Tag Archives: the climate desk

VIDEO: Can We 3D Print Our Way Out Of Climate Change?

by Unique Article Posted on March 25, 2013

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Tech optimists’ crush of the decade is surely 3D printing. It has been heralded as disruptive, democratizing and revolutionary for its non-discriminatory ability to make almost anything: dresses, guns, even houses. The process—also known as “additive manufacturing”—is still expensive and slow, confined to boutique objets d’art or lab-driven medical prototyping. But scaled up, and put in the hands of ordinary consumers via plummeting prices, 3D printing has the potential to slash energy and material costs. Climate Desk asks: can 3D printing be deployed in the ongoing battle against climate change?

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VIDEO: Can We 3D Print Our Way Out Of Climate Change?

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We’re Measuring Energy Efficiency Wrong

by bloksaggfdflajn Posted on March 22, 2013

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This story first appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It is widely assumed that over the coming decades, increased energy efficiency will help the world meet its energy needs and reduce carbon emissions. That may be true, but recent research suggests that energy intensity—a widely used way of measuring efficiency—isn’t the right metric.

Energy intensity is a simple ratio: energy use per dollar of GDP. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the energy intensity of the U.S. economy declined by 1.6 percent per year from 1985 to 2004, suggesting that we’re doing more with less energy.

Energy companies have embraced this idea: “Energy per unit of income as measured by GDP continues to fall, and at an accelerating rate,” asserts BP. “This is true in our outlook to 2030 not only for the global average, but for almost all of the key countries and regions. The combination of energy efficiency gains and a long-term structural shift towards less energy intensive activities as economies develop underpins this trend.” Similarly, ExxonMobil’s Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040 projects that economic output will increase by 80 percent while OECD energy demand remains flat, because “global energy demand does not rise as dramatically as economic growth as a result of declining energy intensity.”

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We’re Measuring Energy Efficiency Wrong

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Climate Change Could Mean Seven Times As Many Katrinas

by Unacoomt Posted on March 18, 2013

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Batten down the hatches, East Coasters: A new study argues that for every one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) of global warming, the US Atlantic seaboard could see up to seven times as many Katrina-sized hurricanes.

That’s the conclusion of Aslak Grinsted, a climatologist at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, who led an effort to match East Coast storm surge records from the last 90 years with global temperatures. His results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the strongest hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace with only half the level of warming currently projected by scientists.

Red represents hurricane projections with one degree (C) global warming; blue represents no warming. The gap between these lines suggests that a warmer climate will produce more frequent hurricanes; the gap is widest at the top, meaning the biggest increase will be with the biggest storms. Courtesy PNAS

“There is a sensitivity to warming, and it is surprisingly large,” Grinsted said.

The study compiled storm surge measurements from tide gauges at six locations on the East and Gulf Coasts, filtering out the effects of seasonal cycles, daily tides, and overall sea level rise to isolate the impact of storms. Next, these records were stacked against both global temperatures and a series of other climatic factors, like natural water temperature cycles and regional rainfall. The result? Global temperatures turned out to be one of the best predictors for hurricane activity. Using computer models, Grinsted found that a one-degree (C) rise in global temperatures could multiply extreme hurricane frequency by two to seven times.

When it comes to extreme weather, hurricanes are among the most costly events—and also among the least understood. Most of our understanding of the link between hurricanes and climate change traces to a research paper released in 2010 that argued that hurricanes worldwide could become up to eleven percent more intense by 2100; Grinsted’s research adds the wrinkle that the biggest storms, in addition to becoming bigger, are likely to happen more often. That is, in the US: Grinsted said exact projections would likely differ for other coastlines across the world.

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Climate Change Could Mean Seven Times As Many Katrinas

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Could Waxman’s New Bill Offer New Hope for a Carbon Tax?

by charlenedean Posted on March 12, 2013

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It’s been a few years now since Representatives Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) led an ambitious but doomed charge to get a carbon-pricing bill through Congress.

But in the wake of President Obama’s climate-centric State of the Union and Inaugural addresses, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are grinding out bills that would make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. Last month, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced plans to introduce a bill this spring to place a $20-per-ton tax on CO2, a move they argue could raise $1.2 trillion over the next decade. And today, Rep. Waxman, along with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), hopped on the bandwagon with their own draft carbon-pricing scheme. Waxman’s legislation hasn’t been formally introduced into Congress, but is open for public feedback until April 12.

The two bills both aim to confront climate change by harnessing the power of the free market, a spokesperson for Rep. Waxman said, but offer different mechanisms for doing so. The Waxman bill would target power plants, for example, while the Boxer bill would focus on “upstream” emitters like coal mines and oil refineries. But both bills are likely to undergo tweaks before being officially introduced.

The as-yet-unnamed Waxman bill would require the EPA and Treasury Department to collaborate on assessing how much big polluters are emitting, and levying an appropriate fee.

The exact price per ton of carbon pollution is still an open question (the lawmakers are seeking public input on this and other issues), but the draft bill purports to be based on the principle that “all revenue generated by the carbon pollution fee should be returned the American people.” Options for this could include using the money to lower the federal deficit, or helping the public shoulder higher energy costs.

Franz Matzner, a government affairs analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said despite the bad track record for past bills like this, now isn’t the time to be cynical.

“Waxman and the others have done exactly the right thing in putting this bill out,” he said, “and reminding Congress that there’s important work to be done on their end for climate change.”

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Could Waxman’s New Bill Offer New Hope for a Carbon Tax?

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MAP: Is the Next Fukushima in Your Backyard?

by Sheeritwern Posted on March 11, 2013

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Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. The $125 billion incident precipitated an identity crisis among the world’s big users of nuclear power, particularly Germany, which was so spooked that it vowed to shut down every one of its nuke plants by 2022.

But here in the United States, there’s no sign of any impending nuclear phaseout, despite the steady parade of meltdown scares reported in a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS dug into public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nuclear industry’s top federal regulator, and found that, in 2012, 12 different nuclear power plants experienced “near miss” events, defined as an incident that multiplies the likelihood of a core meltdown by at least a factor of 10. The reasons range from broken coolant pumps to fires to “failures to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering secure areas”; in some cases aging equipment was at fault, and two plants were repeat offenders. One California plant already ranks high in vulnerability to earthquakes. In most cases, the study charges, weak oversight from the NRC was to blame.

In the map below, click on a plant to see what caused it to have a brush with meltdown in 2012:

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MAP: Is the Next Fukushima in Your Backyard?

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Can This Contraption Make Fracking Greener?

by 9ji7g4x Posted on March 5, 2013

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Although natural gas production emits less CO2 than other fossil fuels, it still spits plenty of junk into the atmosphere. But backers of a new gadget released yesterday say they’ve hit on a way to help frackers clean up their act.

Boosters of natural gas often flaunt the stuff as a “clean” fossil fuel, because when it burns—in a power plant, say—it releases far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil. But with the growth of fracking nationwide, some academics and environmentalists have flagged a silent problem that threatens to undermine the purported climate gains of natural gas: “fugitive” methane emissions.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, even more so than CO2 over the short-term. And natural gas production creates a lot of it: The EPA predicts that methane from the natural gas industry will be one of the top sources of non-CO2 emissions in coming decades. A 2011 federal study found that taken all around, the total greenhouse footprint for shale gas could be up to twice that of coal over a 20-year period. The catch is that it doesn’t have to be so bad. Much of that methane is leaking out (hence “fugitive”) unnecessarily from gas wells, pipelines, and storage facilities—so much so that the Environmental Defense Fund calls methane leakage from natural gas operations “the single largest US source of short-term climate-forcing gases“.

But nailing down exactly how much methane leakage there is has proved a bit challenging: Some independent academic studies say up to nine percent of all the natural gas extracted leaks out, while the official EPA figure is less than three percent. Academics, government agencies, and environmental NGOs are at work to shore up this figure, but the effort can be costly and require teams of specialized physicists and chemists.

Enter Picarro, a California-based scientific instrument company that yesterday released a new gadget the company says will streamline locating leaks and finding out how much methane is streaming out of them. The “Surveyor” attaches to any car, and consists of a computer, an air sampling hose, and a GPS device. Together, says Picarro CEO Michael Woelk, they can sniff out methane and pinpoint the exact spot—like a crack in a pipe—it’s coming from, then feed the data to any web-enabled mobile device in a format understandable without an atmospheric physics PhD.

“All we have to do is drive downwind of the source,” Woelk said.

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Can This Contraption Make Fracking Greener?

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This Cheat Sheet Will Make You Win Every Climate Argument

by d2wk58 Posted on March 4, 2013

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“I don’t see what all those environmentalists are worried about,” sneers your Great Uncle Joe. “Carbon dioxide is harmless, and great for plants!”

Okay. Take a deep breath. If you’re not careful, comments like this can result in dinner-table screaming matches. Luckily, we have a secret weapon: A flowchart that will help you calmly slay even the most outlandish and annoying of climate-denying arguments:

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This Cheat Sheet Will Make You Win Every Climate Argument

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NASA Scientists Are Turning LA Into One Big Climate-Change Lab

by pitery Posted on March 1, 2013

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This story first appeared on The Atlantic Cities website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Southern California’s Mount Wilson is a lonesome, hostile peak—prone to sudden rock falls, sometimes ringed by wildfire—that nevertheless has attracted some of the greatest minds in modern science.


City 2.0: Buy the Ebook

George Ellery Hale, one of the godfathers of astrophysics, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904 and divined that sunspots were magnetic. His acolyte Edwin Hubble used a huge telescope, dragged up by mule train, to prove the universe was expanding. Even Albert Einstein made a pilgrimage in the 1930s to hobnob with the astronomers (and suffered a terrible hair day, a photo shows).

Today, Mount Wilson is the site of a more terrestrial but no less ambitious endeavor. Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and elsewhere are turning the entire Los Angeles metro region into a state-of-the-art climate laboratory. From the ridgeline, they deploy a mechanical lung that senses airborne chemicals and a unique sunbeam analyzer that scans the skies over the Los Angeles Basin. At a sister site at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), researchers slice the clouds with a shimmering green laser, trap air samples in glass flasks, and stare at the sun with a massive mirrored contraption that looks like God’s own microscope.

These folks are the foot soldiers in an ambitious, interagency initiative called the Megacities Carbon Project. They’ve been probing L.A.’s airspace for more than a year, with the help of big-name sponsors like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and the California Air Resources Board. If all goes well, by 2015 the Megacities crew and colleagues working on smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Boston will have pinned down a slippery piece of climate science: an empirical measurement of a city’s carbon footprint.

If that doesn’t sound like something Einstein would scarf down energy bars and hoof up a mountain to check out, give it time. It promises to be a groundbreaking development in the worldwide fight against global warming.

Part of the Megacities team at the CLARS facility in Pasadena. Left to right: Thomas Pongetti, Riley Duren, Eric Kort, Stan Sander. John Metcalfe

Historically, researchers have tried to understand anthropogenic global warming by looking at it from the big picture—first across the planet, then by regions and countries. But two things happened in the past few years that turned their frame of reference. First, they realized that the emissions of a large landmass are extremely difficult to measure. The signal from fossil fuels gets tangled up in a bunch of other things, such as byproducts from the natural ecosystem and agriculture.

Second, they encountered a rash of enthusiasm-killing gridlock in the United States government, with the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks ending in a muddle and a 2010 cap-and-trade bill dying in the Senate. It became clear to environmental stakeholders that if any policy was going to happen on cutting emissions, it was going to be at the scale of states and cities.

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NASA Scientists Are Turning LA Into One Big Climate-Change Lab

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Coal Country Bank First to Report Carbon Footprint to Shareholders

by d2wk58 Posted on February 21, 2013

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There’s a growing interest among enviros these days in combating climate change with direct offensives against the fossil fuel industry, sights locked on its bottom line. The idea is that while we scramble to invent more efficient light bulbs and throw up solar panels, we also chip away at the mountain of money that gives the industry its power, by turning shareholders on to the idea that unwise investments can make them accomplices in global warming.

Activist investment is nothing new, of course, the best-known case being the massive movement to divest from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. But it’s gaining traction in the realm of climate change: Bill McKibben in particular has campaigned recently for colleges and universities to divest their endowments from fossil fuels, and Al Gore this month backed the efforts of Harvard students to do so.

Shareholders at a host of corporations nationwide—including Exxon Mobil, fracking giant Nabors, and, incongruously, Dunkin’ Donuts—have climate-related resolutions on the table this year that aim to require companies to account to shareholders on everything from mountaintop removal to greenhouse gas emissions to renewable energy use. This week, an unexpected institution became the first major bank to join their ranks and have its climate impact interrogated by shareholders. From the LA Times:

The resolution, which follows years of protests over banks financing certain coal operations, is to be included in proxy material being sent to shareholders of PNC Financial Services Group of Pittsburgh before the bank’s April 23 annual meeting.

It asks PNC to assess and report back to shareholders on how its lending results in greenhouse gas emissions that can alter the climate, posing financial risks for its corporate borrowers and risks to its own reputation.

PNC is the only major bank based in Appalachia, a region where coal and gas extraction is a major business. It has long lent to mining companies, including those engaged in mountaintop removal, which involves blowing up peaks to reach coal seams below and has been blamed for degrading landscapes, destroying habitat and polluting streams.

You might not expect a bank smack dab in the heart of coal country to have the most environmentally progressive shareholders, but then again PNC, heavily entwined with the coal industry but not as unbreakably massive as, say, Bank of America, could be fertile ground for climate leadership. The bank has in recent years tried to give itself a green makeover, but apparently not enough to satisfy the shareholders behind the resolution, including a Roman Catholic group and Walden Asset Management. The case PNC ultimately makes to its investors should be an interesting study in the practical power of wielding shares as a weapon against climate change.

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Coal Country Bank First to Report Carbon Footprint to Shareholders

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BP to Government: $21 Billion Fine is ‘Excessive’

by MalenMajure469 Posted on February 20, 2013

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This story first appeared in The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A former Illinois congressional candidate and a government watchdog organization have teamed up to sue the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency should bar dark money groups from funding political ads.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by David Gill, his campaign committee and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is the first to challenge how the IRS regulates political spending by social welfare nonprofits, campaign-finance experts say.

As ProPublica has reported, these nonprofits, often called dark money groups because they don’t have to identify their donors, have increasingly become major players in politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in early 2010.

BP has already accepted criminal responsibility for the disaster, pleading guilty last November to manslaughter and lying to Congress and paying $4.5 billion in fines. It reached a separate $7.8 billion settlement earlier last year with thousands of local individuals that suffered economic damages because of the oil disaster.

But Bondy indicated the company had become stuck trying to reach a deal on the big ticket item: up to $21 billion in fines for environmental damage arising from the oil disaster.

The fines, which would be levied under the Clean Water Act, would go directly for coastal restoration in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf states. More than 40 lawyers for federal and state governments are expected to be in court on Monday.

At issue are BP’s efforts to stop the doomed Macondo well, which gushed for three months before it was finally sealed off by company engineers.

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BP to Government: $21 Billion Fine is ‘Excessive’

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