Tag Archives: the climate desk

Ontario Cares Aboot Coal

by 1LymSlagter473 Posted on January 17, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, will become the first jurisdiction in North America to boot coal completely out of its energy mix, the province’s Minister of Energy, Chris Bentley, announced last week. By the end of 2013, Ontario will shutter 17 of its 19 coal-fired power plants, leaving less than one percent of the province’s energy mix provided by coal, and close the last two next year, a decision Bentley says was fueled by concern about global climate change and local health.

The phase-out has been coming down the pipeline since 2003, and it’s already paying off: Canada’s Pembina Institute found that greenhouse emissions from Ontario’s energy sector fell by 30 million tons in the last decade.

The move is made somewhat easier by the fact that Ontario was never a major coal addict to begin with: In 2011, less than three percent of its total power generation came from coal; that same year in the US, the share was 42 percent. And part of what has tended to make coal so intractible in the US—thousands of jobs on the line—is a non-issue for Ontario, which never had its own coal mining industry, importing most of its supply from the US, Bentley said. The province, although a net electricity exporter, also imports a little of its power from adjacent US states and Canadian provinces; a spokesperson for Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator said they had no way to know whether any of the imported power came from coal-fired plants.

Ramping down coal over the last several years has given Bentley time to shore up other energy resources to fill the supply gap, including a booming wind industry—which more than tripled in the last five years—and, like in the US, a growing dependency on natural gas.

Down here south of the border, although our appetite for coal is waning, industry lobbyists and GOP pols from states like West Virginia are raising hell, and we’re still pretty far from zero. And even though the US has its own unique challenges in confronting coal compared to Ontario, Bentley says he learned one thing from his experience cutting it out that can apply to his US counterparts: “There are far more people who are supportive than the critics would like you to believe.”

From – 

Ontario Cares Aboot Coal

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Ontario Cares Aboot Coal

The Pro-Nukes Environmental Movement

by kowalski099 Posted on January 15, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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

James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, is one of the most impassioned and trusted voices on global warming. People listen closely to what he says about how drastically the climate is changing.

But when Hansen suggests what to do about it, many of those same people tune him out. Some even roll their eyes. What message is he peddling that few seemingly want to hear? It’s twofold: No. 1, solar and wind power cannot meet the world’s voracious demand for energy, especially given the projected needs of emerging economies like India and China, and No. 2, nuclear power is our best hope to get off of fossil fuels, which are primarily responsible for the heat-trapping gases cooking the planet.

Many in the environmental community say that renewable energy is a viable solution to the climate problem. So do numerous energy wonks, including two researchers who penned a 2009 cover story in Scientific American asserting that “wind, water, and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy” by 2030. Hansen calls claims like this the equivalent of “believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here: 

The Pro-Nukes Environmental Movement

Posted in Bunn, GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Pro-Nukes Environmental Movement

Study: It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Enviro Groups Botched the Climate Fight

by BayalaHillesland628 Posted on January 15, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This article first appeared in the Guardian as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A Harvard academic has put the blame squarely for America’s failure to act on climate change on environmental groups. She also argues that there is little prospect Barack Obama will put climate change on the top of his agenda in his second term.

In a research paper, due to be presented at a Harvard forum next month, scholar Theda Skocpol in effect accuses the DC-based environmental groups of political malpractice, saying they were blind to extreme Republican opposition to their efforts.

Environmental groups overlooked growing opposition to environmental protections among conservative voters and underestimated the rising force of the tea party, believing—wrongly, as it turned out—they could still somehow win over Republican members of Congress through “insider grand bargaining.”

That fatal misreading of the political realities—namely, the extreme polarization of Congress and the tea party’s growing influence among elected officials—doomed the effort to get a climate law through Congress. It will also make it more difficult to achieve climate action in the future, she added.

Continue Reading »

This article – 

Study: It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Enviro Groups Botched the Climate Fight

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Study: It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Enviro Groups Botched the Climate Fight

Why New York’s Sandy Commission Recommendations Matter

by ghd12australia Posted on January 14, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the The Atlantic Cities and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

From a behavioral perspective, the hardest thing about adapting to the slow process of climate change is creating a sense of urgency. After a close call with Hurricane Irene a couple years back, and a horrible clash with Hurricane Sandy this past fall, New York is beginning to accept the fact that when it comes to weather patterns along its coasts, there’s a terrifying new normal.

Late last week, just two months after Sandy, a state commission released a massive, 200-plus page blueprint on ways to develop resilience in the face of tomorrow’s environment PDF. The NYS 2100 Commission—one of several formed by Governor Andrew Cuomo following Sandy—evaluated the state’s critical infrastructure systems and recommended a gradient of goals, from broad to specific, to reduce their vulnerability.

“There is no doubt that building resilience will require investment, but it will also reduce the economic damage and costs of responding to future storms and events, while improving the everyday operations of our critical systems,” write commission co-chairs Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation and Felix Rohatyn of Lazard in a foreword.

While the commission offered statewide suggestions, its emphasis fell naturally on the New York City metro area—especially coastal parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island—where Sandy hit hardest.

The report’s recommendations were based on five characteristics of resiliency: spare capacity (e.g. establishing backup systems, such as alternative transportation routes), flexibility (favoring “soft” solutions that can be modified over time, like improved hazard maps and evacuation plans), limited failure (designing infrastructure networks, especially power grids, to shutdown in pieces instead of wholes), rapid rebounds (initiating preemptive response strategies, like creating fleets of portable generators), and constantly learning.

Ideas produced by this model of resiliency cross a number of infrastructure sectors. Some of the broadest ones touch on the insurance and financial sides of resilience. The commission recommends considering ways to pre-fund disaster recovery, for instance, and also the establishment of an infrastructure bank to coordinate and maximize the investments bound to occur in coming years. A general strengthening of the energy grid, especially securing critical systems, is also suggested.

Many of the recommendations specific to New York City fall in the category of land use. The former includes a host of “green infrastructure” initiatives. These take the form of restoring wetlands and oyster reefs in New York Harbor to break up storm surges, or building an archipelago of small islands in front of the harbor, or dumping old subway cars into the sea to form barrier reefs. (As Sarah Goodyear recently pointed out, even green infrastructure is subject to destruction during major storms.) The commission also suggests a comprehensive assessment of a true storm surge barrier on the harbor, estimating the cost between $7 billion and $29 billion.

Even more city-relevant recommendations focus on solidifying the transportation network (which, it should be said, recovered rather well post-Sandy). The commission encourages measures to limit subway flooding, including waterproof roll-down doors at the foot of subway entrances, mechanical vent closures, and inflatable plugs or bladders for the tunnels themselves. It also suggests a general increase in pump capacity and upgrades of infrastructure subject to seawater erosion. More resilient airports—featuring raised runways, better drainage valves, and more emergency fuel storage—also get mentioned.

The biggest transportation suggestion is what the commission calls “redundancy.” Here the commission’s idea is to create so many overlapping routes into and out of the city that if one fails the others can continue to function. Recommendations include expanded intercity rail networks, more surface transit, additional ferry service, and continued support of non-motorized travel modes like biking.

There are a few particular projects endorsed by the commission to meet this redundancy goal. Some are the usual suspects: a new transit tunnel across the Hudson, expanded Long Island Railroad service, and Metro North commuter rail access at Penn Station on the west side (instead of only Grand Central on the east). The most novel idea is the establishment of a vast bus rapid transit network—beginning perhaps with a “BRT task force” created this year—to complement the rail system and fortify inter-borough corridors.

The New York Times, reporting last week on a draft of the report that seems similar to the final version, wondered if the recommendations weren’t too sprawling and vague. The Times also pointed out that a “disaster preparedness commission” already exists under state law, making the present one rather superfluous. Last, the paper notes that commissions and reports mean little if they aren’t followed by political action.

All these critiques of the NYS 2100 Commission are well taken. Still we shouldn’t forget that climate adaptation policy remains pretty uncharted territory. These problems are very new, the solutions largely untested. At some point quite soon New York (and other vulnerable cities) will have to select and implement adaptation measures. For now it’s at least a partial sign of urgency that we’re building consensus around the best ones.

View original:  

Why New York’s Sandy Commission Recommendations Matter

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Why New York’s Sandy Commission Recommendations Matter

Shell Gets Massive, Involuntary Aid Package from Alaska, the US Coast Guard, and You

by biglermyrta910 Posted on January 12, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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

I’ve been working this case relatively nonstop since the 27th.

Petty Officer First Class David Mosley didn’t sound all that tired when I spoke with him yesterday, but, then, he’s a public affairs specialist, a professional. A few times he stumbled over his words, once or twice forgot specific numbers. On the whole, though, no problems as he walked me through the massive complement of US Coast Guard staff and sea vessels and aircraft deployed to fix Shell’s mistake.

Two weeks from yesterday, the Kulluk, a drilling rig managed by Noble Drilling and owned by Shell, broke free of its tow lines as tug boats struggled in inclement weather to move it away from the Alaskan shore. On Dec. 31, it ran aground within an important bird area on Kodiak Island. A unified command comprised of representatives of Shell, Noble, the Coast Guard, the state of Alaska, and local representatives spent the next week and half determining whether the rig was safe to move and, ultimately, moving it to a nearby harbor. Some 700 people were involved in the effort by the time it had been safely docked.

How many of that 700 were from the Coast Guard? “That’s a very good question,” Mosley told me. He noted that “the command center at Coast Guard Center Anchorage was very much involved in the unified command,” proving the point by listing just the people who came to mind:

Captain Mehler, the federal on-scene coordinator, all the way down to your storekeepers and yeomen and people like myself, public affairs specialists, who were all swept up and involved in this in some way. The people who provided support on Base Kodiak and Air Station Kodiak, moving gear around and making things happen on the base. Maintenance crews with the helicopters, the C-130s. You’ve got the crews that were involved with the Alex Haley. We had stationed the Coast Guard Cutter Hickory and the Coast Guard Cutter Spar, both of which are 225-foot buoy tenders that were activated and would have come out to the scene as needed.

The Alex Haley has a crew of 90, plus 10 officers and a four-person aircrew. The Spar and Hickory each have a complement of about 50 people. He continued:

We brought people in, whether it was our strike teams or other folks that came in from the lower 48, from California and as far away as the Carolinas. We brought in these folks that are specialized in responding to these situations. It was not only a large response locally, it was a far-reaching response.

Those folks from the Carolinas, for example, were media specialists, brought in to help Mosley handle the onslaught of questions about Shell’s latest Arctic mistake during a slow news week. The strike teams are oil spill response experts, on stand by in case the worst case happened. (It didn’t.)

Mosley explained who foots the bill for a scenario like this. There’s a federal fund, the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, that was set up after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. The fund is financed by a per-barrel excise tax on imported fuel as well as “cost recovery” from at-fault companies and any civil penalties imposed on a company responsible for a spill. It’s not clear how that money might be applied here; Mosley suggested that would be “hammered out” with Shell.

When it comes to search-and-rescue, Mosley says not to expect money back. “I have yet to see an incident in which we do search and rescue that we look for reimbursement,” he said. “That’s why the taxpayers pay us to do our jobs.” Among the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue efforts in this case? Three round-trip Jayhawk helicopter flights out to the Kulluk, each trip rescuing six members of the rig’s 18-person crew. Bringing people back onto the rig to test its integrity. Overflights to assess damage. The Coast Guard also reached out to the Department of Defense to borrow two Chinook helicopters to transport equipment. All of that? On your tab.

When the unified command first set up shop after the Kulluk‘s grounding, it was in a Shell office in Anchorage. As the number of people involved in the response swelled, the group decamped to a nearby hotel. Among those who made the trip was Shannon Miller, who works for Alaska’s division of spill prevention and response. Probably since its role was more modest, Miller had a better estimate of how many employees of the state of Alaska worked with the command. Twenty-two, she guessed — but that doesn’t include other resources, like the emergency towing package provided by the state.

Alaska has a strategy to get its money back. The costs the state accrues are internally invoiced and calculated, and Shell will be sent a bill for whatever portion of those invoices the state feels is appropriate. (One can assume that this, too, will be “hammered out.”) The process, Miller expects, will take months. There is also an emergency response fund that can allocate money for the incident. The fund collects revenue through a two-cent-per-barrel surcharge on oil produced in the state, as well any as money recovered from companies at fault.

I reached out to Shell in both Houston and Alaska to gauge the company’s willingness to absorb costs incurred by public entities. Neither location made a representative available to answer questions by deadline. See update at bottom. The company did clear up one gauzy point, albeit to other outlets. As we reported earlier this week, Shell was motivated to move the Kulluk when it did to avoid paying tax to Alaska on the rig in the new year. From United Press International:

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he questioned claims made by Shell that Kulluk was towed from its grounding site because of inclement weather.

“Reports that financial considerations rather than safety may have factored into Shell’s considerations, if true, are profoundly troubling,” he said in a letter to Shell Oil President Marvin Odum.

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith told Bloomberg News that avoiding a Jan. 1 tax issue in the state was “a consideration” but “not among the main drivers for our decision to begin moving the Kulluk.”

Shell made a bad bet. Hoping in part to avoid an estimated $6 million tax bill, it decided to risk the stormy weather on Dec. 27. The bet didn’t pay off.

Lucky for the company, it wasn’t only betting with its own money. It was gambling yours, too.

Update: Shell’s Curtis Smith provided this statement by email in response to my questions:

We will live up to all of our obligations related to the response and recovery of the Kulluk. Throughout this incident, we have spared nothing in terms of personnel or assets to reach this safe outcome.

More here:

Shell Gets Massive, Involuntary Aid Package from Alaska, the US Coast Guard, and You

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Shell Gets Massive, Involuntary Aid Package from Alaska, the US Coast Guard, and You

New Federal Report: Climate Change is Really, Really Scary

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 11, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Say what you want about the Obama administration’s relative ignoring of climate issues: Many of his top scientists are paying rapt attention, and they think we’re about to get our butts kicked—although dumping the news at 4pm on a Friday gives some indication of where it sits in federal priorities.

The National Climate Assessment is produced by the US Global Change Research Program, which is tasked with collating climate research from a wide variety of federal agencies and, every few years, distilling it into one major report. The latest, a first draft, is the third such report (the last was in 2009), product of a 1990 law that requires the White House to produce semi-regular updates on climate science to Congress. Today’s report echoes the themes of earlier editions, and paints a picture that is all the more grim for being an unsurprising confirmation of the dangers we’ve come to know all too well. Here’s the top six things for you to worry about this weekend, according to the report:

  1. Climate change is definitely caused by human activities. Always nice to hear government officials acknowledge this essential fact. And the report concedes that our only hope of curbing warming is to kick our addiction to greenhouse-gas spewing fossil fuels.
  2. Extreme weather is increasing, and that’s our fault, too. In particular, searing temperatures, heavy rain, and prolonged drought.
  3. Weather isn’t the only threat we have to worry about. The list sounds like the side-effect warnings at the end of a prescription drug commercial: decreased air quality, insect-borne diseases, and “threats to mental health” are all on the docket for the coming decades.
  4. Our infrastructure is getting hammered, and we’re not spending enough to save it. Floods are destroying farmland; extreme heat is damaging roads, rail lines, and airports; and military installations are at risk.
  5. Food and water security will be up in the air. Especially in water-scarce regions like the Southwest, decreasing snowpack and shrinking groundwater supplies will spark competition for water between “agricultural, municipal, and environmental” uses. At the same time, heavy floods could put water quality at risk with sediment and chemical contaminates. And by mid-century, efforts to artificially protect agriculture (like expanded irrigation) could be over-ridden by temperature and precipitation extremes.
  6. Climate change is hitting plants and animals just as hard as us. Beaches, forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems could shrink or disappear, especially a problem when they play a role in mitigating the impact from extreme weather. And warming, acidifying seas could slam sea life.

The report is sure to get thoroughly dissected by reporters in the coming week; keep an eye out for more details to come.

Credit – 

New Federal Report: Climate Change is Really, Really Scary

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on New Federal Report: Climate Change is Really, Really Scary

Australia’s Climate Inferno "Encroaching on Entirely New Territory"

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 11, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Smoke near Cooma, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013 New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Australia’s top government-appointed climate commissioner says this week’s heatwave is occurring amid record-breaking weather around the world. “This has been a landmark event for me,” Professor Tim Flannery told Climate Desk from his home in Melbourne. “When you start breaking records, and you do it consistently, and you see it over and over again, that is a good indication there’s a shift underway—this is not just within the normal variation of things.”

Flannery is perhaps best known in the US for his 2005 book, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change; Downunder, he was named Australian of the Year in 2007, and appointed chief climate commissioner in 2011 by the current Labor government, which tasked him with communicating climate science to the Australian public (a government-funded job that may well sound unimaginable to American readers).

Flannery says the harsh weather is a sign of things to come: “What we’ve seen is the bell curve shift to the hot end. The number of very hot days is increasing quite dramatically. But we’re also encroaching on entirely new territory.”

That new territory involves record-breaking temperatures. The number of consecutive days where the national average maximum temperature topped 102.2°F (39°C) was broken in the last week, almost doubling the previous record set in 1973. There are now new first- and third-place winners for highest temperatures on Australia’s books, too. The number of record high temperatures have outstripped the number of record low temperatures at a ratio 3-to-1 over the last decade, according to the Bureau of Meterology.

Tim Flannery Mark Coulson, 5th World Conference of Science Journalists.

Several fires are still burning in Tasmania, Australia’s lush island state, where the crisis began last week. The cost of the destruction of 200 buildings there is pegged at $A50 million ($US52.7m), according to the Australian newspaper. Luckily—perhaps shockingly given the extent of damage—lives were spared.

Statewide total fire bans remain in force across the weekend in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), where at last count more than 95 fires are still burning, with 18 out of control. NSW Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that new fires on Saturday might be “beyond the ability for fire services to suppress.”

And don’t think there’s any rest from wild weather. Not content which just record-breaking heat, the skies are now hurling Narelle—a category 4 severe tropical storm comparable to a strong Category 3 hurricane—at the North West of the vast continent. Communities living along a coastline roughly as long as the stretch from New York to North Carolina are bracing for gale force winds and heavy rains.

Tropical Cyclone Narelle off the West Australian coast Australian Bureau of Meterology

“There is no doubt,” Flannery said, “that climate change is playing a significant roll in this. If this was just one record-breaking event you might write it off as a statistical anomaly. But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing records falling around the world.”

Flannery told Climate Desk the Australian government has confirmed he will hold his seat for the next two years, but it might not play out that way. The conservative opposition party is likely to erode the Climate Commission if elected, something that will be decided by a deepy divided electorate towards the end of this year. The election promises to be fought over the government’s carbon tax. Opposition leader Tony Abbott famously made a “blood pledge” to repeal the tax which will lead to a carbon trading scheme.

Continue reading: 

Australia’s Climate Inferno "Encroaching on Entirely New Territory"

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Australia’s Climate Inferno "Encroaching on Entirely New Territory"

On Sea Level Rise, More Experts Lean Toward High End

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 7, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If you want to imagine what the future, climate-changed world will look like, one of the biggest questions is by how much, exactly, the sea levels will increase. Rising tides have already become one of the most prominent climate change impacts, threatening coastal communities from Virginia to Palau and amplifying the damage of storms like Sandy. Estimates vary: 2007’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report pegged the figure at somewhere around a foot by 2100, while a December study from NOAA went as high as 6.6 feet. But a swath of recent studies put the estimate at around three feet, including a report out Sunday in Nature Climate Change. From NBC:

Melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland may push up global sea levels more than 3 feet by the end of this century, according to a scientific poll of experts that brings a degree of clarity to a murky and controversial slice of climate science.

Such a rise in the seas would displace millions of people from low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail, and cost coastal mega-cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other infrastructure to combat the tides.

“The consequences are horrible,” Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the study, said.

While efforts to stem the rising sea, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, are always worth pursuing, in light of the mounting evidence for large-scale changes it seems prudent for more coastal cities to take a lead from places like New York and start preparing for a closer coastline.

Read original article:  

On Sea Level Rise, More Experts Lean Toward High End

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on On Sea Level Rise, More Experts Lean Toward High End

A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 4, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the midst of this week’s fiscal cliff hullabaloo, with tax hikes for many Americans, tax breaks for Big Oil, and a superstorm of righteous outrage over withheld storm aid, you’d be forgiven for not noticing the climate win that slipped in at the eleventh hour: a long-awaited extension of the wind energy Production Tax Credit, a federal incentive that has for many years been the bread and butter of the wind industry, providing $1 billion each year to keep wind competitive against heavily-subsidized fossil fuels.

Despite being a record-setting year for wind installations, 2012 was a nail-biter for many in the industry, who feared Congress would axe the credit and send the industry from boom to bust, as has happened several times in the past when the credit has not been extended. The industry’s trade group was a clearinghouse for grim prognostications: Some 35,000 jobs lost and up to a ninety-percent drop in wind projects, should the credit not be passed. Even with the extension, the industry’s financial backers were so spooked by last year’s uncertainty that investments are almost sure to fall in 2013.

“We’ve effectively killed 2013 by waiting this long to extend the PTC,” Jacob Susman, CEO of wind installer OwnEnergy, told me a few months ago.

And while the extension was an excuse for wind folks from Colorado to Iowa to Boston to pop an extra bottle of champagne, the industry ain’t out of the woods yet: The recent extension is only for one year, which means the battle to wring money from Congress will need to be fought all over again in just a few months. Indeed, the complaint one hears most often from industry leaders is that the constant political kowtowing necessary to secure this essential tax credit makes it nearly impossible for the industry to secure long-term growth. That’s very different from fossil fuels, whose benefits, as my colleague Andy Kroll points out, are “baked into the tax code.”

But this extension comes with at least one big improvement: In the past, to secure the credit, wind projects had to be delivering power to the grid before the credit’s expiration date at year’s end. That led to a huge push to get projects up and running in the final months of 2012, but also threw up a barrier to any projects that got started too late. This version sets a lower bar: The credit is now available to any projects that break ground in 2013, giving everyone from turbine manufactorers to installers to investors much more breathing room on a realistic timescale, which David Roberts at Grist says is equivalent to extending the old version for two or three years.

The challenge for Big Wind this year will be to work with Congress to find ways to keep the industry competitive in the long term, while unleashing it from year-to-year political turmoil.

“The extension is a very important piece of legislation,” industry researcher Matt Kaplan told the Financial Times. “The big question, though, is what comes next.”

From: 

A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal