Senate, it's easier for opponents there to delay legislation using procedural hurdles.
Baucus' Finance Committee held a hearing on Tuesday focusing on the job creation that could flow from a climate bill.
Van Ton-Quinlivan, a director of jobs development at Pacific Gas and Electric Co, a major California-based utility, said designing and creating a U.S. low-carbon energy system could require as many as 150,000 workers by the 2020s.
About 60,000 people will be needed to operate and maintain things like wind and solar farms by 2030, she said.
Margo Thorning, chief economist at the American Council on Capital Formation, said job losses under the House climate change bill may total 80,000 in 2020 and between nearly 1.8 million to more than 2.4 million in 2030.
At that hearing, Kerry shot back at Thorning: "Your studies aren't credible. You don't take into account the cost of inaction."
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The world faces a surge in energy costs, as well as in planet-warming carbon emissions, unless it can swiftly agree a climate change deal, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.
Arguing strongly for a global deal at the U.N. Climate Change summit in Copenhagen in December, the IEA said use of fossil fuels will increase quickly if policies remained unchanged.
Without an international agreement on climate change, the ratio of energy spending to gross domestic product for the largest consumer countries would double by 2030.
The world would have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delayed implementing a deal on global warming, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Outlook.
"As the leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions, energy is at the heart of the problem and so must be integral to the solution. The time to act has arrived," it said.
IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol told Reuters in an interview the world needed to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent.
"The world needs to go to the 450 parts per million target, not only because of climate change but because of growing problems within our energy system and its possible implications again on the economy," Birol said.
Global energy demand would rise by an average of 2.5 percent per year over the next five years if governments made no changes to their existing policies and measures.
Under these circumstances, which the IEA called its reference scenario, world primary energy demand would rise by an average of 1.5 percent per year over the next two decades.
Oil demand, excluding biofuels, would increase by 1 percent per year to 105 million barrels per day by 2030 from 85 million barrels per day in 2008. This was a slight decrease in its demand forecast, reflecting the impact of the global economic downturn.
Last year the agency, which advises 28 industrialized nations, forecast oil use would reach 106 million barrels per day by 2030.
But the IEA stressed the trend toward heavier use of hydrocarbons would be unabated without a climate change deal.
"Fossil fuels remain the dominant sources of primary energy worldwide in the reference scenario, accounting for more than three-quarters of the overall increase in energy use," it said.
A key driver of energy demand would be inexorable growth in power generation, it said, forecasting in its reference scenario world electricity demand would grow 2.5 percent a year to 2030.
Stressing the need to move away from dependence on fossil fuels, Birol said that without a climate change deal, the European Union's annual energy bill would more than double to $500 billion by 2030, up from $160 billion in the last 30 years.
Oil prices soared to a record of nearly $150 a barrel in July 2008. They then collapsed to less than $33 last December, but have since recovered to around $80.
The price collapse, combined with the credit crisis, choked off investment and the Paris-based IEA has warned the oil market could surge back, damaging still fragile economic growth.
Birol said the oil price was likely to reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 by 2030: "This means that if we don't do anything to our energy system, we will be in difficulty."
Bank of Ireland analyst Paul Harris said the IEA had taken a "rather cautious approach" in the report.
"There's an emerging consensus that the demand and supply balance is really going to start to tighten by 2015 which should sound the death knell for cheap oil."
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Contraception would be the cheapest and most effective way to reduce carbon emissions worldwide between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the London School of Economics.
The report, "Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost," (PDF) determined that if contraception was made widely available between 2010 and 2050 to women and men around the world who wished to use it, the reduction in unwanted births could result in saving 34 gigatonnes (one billion tonnes) of carbon emissions. That's roughly 60 years worth of U.K. emissions or 6 years worth of U.S. emissions.
The cost for supplying, and distributing contraception over those 40 years would cost an estimated $220 billion, or $7 for each tonne of carbon emissions avoided. It's cheaper than the next most efficient low-carbon technology, wind power, which would cost $24 per tonne or $1 trillion to prevent the same amount (one billion tonnes) of carbon emissions from being produced, according to the report.
In its per-tonne cost analysis, the report also calculated $51 for solar, $57 to $83 for coal plants with carbon capture and storage, $92 for plug-in hybrid vehicles, and $131 for electric vehicles.
The contraception as carbon reduction conclusion was based on United Nations statistics that 40 percent of worldwide pregnancies are unintentional. If contraception was made available to people who wanted it, those unintentional births could be reduced by as much as 72 percent. Between 2010 and 2050, that would result in curbing the world population growth by half a billion people, according to the UN statistics.
That is a conservative estimate, according to the report, since the UN figures are based solely on the lack of contraception access for married couples, and did not include unintended pregnancy statistics for unmarried women.
The study was funded by the U.K. environmental group Optimum Population Trust (OPT), which has argued that a more responsible attitude toward reproduction could be the answer to many environmental issues such oil, food, and water shortages.
The group has said that family planning programs in poor countries should qualify for environmental aid, since fewer people result in less energy use and fewer emissions.
"It's always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions--the carbon tonnage can't shoot down, as we want, while the population keeps shooting up," Roger Martin, chair of OPT, said in a statement.
Is the practical idea too controversial to be considered because of moral reservations, or will countries warm up to it as not only climate change, but world water supplies become an issue?
"The taboo on mentioning this fact has made the whole climate change debate so far somewhat unreal. Stabilising (sic) population levels has always been essential ecologically, and this study shows it's economically sensible too," said Martin.
It always happens when you try to do some good, doesn't it?
You try to help an old lady cross the road, and she looks at you harshly and says, "So I look old to you?" You tell that special someone that you love her, and she tells you that she's actually enjoying the company of your best friend.
Such is the painful, ironic circumstance at the United Kingdom's Met Office. ("Met" is short for "meteorological.")
You see, according to the Daily Mail, the agency's large weather brains decided to invest in an even larger IBM brain in order to accurately predict gaseous happenings of climate change.
I have no reason to believe these miserable wet people are from the Department of Communities and Local Government.
(Credit: CC Stevie-B/Flickr)This metal mastermind can make a quadrillion calculations in the time in takes you to utter a consonant. In the technical world, this is "petaflop" performance. But it might as well have been a Fosbury Flop to some buzz killers.
For along came some bureaucrats from the Department of Communities and Local Government, declaring that the incredibly intelligent hulk is one of the worst polluters in the United Kingdom. For some reason, they were looking at the emissions in all of the nation's public edifices.
All right, so the climate-calculating colossus produces about 75 percent of its own carbon footprint. I fancy that there are several members of Parliament who may do the same. And the supercomputer really can see into the future, whereas some members may not be able to see much beyond lunch.
The beautifully named Barry Grommett from the Met Office told the Mail: "We would be throwing ourselves back into the Dark Ages of weather forecasting, if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing. It's as simple as that."
Quite. The U.K. bureaucrats have done so much in their attempt to return to the Dark Ages (before climate change?) that the weather men must make a stand.
Katherine Sierra
(Credit: The World Bank)SAN FRANCISCO--How will a shift in carbon reduction play out with the world's poor? This is an issue The World Bank is grappling with as it prepares for the international climate change summit in Copenhagen this December.
Katherine Sierra, the vice president for sustainable development at The World Bank, and Awais Khan, the director of KPMG's Clean Tech Venture Capital Practice, spoke on this topic Tuesday here at the Commonwealth Club.
Along with higher temperatures, climate change is causing rising sea levels, shifts in rain/snow patterns, and an increase in weather-related natural disasters. Although the impact is worldwide, people in developing countries get the brunt of it with severe risk to their agriculture, food, and water, Sierra said.
"We took a major step a couple years ago because we felt we weren't doing as good a job as we should have in integrating environment into our programs," said Sierra. "We actually merged our infrastructure practice with the environmental and social practices."
On top of being more vulnerable to climate change, countries in the developing world have a shortage of infrastructure. According to The World Bank, 1.6 billion people in the developing world still do not have access to electricity, and those who do may have only intermittent service.
"There are areas in Pakistan that have 12 to 14 hours of blackouts per day," said Khan. If the shortest way to fix that problem is through burning coal, he explains, that's what governments will do.
However, being the ninth-largest coal deposit in the world--with 186 billion tons of coal, Pakistan's "government is very favorable to using cleaner coal technologies," Khan said. "Sometimes we don't give enough credit to governments of developing countries."
The event fell on the heels of an article Sierra wrote for The San Francisco Examiner last week, where she explained what The World Bank, an international financial institution that loans money to developing countries, intends to do regarding climate change and the world's poor. Last year, The World Bank gave almost $7.6 billion for energy financing, a third of which went to renewable energy and energy efficiency. Projects included putting in rapid bus transport in five major cities in Mexico and working on smart grids in Turkey.
But another third of the $7.6 billion put forth was given to fund traditional fossil fuels. This is what skeptics generally point to when criticizing The World Bank's initiatives and intentions. The nonprofit Bank Information Center, for example, released a study in February on how The World Bank's energy financing is being felt by developing countries
The organization found that although The World Bank increased funding for renewable energy (by 11 percent), it dramatically increased funding for fossil fuels (by 102 percent) last year. "The bank's continued lending focus on fossil fuels commits many developing countries to fossil-fuel based energy for the next 20 to 40 years," said Heike Mainhardt-Gibbs, a consultant with the Bank Information Center.
The Bank Information Center points out that when developing countries begin to work on greenhouse gas emission reductions, it will be more difficult and expensive because of their extended use of fossil fuels.
The World Bank says the fossil fuels they are funding are increasingly clean coal technology and natural gas, which is the cleanest fossil fuel. "We want hospitals with refrigerators, schools with light bulbs," Sierra said during her talk, "if you look at any projections, they tell us under any circumstance we still need fossil fuels."
This will all be hashed out come December when representatives from over 180 countries meet in Copenhagen to work on a new treaty that addresses global warming. Within this international agreement, countries will look at what is doable and possible to lower greenhouse gas emissions while still trying to get energy to the world's poor.
In his speech in Constitution Hall this week, former Vice President and renewable energy investor Al Gore extolled a stretch goal challenging America to achieve 100% renewable power within 10 years.
The quote: "Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years." And my favorite part: "When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon."
That statement is about like challenging your 2 year old to finish college by the time she is 12. Not exactly practical, more than a little crazy, and likely to be either ignored, or if you push it, to cause lots of therapy sessions by the time she is 8. I will, however, credit him with getting almost every renewable energy platitude I've ever heard into one succinct speech.
He does raise lots of good points about the need for a new energy policy not built around shipping dollars to the MidEast for oil (a definite must), for long term support for renewables (it is critical for us to get off our fits and starts mish mash idea of renewable energy policy), and for moving faster and larger to fight climate change (a topic near and dear to my heart, and one that is only partially helped by making broad statements about how fast the sky is falling, I mean, the glaciers are melting). In fact, there is no better way to give anti renewable energy and climate change naysayers fuel and ammunition than to make statements like these. Any path we go down, I'd still rather challenge that two year old to do something they can achieve, not try and make it through college by age 12 - especially if I'm asking her to pay for it. Slow and steady wins the race.
The core of Al Gore's argument in his speech on the practicality of a 10 year all renewable energy goal boils down to this quote from his speech on fuels:
"What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don't cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?
We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.
And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America."
And this one on costs and technology:
"To those who argue that we do not yet have the technology to accomplish these results with renewable energy: I ask them to come with me to meet the entrepreneurs who will drive this revolution. I've seen what they are doing and I have no doubt that we can meet this challenge.
To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to consider whether the costs of oil and coal will ever stop increasing if we keep relying on quickly depleting energy sources to feed a rapidly growing demand all around the world. When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down."
These quotations, while partially true and very seductive, are highly misleading in this context. The effective conversion rates of that energy to usable electric power or liquid fuel is still horrendously low, and requires lots and lots of capital expenditures, and thousands of miles of new transmission lines to implement. And that's not taking into account the state of technology - as an industry we really are the two year old in my analogy.
So given those conversion rates and the current high capital expenditures per unit of energy, the cost is still 5-20x (depending on what you count) the cost of conventional electric power generation (yes I know, unless you add in the carbon price and environmental externalities, but that's still extra cost any way you slice it . . . unless you'd like to subsidize mine). Frankly no serious analyst is suggesting that within 10 years, given the state of technology and the best case forecast capacity, that solar can make up more than a small single digit fraction of even electricity needs or that wind can make up more than a meaningful minority share (let alone after doubling the global power demand by replacing liquid fuels in cars with electricity, which Al Gore also suggests), especially given lead times on power plants and transmission lines.
Most likely even if the technologies were already cost comparative, which they are not - if you need evidence, just look at our wind and solar industries in their current tizzy because their biggest subsidy programs are up for renewal this year - most analysts wouldn't project a fabled grid parity on cost for renewables for at least the next decade, and certainly not at scale. So Mr. Gore's statements on cost and technology are in part true, but imply a maturity level in these industries that just doesn't exist yet. Given manufacturing scale up issues on the technology, transmission infrastructure requirements at least as large as the new generation requirements, and long lead times on building projects of this size (industry executives point to seven year time frames just to build a single transmission line), probably reaching even significant low double digit percentages of carbon free power within ten years is a stretch (excluding large hydro and nuclear which we already have but are hesitating to expand) across the whole nation. Notwithstanding that California has managed to come close to its target 20% number over the last decade, that's one state leaning on the resources of many states, using the best available sites, federal subsidies paid for from all of our pockets, and that took a decade. When it comes to carbon capture and storage for coal fired generation, a concept with lots of legs - if it works - 10 years just isn't enough time to achieve scale. The first big pilots are scheduled over the next several years, and there are too many unknowns to bet the farm on, without the lead time and capital cost issue. Though still definitely worth trying.
And as far as paying for it, there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle today calculating our Federal government long term liabilities at $450,000 per American already mainly for Medicare and Social Security. Actually trying to replace our entire fossil fuel infrastructure within 10 years would push that to how much? Somebody please do the math before we launch a government funded mission to the moon, or legislate that our citizens pay for it instead. On costs, Mr. Gore made the statement in his speech "Our families cannot stand 10 more years of gas price increases." I agree, but Mr. Gore, your 10 year, hell for leather, man to moon race for 100% renewable energy would guarantee just that.
So while extolling stretch goals for a two year old is probably a good idea, let's keep it within the realm of possibility, and not just make grandiose statements for media effect. Now if Al Gore's silly challenge on renewable energy was simply a trojan horse to get people talking about how to move forward on fighting climate change and addressing our long standing energy policy issues, I'm all for that and am happy to help. After all, the words Al Gore and climate change make for very searchble blog articles! But personally when I make outlandish statements, I do like to bring an modicum of practicality to the discussion.
I will leave you with one final note, and please remember, I am actually a proponent of the ideals in Al Gore's speech, I just prefer to get there in one piece. One theory on the effect of the history of the man on the moon driven space race that Mr. Gore challenges us to copy basically says that we pushed for a single high profile goal so fast and furious that we effectively skipped ahead and outran our infrastructure and capabilities to get a nonscalable shot at the moon in the target time frame. The theory goes on to suggest that's why after reaching the moon so fast we haven't progressed at the same rate in space since, and had we taken it slower, we would have gotten there a few years behind, but might be on Mars by know. Akin in a military campaign to outrunning your supply chain, and then getting your army surrounded and destroyed - or perhaps invading a country half way around the world, winning the war in weeks and forgetting to prepare for the peace. And just to show that I can deliver as many platitudes in one article as Mr. Gore, that's why you never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Energy and environment are the two pillars of everything in our lives. Mr. Gore and I want the same thing, but he thinks we can't afford not to swing for the fences - I think we can't afford to mess it up.
Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is the founding CEO of Carbonflow, founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, Chairman of Cleantech.org, and a blogger for CNET's Green Tech blog.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday that Congress, not the EPA, should regulate greenhouse gases.
EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson hosted a conference call with reporters on Friday where he said that existing law, the Clean Air Act, is "ill-suited" to addressing greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead, Johnson said that Congress should draft legislation to address climate change.
"It's really at the feet of the Congress to come up with good legislation that cuts through what will likely be decades of litigation and regulation," he said on the call.
A document published by the EPA on Friday, called Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), compiles concerns from other government agencies and solicits public comments.
The ANPR was issued in response to a Supreme Court ruling last April that compelled the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide as pollutants if they affect human health.
With the Clean Air Act, the EPA cannot adequately address climate change regulations because of the complexity of the task, which affects other government agencies, the U.S. economy, and potentially individual citizens, Johnson said.
Earlier this week at the G8 meeting of industrialized countries, world leaders called on countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050, but it was unclear whether 1990 or today's levels serve as a baseline.
Although hailed as a victory by the Bush administration, environmentalists said that the targets are too low to avert the most serious effects of climate change.
The Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, lambasted the EPA's move on Friday, saying that "the first thing the next administration will do is toss the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking into the circular file."
Most businesses believe that some sort of climate change regulation that put limits on air pollution will take hold in the next president's administration.
These regulations could let green-tech companies make money from reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But, in general, most start-ups are not expecting to monetize those reductions in the near term.
