Psyche, Science, and Society

McKibben: Act now or else…

Thanks to Tomdispatch, Bill McKibben reminds us that we have only milliseconds, historically speaking, to make massive environmental changes, or all humanity will suffer the consequences:

The World at 350
A Last Chance for Civilization

By Bill McKibben

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it’s a tough diagnosis. It’s like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don’t bring it down right away, you’re going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you’re lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It’s like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it’s worse than that because we’re not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas — hard. Instead of slowing down, we’re pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year — two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we’ve managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don’t forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that, if we didn’t act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn’t yet know what was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: “…if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands.)

We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty — a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we’re the Coyote — because “doing everything right” means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That’s possible — we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase “gas tax holiday” has danced into our vocabulary, it’s hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton’s gambit didn’t sway many voters). And if it’s hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it’s not impossible, we’ve got a duty to try. In fact, it’s about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won’t exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That’s the limit we face.

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.

Copyright 2008 Bill McKibben

Add comment May 12th, 2008

NPR finds anthropogenic climate change denier “cute”

On Friday, as I drove into work, I heard a ridiculous NPR piece on 15 year old Kristen Byrnes, who has a web site claiming to disprove anthopogenic global warming. While Byrnes seems like an energetic, feisty girl who one roots for in he long run, the piece presented no evidence that she actually knew anything about science or that her views should be taken seriously. When someone makes claims that thousands of scientists, as well as Al Gore are full of crap, surely the media has an obligation to make some effort to evaluate heir arguments before giving them five minutes of exposure to millions of listeners. But NPR increasingly view substance as anathema to the entertainment function of its “news” shows.

In addition to the NPR listeners, Byrnes herself should be upset at being so condescended to by NPR. The fact that a 15 y.o. girl pontificates on climate science is “cute”  was the message. I once was a prodigy (in math) and am aware of how irritating the condescension by the media and other adults can be. I hated it when adults would ask about my work, only to ignore what I said and smile at how “cute” it was that a 14 year old thought he had something interesting to say.

Deltoid links to a number of sites providing commentary on the piece and critique of Byrnes’ claims.

1 comment April 20th, 2008

Another reminder, Lord Stern warns climate sitation dire

Another voice reminding us of how desperate the climate situation is. From the Independent:

Stern warns that climate change is far worse than 2006 estimate

By Danny Fortson

Lord Stern, the economist whose report on climate change helped galvanise world leaders behind the green energy movement when it was published 18 months ago, has admitted that the situation is far worse than the assumptions that formed the basis of his ground-breaking report.

“We badly underestimated the degree of damages and the risks of climate change,” said Lord Stern in a speech in London yesterday. “All of the links in the chain are on average worse than we thought a couple of years ago.”

When it was first published, the Stern Review and its recommendations – zero-emission automobiles around the world by 2050, for example – brought plaudits and brickbats from the different sides of the climate change debate. A year and a half on from its publication, Lord Stern dismissed the doubters and renewed his call for urgent global action: “People who said this was scaremongering are profoundly wrong. If anything, I was too reticent. What we are playing for is the transformation of the planet,” he said.

Greenhouse gas emissions are growing much faster than previously thought because of several factors that were not fully appreciated before, including the release of methane from thawing permafrost, the acidification of oceans, and the decay of carbon sinks. The worsening situation increases the need, he argued, for a global pollution-cutting agreement to be reached by next year’s climate conference in Copenhagen. He also reiterated his previous estimates that governments and business must invest the equivalent of between 1 to 2 per cent of global GDP annually up to 2050 in new technologies and efficiency measures or face climate change of catastrophic proportions. A global carbon trading system would be the “glue” for a worldwide climate deal, he said.

The sector to be most heavily affected by any global climate deal would be the energy industry, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of emissions. “We need to have zero carbon electricity, or very close to it, by 2050. That means carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in electricity by 2050, it means nuclear, it means renewables,” he said.

The soaring use of coal in electricity generation, principally from China where a new coal-fired power station comes into operation every week, means that CCS – a technology that remains unproven on an industrial scale – will be absolutely crucial. “We need to get better at carbon capture and sequestration very quickly,” Lord Stern said.

Not only is coal the dirtiest fuel, it is also the only major fossil fuel source where big consumer nations still have large stores within their borders, and it is relatively cheap. For these reasons, most economists and energy analysts expect its consumption to grow massively. Lord Stern gave his revised views on the same day that the price of oil hit a new high at $114.43 per barrel amid rising demand from Asia and industrialised nations.

He said: “This is about buying down risk. Starting now, that means it requires at least 1 per cent of world GDP. That is small relative to a planetary catastrophe.”

Add comment April 19th, 2008

Al Gore: New thinking on the climate crisis

here is a new Al Gore slideshow on global warming. He both presents data showing the escalating rate of climate change and challenges the American public to rise to the challenge of saving human civilization. very moving. Please ignore the ads:

Add comment April 8th, 2008

IPCC: Crucial greenhouse gas threshold already passed

The day they win the Nobel Prize, we hear that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is set to report that the world crossed a crucial threshold, 50 parts per million (ppm), of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere two years ago. This was the level that their report earlier this year said we were in danger of reaching within a decade. If the new IPCC rport is correct, it would imply that massive climate change is now likely inevitable.

A key threshold crossed
An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to be released next month will show that the limit on greenhouse-gases scientists hoped to avert has already been surpassed.
By Gregory M. Lamb

In Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel “Fahrenheit 451,” that number represented the temperature at which books would burn, a symbol of a disturbing future under a totalitarian government.

For climate scientists, a similar number, 450 parts per million (ppm), holds its own ominous meaning. It represents a dangerous concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; a total that they were not expecting to be passed for at least another decade.

But a new UN-sponsored report, to be released next month, will show that as of 2005 the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had already reached 455 ppm, according to Tim Flannery, a prominent Australian climate scientist who says he’s seen the raw data that go into the document.

In an interview on Australian television this week, Dr. Flannery said that an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and other greenhouse gasses are at much higher concentrations than previously thought. Reuters quotes him:

“We thought we’d be at that threshold within about a decade…. We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold…. What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change.”About 75 percent of the total ppm represents carbon dioxide, associated with burning fossil fuels. The rest is a combination of the other gasses, he said.

On the Sierra Club website, blogger Pat Joseph explains the meaning of 450 ppm:

“450 ppm has long been held up as the threshold we dare not cross if we hope [to] avert the worst consequences of warming. Well, if Flannery is right, (and there’s no reason to think otherwise) we crossed that line without even breaking stride.”How did it happen? For one thing, countries such as China and India are actually “recarbonizing,” Mr. Joseph says, meaning that their economies are becoming more energy-intensive “as they turn increasingly to [greenhouse-gas emitting] coal to feed their growth.” In May, the IPCC estimated current concentration of greenhouse gases at only 425 ppm, said a BBC report at the time. It noted that many scientists equated 450 ppm with a 2 degree C (3.6 degrees F.) rise in temperatures. Allowing temperatures to rise more than 2 C could lead to major impacts on the environment, scientists said. In the article, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, explained the strategy this way:

“If you want to stabilise around 450 ppm, that means in a decade or two you have to start reducing emissions far below the current level…. So in other words, we have a very short window for turning around the trend we have in rising greenhouse gas emissions. We don’t have the luxury of time.”But, says Flannery, named Australian of the Year for 2007, that window is closed. According to the Australian Associated Press he says that higher figure is due to miscalculating the potency of other greenhouse gasses, which are included in the 450 ppm figure and measured in terms equivalent to that of CO2. But he adds:

“[A]lso we have really seen an unexpected acceleration in the rate of accumulation of CO 2 itself, and that’s been beyond the limits of projection … beyond the worst-case scenario. We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change – that’s what the new figures say…. It’s not next year, or next decade; it’s now.”A major UN climate change meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December aims to set a course toward a new global agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The current Kyoto Protocol, signed by the majority of the world’s nations but not the United States, expires in 2012. Flannery told Reuters that the 450 ppm figure adds to the urgency and importance of that meeting.

Meanwhile, Erwin Jackson, policy director of the Climate Institute, an Australian environmental group, told the Australian Associated Press that reducing greenhouse gas levels would be the only path to avoiding a catastrophe:

“The longer we stay above the kind of levels we’re at at the moment, the more likely it is that we would start to see the loss of the Great Barrier Reef; you would actually start see the collapse of the great ice sheets and places like the Amazon starting to burn down.”This weekly feature appears with links at csmonitor.com

2 comments October 12th, 2007

Carbon offsets: Part of the solution or part of the problem?

The LA Times has an articles discussing the carbon offset scam that is currently serving to offset real action to avert global warming fiasco:

Can you buy a greener conscience?
A budding industry sells ‘offsets’ of carbon emissions, investing in environmental projects. But there are doubts about whether it works.

By Alan Zarembo

The Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” touted itself as the world’s first carbon-neutral documentary.

The producers said that every ounce of carbon emitted during production — from jet travel, electricity for filming and gasoline for cars and trucks — was counterbalanced by reducing emissions somewhere else in the world. It only made sense that a film about the perils of global warming wouldn’t contribute to the problem.

Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film’s distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie.

It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.

Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.

According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village.

As it turned out, both projects had already been designed and financed, and the contributions from Native Energy covered only a minor fraction of their costs. “If you really believe you’re carbon neutral, you’re kidding yourself,” said Gregg Marland, a fossil-fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who has been watching the evolution of the new carbon markets. “You can’t get out of it that easily.”

The race to save the planet from global warming has spawned a budding industry of middlemen selling environmental salvation at bargain prices.

The companies take millions of dollars collected from their customers and funnel them into carbon-cutting projects, such as tree farms in Ecuador, windmills in Minnesota and no-till fields in Iowa.

In return, customers get to claim the reductions, known as voluntary carbon offsets, as their own. For less than $100 a year, even a Hummer can be pollution-free — at least on paper.

Driven by guilt, public relations or genuine concern over global warming, tens of thousands of people have purchased offsets to zero out their carbon impact on the planet.

“It made me feel better about driving my car,” said Nicky Tenpas, a 29-year-old occupational therapist from Hermosa Beach, who bought offsets to neutralize emissions from the Jeep she always wanted.

The star of “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore, says he and his family are carbon neutral, as are Dave Matthews Band concerts and Coldplay albums. The travel websites Expedia and Travelocity now offer passengers the option of counteracting their flights, and Rupert Murdoch promises that his entire News Corp. will be carbon neutral by 2010, largely through the purchase of offsets.

Offset companies stress that they are not a cure-all for the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are equivalent to 54 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Tom Boucher, chief executive of Native Energy, said people should first reduce their energy consumption and waste, and then buy offsets — “the only way to really get to zero unless you stop driving, stop traveling.”

But the industry is clouded by an approach to carbon accounting that makes it easy to claim reductions that didn’t occur. Many projects that have received money from offset companies would have reduced emissions by the same amount anyway.

The growing popularity of offsets has now prompted the Federal Trade Commission to begin looking into the $55-million-a-year industry.

“Everybody would like to find happy-face, win-win solutions that don’t cost anything,” said Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University. “Unfortunately, they don’t exist.”

Selling clean airIn the rolling hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, outside the town of Berlin, Dave Van Gilder’s family has been raising cows for four decades. He and his twin sons, Jason and Justin, tend to their 400 Holsteins while his wife, Connie, keeps the books.

The smell of manure has long been the sweet exhaust of a dairy farm running full tilt.

Millions of pounds of cow excrement over the decades were funneled from the barns to a 3.3-million-gallon lagoon, where it decayed, burping invisible clouds of the potent greenhouse gas methane.

In the days of Van Gilder’s father, nobody cared about the greenhouse gases.

But things began to change a few years ago. Van Gilder didn’t know it, but his lagoon had become an economic opportunity.

A local congressman urged him to apply for a state alternative energy grant to build a system that would capture methane from cow manure and burn it to generate electricity.

The whole project, known as a methane digester, would cost about $750,000 — $631,000 of it coming from the state and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Van Gilder had to make up the difference, but he figured he could earn that back — and in several years start making money — by supplying electricity for the farm and selling the excess to the local utility.

A year before construction began, Van Gilder was contacted by Native Energy, which wanted to buy his emissions reduction, along with the reductions of others who had won state energy grants.

Van Gilder had never heard of the company or the idea of selling clean air.

Nothing came of his discussions with the company until construction started on the massive tank for heating manure. He gladly signed a contract to sell Native Energy 29,000 tons in carbon dioxide reductions — the company’s estimate of how much greenhouse gas the digester will keep out of the atmosphere over the next 20 years.

“There wasn’t a lot of negotiation,” said Van Gilder, who was happy to accept whatever the company was offering.

Family members said the contract prohibited them from disclosing the payment, but based on a contract with another dairy farmer, signed with Native Energy, it was about $70,000, or $2.40 a ton.

Justin Van Gilder said the money had nothing to do with the family’s decision to build its methane plant. “It was a free bonus,” he said.

“We still don’t understand it all,” Connie Van Gilder said. “It’s hard for us to fathom, to see what it is doing.”

The situation was similar for the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, a power utility for dozens of remote communities.

In early 2006, account manager Brent Petrie was at an Anchorage environmental conference talking about a windmill project that the cooperative was building in the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Kasigluk, a soggy patch of tundra on the remote Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska.

Rising 100 feet over the landscape, the three 100-kilowatt turbines were intended to reduce the area’s dependence on diesel generators, whose fuel must be shipped in on barges. Federal grants were covering $2.8 million of the project’s $3.1-million cost.

Petrie had barely finished his presentation when he was cornered by representatives from two brokers — Native Energy and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation — eager to buy the project’s offsets.

The cooperative sold 25 years of carbon dioxide reductions to Native Energy for $36,000 — roughly $4 a ton.

Native Energy had contributed just over 1% of the total cost of the project yet claimed 100% of its carbon reductions.

“If you look at the costs of these projects, it’s a tiny, tiny fraction,” said cooperative president Meera Kohler. The payment did “not determine whether those blades turn or not.”

At best, Kohler said, the money could cover some maintenance costs.

An untapped marketDespite its relatively small role in the project, Native Energy counts the windmills as a success, demonstrating the power of carbon offsets to encourage clean energy.

“Every kilowatt-hour they produce means one fewer kilowatt-hour is generated by the diesel generators that otherwise provide power for this village,” the company’s website says.

Wind power has long been a fascination for Boucher, Native Energy’s co-founder. As an electrical engineering major in the 1970s at the University of Vermont, he built a 25-foot-high wind turbine in his parents’ backyard, carving the blades from a piece of redwood.

He later worked at a Vermont utility and helped develop one of the first wind farms in the northeast. Boucher started his own company in the 1990s to sell alternative energy but soon came upon a simpler and possibly more lucrative product: voluntary carbon offsets.

It was a new twist on an old idea.

About 30 years ago, the U.S. government began fostering emissions markets that allowed industrial polluters to buy offsets for such gases as nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides. One of their successes has been in reducing acid rain in the Northeast.

The Europeans have recently adopted a similar model to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, allowing the continent’s dirtiest industries to buy and sell rights to spew greenhouse gases.

The key to these regulated markets is a gradually falling cap on total emissions, forcing factories to either reduce their own emissions or buy someone else’s reductions at increasing prices.

Boucher and other environmental entrepreneurs, however, believed there was an untapped market for carbon reductions: people and companies who would buy them voluntarily.

“What was coming was a way for folks to take actions against global warming,” said Boucher, a bearded 52-year-old, who has long believed that alternative energy can be competitive with cheaper power from fossil fuels.

Native Energy, based in Charlotte, Vt., was one of the first offset companies in the United States and has become one of the most respected in environmental circles.

It has sold offsets to thousands of individuals and companies, including Levi Strauss & Co. and Ben & Jerry’s. It has been big with political campaigns, providing offsets to Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards. The producers of the 2005 film “Syriana,” which claims to be the first carbon-neutral major motion picture, bought 2,040 tons of carbon dioxide reductions from the company.

After Native Energy’s name was mentioned in the final credits for “An Inconvenient Truth,” visits to the company’s website jumped 1,100%, marketing director Billy Connelly said.

As a private company, it doesn’t report its revenue, but Connelly said he expects it will double its sales this year, reaching a total of about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide neutralized since its founding.

“Things have really taken off in the last year or two,” said Boucher. The company has about 20 employees.

Native Energy now finds itself facing competition from nearly three dozen other offset firms worldwide. Some are nonprofit, but most of the biggest are in business to make money.

In 2006, offset companies sold greenhouse gas reductions equivalent to at least 14.8 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than double the previous year, said Katherine Hamilton, carbon project manager for Ecosystem Marketplace, which tracks the industry.

Sales are expected to double again this year.

Requirements are vagueFor all the money spent, nobody can say if the offsets have done much to alleviate global warming.

The problem is whether the voluntary reductions really exist. The buzzword in the industry is “additionality” — the idea that offset purchases actually lead to additional greenhouse gas reductions.

The concept should be simple: Pay for a project, monitor its actual reductions, then claim your share.

Instead, offset companies often have vague requirements to determine if their potential investments would actually lead to additional reductions.

Native Energy says it looks for projects that need offset revenue to survive — a difficult standard, since the projects are expensive and the offset payments are relatively small. But even if a project can stand on its own, it can still qualify for the money if it is novel or simply “not business as usual,” according to the company’s website.

That definition has allowed Native Energy and other offset companies to claim the carbon reductions from projects in which they have played minor roles. Still, Native Energy’s contract requires projects to certify that whatever offset money they receive “is a necessary component of the project’s economic viability.”

The company has struggled with whether its funding matters. Boucher said the windmills in Alaska were debated for weeks inside Native Energy since the project already had been funded by the government. “This is a case of one of the more difficult determinations,” he said.

Native Energy, he said, eventually concluded that its contribution, if used as a reserve fund for emergency repairs, was meaningful. It helps “to make sure these turbines will run as well as they can, and to further the chances that other wind farms will be built,” he said.

In the case of the methane digester, Boucher said the reductions were additional since the offset payments helped cover a significant portion of Van Gilder’s out-of-pocket expenses.

The best way to ensure additionality, according to Native Energy, is to pay a project for a decade or more of offsets while the developers are still arranging the financing.

The downside is that the carbon reductions might not occur for a decade or more.

One of Native Energy’s expected future projects is a windmill development being planned for a South Dakota Sioux reservation. Part of the offset money from “An Inconvenient Truth” has been earmarked for the $45-million project, known as the Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm.

Native Energy and the developers are still negotiating, but the payment for the next 25 years of carbon reductions could be a few million dollars.

Even in this ideal case, the developer is hesitant to say that the money he will get from Native Energy is essential.

“Could we do it without it?” said Dale Osborn, head of Distributed Generation Systems Inc. in Lakewood, Colo. “Maybe. But that would require charging more for the energy or the investors accepting a lower rate of return.”

Several environmental and clean energy groups have also raised concerns about verifying projects, monitoring their actual carbon reductions and ensuring that each carbon offset is not sold more than once.

“People are trying to do the right thing,” said Peter Knight, a partner with Al Gore in Generation Investment Management, which invests in environmentally responsible companies. “It’s a new field . . . and it’s going through some growing pains.”

Price of feeling goodWithout government regulation and mandatory caps on emissions, all that is left to drive offset sales is guilt and marketing. Offset companies charge what the market will bear.

“How much are you willing to spend to feel good or to impress your neighbors?” asked Marland, of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For Katy Hansen, a 29-year-old law school student, the answer was $429.99.

She wanted to offset the travel of the guests to her May wedding in Madison, Wis., and paid San Francisco-based offset company TerraPass Inc. to neutralize 40 tons of carbon dioxide.

“The wedding felt out of character in a way,” she said. “It was more overdone than anything in our lives.”

It was a well-intended gesture, but one that some scientists say does carry a price. Offsets are so convenient that they may foster a false sense that global warming can be easily solved when the hard and expensive work remains undone.

A United Nations panel recently concluded that actually reducing emissions to avoid the worst perils of global warming would cost trillions of dollars a year over the next several decades.

“These offsets are not addressing the problem that must be addressed now,” said James Hansen, NASA’s top climate researcher. “If we just fool around with marginal things, we will be up a creek without a paddle in the rather near future.”

Despite the imperfections of the offset market, some customers say, it still helps people think about their own responsibility for global warming.

“It’s a powerful first step,” said Davis Guggenheim, director of “An Inconvenient Truth.” “The choice of doing this rather than nothing is not a choice.”

He acknowledged the skepticism about voluntary offsets, but he added, “All of us knew when you’re doing offsets that the theoretical and symbolic quality to doing this is as important as the practical quality.”

Ethan Prochnik, a 43-year-old freelance television producer in Los Angeles, said the enormous threat of global warming means that everyone has to help in reducing emissions.

He foresees a time when a carbon tax will be factored into the price of every tomato, every pair of jeans, every computer.

Until then, offset payments are a sort of self-imposed pollution tax.

For months, Prochnik and his fiancee saved to offset a year of their lives. He finally went to the website for an Oregon company called the Climate Trust. He entered their state of residence, the size of their Montecito Heights house, their cars, their annual mileage and the number of flights they took in a year.

“It’s like a poor man’s Prius,” he said, explaining that he couldn’t afford to trade his Isuzu Rodeo SUV for a hybrid.

“It does make you feel a little better,” said his fiancee, Amber Vovola, 29.

Prochnik entered his credit card number and pressed the “enter” key. The total came to 21.22 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or $200.28.

Figuring that the website calculator didn’t cover all their pollution, he decided to buy an additional $300 in offsets, just to be safe.

Add comment September 2nd, 2007

Public overwhelmingly realizes global warming threat

A new survey released earlier this month shows that the American public is far ahead of its leadership in understanding the dangers posed by global warming, and in willingness to address it:

Sea Change in Public Attitudes Toward Global Warming Emerges
Climate Change Seen as Big a Threat as Terrorism

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—A new Yale research survey reveals a significant shift in public attitudes toward the environment and global warming. Fully 83 percent of Americans now say global warming is a “serious” problem, up from 70 percent in 2004. More Americans than ever say they have serious concerns about environmental threats, such as toxic soil and water (92 percent, up from 85 percent in 2004), deforestation (89 percent, up from 78 percent), air pollution (93 percent, up from 87 percent) and the extinction of wildlife (83 percent, up from 72 percent in 2005).

Most dramatically, the survey of 1,000 adults nationwide shows that 63 percent of Americans agree that the United States “is in as much danger from environmental hazards, such as air pollution and global warming, as it is from terrorists.” It reveals growing concern about dependence on Middle Eastern oil, with 96 percent of the public saying this is a serious problem. As a result, the public overwhelmingly supports increasing the use of alternative energy, including solar and wind power, as well as investing more in energy efficiency.

The survey indicates that while 70 percent of Americans believe that President Bush doesn’t do enough for the environment and should do more, many citizens are ready to act on their own. Seventy-five percent recognize that their own behavior can help to reduce global warming, and 81 percent believe it is their responsibility to do so.

The results further suggest that many Americans want greener products and are ready to spend money to try new technologies that will help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seventy percent of the public indicates a willingness to buy solar panels, and 67 percent would consider buying a hybrid car.

Note especially 63 percent of Americans agree that the United States “is in as much danger from environmental hazards, such as air pollution and global warming, as it is from terrorists.” . Of course, with so much of the corporate “leaders” concerned about profits before survival, don’t expect much from the corporate-controlled politicians unless corporations are certain of a profit. While there may be large profits in green products and technology, dealing with global warming may also require changes in lifestyle that will not increase profits. The question facing the human race is whether such changes can nonetheless be made. We may be at the point where capitalism (the “free market”) and human survival are in conflict. Can new forms of social organization be developed? Stay tuned.

Here are the Key Findings:

MEMORANDUM

To: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy
From: Global Strategy Group
Re: 2007 Environment Survey – Key Findings
Date: March 5, 2007

The 2007 Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy Survey on American Attitudes on the Environment reveals that Americans want action on global warming and energy conservation – and most agree that they have a responsibility to do their part.

• Close to two-thirds (63%) of Americans agree that our country “is in as much danger from environmental hazards such as air pollution and global warming as it is from terrorists.”
– Women (70%) are more likely to agree with this statement than are men (56%).

• The percentage of Americans who say global warming is a serious problem has risen to 83% from 70% in 2004.
– Slightly fewer Americans (79%) are concerned about ‘climate change,’ though concern about this issue has increased from 61% in 2004.

• More than two out of three (68%) Americans agree that global warming is something people can control. And fully 81% agree with the statement, “It is my responsibility to help reduce the impacts of global warming.”
– 62% of Americans agree that we need more laws to enforce energy efficiency.
– 87% agree that they look for new ways to save energy.
– 90% adjust the temperature in their house to save energy.
– Just 27% agree that “the need to conserve energy is exaggerated.”

• Two of three Americans (67%) say that, if they had to, they could explain global warming or climate change “to someone I meet in passing.”
– Men (71%), younger Americans age 18-44 (74%) and college graduates (76%) are more likely than women (63%) or seniors (55%) to say they could explain global warming to others.

• Just 33% of Americans say they are familiar with the phrase “carbon neutral.”
– Younger Americans and those between the ages 45 and 64 are more likely (36% and 34%, respectively) to say they are familiar with the term than are seniors (26%).
– Men (38%) are more likely to say they are familiar with “carbon neutral” than are women (27%).
– Just 39% of college graduates are familiar with the phrase.

The National outlook is worsening

• Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans believe the environment in the United States is getting worse. Just 11% think it is getting better. In 2005, 52% believed the environment was getting worse and 15% thought it was getting better.
– Women continue to be more downbeat about the direction of the environment than are men. 67% of women (up from 56% in 2005) believe the environment is getting worse, while 56% of men believe it is getting worse (compared to 47% in 2005).

• Just one in three Americans (33%) rate the overall quality of the environment in the United States as excellent or good. 65% rate the country’s environment as only fair or poor.
– In 2004 and 2005 surveys, 39% rated the overall quality of the environment in the United States as excellent or good.

• Fully 70% of Americans say President Bush doesn’t do enough for the environment and should do more. 53% say President Bush should do ‘much more.’ In our 2005 survey, 63% believed the President wasn’t doing enough for the environment.
– Compared to data from the 2004 and 2005 surveys, fewer Americans trust President Bush as a source of information about environmental issues. Just 37% say they trust President Bush at least somewhat, while as recently as 2005, the president was trusted by more than half of Americans (52% in both 2004 and 2005).

• The most-trusted sources of information about environmental issues are:
– Scientists at major universities (trusted by 76%),
– Universities (74%),
– The Environmental Protection Agency (63%, but down from 73% in 2004), and
– Industry scientists (56%).

• Nightly television news is trusted by 50% of Americans, but this is down significantly from 2004, when 69% of Americans said they trusted the television news as a source of information about the environment. 23% say they do not trust the nightly television news at all – up from 13% in 2004.
– Major newspapers have also taken a major hit. In 2004, two-thirds of Americans trusted major newspapers as sources of information about environmental issues. Today, just 45% of Americans say they trust newspapers. Fully 27% say they do not trust major newspapers at all – up from just 16% in 2004.

• When it comes to the environment, Democrats in Congress are slightly more trusted than Republicans in Congress, 45% to 39%. Both parties’ numbers are down significantly since 2004, when 57% trusted the Democrats in Congress, and 49% trusted Republicans.

Top Concerns: Dependence on Imported Oil

• Americans continue to be nearly unanimous in the belief that dependence on imported oil is a very serious problem. Fully 93% say it is a serious problem and 70% say it is a ‘very’ serious problem.

• The most popular remedy to America’s dependence on imported oil is to require the auto industry to make cars that get better gas mileage. 94% of Americans say this is a good idea. 61% say it is a ‘very good’ idea.

• 90% of Americans support building more wind-turbine farms, and 90% say it is a good idea to build more solar power facilities.
– 86% want increased funding for renewable energy research.

Americans are more interested than ever in higher-mileage and hybrid cars
• In 2005, 23% of Americans said they would ‘never’ buy a hybrid car. Today, just 13% say they would never buy a hybrid.

• 78% of Americans (and 86% of men age 18-54) would consider buying a vehicle powered by an alternative fuel like ethanol.

• 37% of Americans say they would never buy an S.U.V., down from 43% in 2005.
– 46% say they have bought or would consider buying an S.U.V., compared to 42% in 2005.

Other findings
• 56% of Americans believe it is a bad idea to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration and drilling.

• 86% of Americans think it is a good idea to increase funding for renewable energy research.
– 90% think building more solar power facilities is a good idea for reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil.

ABOUT THE POLL

The nationwide survey of 1017 American adults was conducted on behalf of the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy by Global Strategy Group from February 5-11, 2007.

• The survey was conducted using professional phone interviewers.
• The nationwide sample was drawn from a random digit dial (RDD) process.
• Respondents were screened on the basis of age, i.e., to be over the age of 18.
• The survey has an overall margin of error of ±3.07% at the 95% confidence level. That is, if the same survey were conducted among similar respondents, the results would fall within the range of ±3.07% in 19 out of 20 cases.

Add comment March 28th, 2007

Carbon trading no panacea

Now that global warming is finally getting attention, massive attention is focussed upon carbon trading schemes that allow companies to pollute, as long as they purchase alleged offsetting savings elsewhere. David Morris at AlterNet shows that these schemes are easily open to gaming and are likely to make speculators and manipulators rich while doing little or nothing for the environment.

Al Gore has done great work calling attention to the dangers posed by global warming. But his enthusiasm for carbon trading threatens to undo this good. It may be the case that global warming cannot be addressed without, at a minimum, significant changes to our corporate-controlled so-called “free market” system. The world may have to choose between “free markets” and “freedom to live.” Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll choose the former.

The last thing we need is to have the world endorse schemes that will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The S&L and Enron scandals cost billions. This scandal could cost us a livable world.

The Dag Hammarskjold Foundation did an excellent analysis of carbon trading in its September 2006 Development Dialogue magazine. “With a bit of judicious accounting,” the report found, “a company investing in foreign ‘carbon-saving’ projects can increase fossil emissions both at home and abroad while claiming to make reductions in both locations.”

Carbon traders seek the lowest cost carbon offset. Which almost always means tree planting in some far off country, without regard to its long-term effects on the community or the environment, or a modest reduction in the emissions of a highly polluting factory in a developing nation. A company needing, or wanting, offsets may have to choose between investing a significant amount of capital that has long-term and very substantial savings, or buying much lower cost and short-term offsets. From a short-term economic perspective, the latter will always be the preferred choice. A study reported in Nature, the scientific journal, supported this proposition. It found that only 2 percent of the United Nations’ trading projects involving either renewable energy or communities that follow eco-friendly practices with regard to tree cultivation and harvesting.

Add comment March 13th, 2007

Hamburger and global warming

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says, in a new report, that raising livestock are causing more greenhouse gases than does the entire transportation sector:

Says Henning Steinfeld, Chief of FAO’s Livestock Information and Policy Branch and senior author of the report: “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.

As a further indicator of danger, according to the report, the livestock sector is growing factor than any other agricultural sector.

Livestock production produces 9% of global CO2 emissions, but this translates into 18% of “CO2 equivalents” as

[I]t generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

The report also details land devastation, damage to water resources, and other damaging effects from livestock production.

Now, I’m not a vegetarian, but this report suggests that these problems will have to be addressed as part of any global strategy to address global warming, not to mention to preserve the land and water systems upon which we, and all life, depend.

Add comment December 6th, 2006

Science teachers part of energy industry propoganda machine

Laurie David, a producer of “An Inconvenient Truth,” has an Op Ed in today’s Washington Post which indicates that the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) has turned down 50,000 free copies of “An Inconvenient Truth” because they are concerned about “special interests.” However, they had no problem taking $6 million from Exxon Mobil. They also have no difficulty accepting money from Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API). The NSTA has had no difficulty distributing “You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel,” produced by the API to pitch for use of oil.

The education organization also hosts an annual convention — which is described on Exxon Mobil’s Web site as featuring “more than 450 companies and organizations displaying the most current textbooks, lab equipment, computer hardware and software, and teaching enhancements.” The company “regularly displays” its “many . . . education materials” at the exhibition. John Borowski, a science teacher at North Salem High School in Salem, Ore., was dismayed by NSTA’s partnerships with industrial polluters when he attended the association’s annual convention this year and witnessed hundreds of teachers and school administrators walk away with armloads of free corporate lesson plans.

Along with propaganda challenging global warming from Exxon Mobil, the curricular offerings included lessons on forestry provided by Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, Borowski says, and the benefits of genetic engineering courtesy of biotech giant Monsanto.

“The materials from the American Petroleum Institute and the other corporate interests are the worst form of a lie: omission,” Borowski says. “The oil and coal guys won’t address global warming, and the timber industry papers over clear-cuts.”

An API memo leaked to the media as long ago as 1998 succinctly explains why the association is angling to infiltrate the classroom: “Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future.”

So, how is any of this different from showing Gore’s movie in the classroom? The answer is that neither Gore nor Participant Productions, which made the movie, stands to profit a nickel from giving away DVDs, and we aren’t facing millions of dollars in lost business from limits on global-warming pollution and a shift to cleaner, renewable energy.

It’s hard to say whether NSTA is a bad guy here or just a sorry victim of tight education budgets. And we don’t pretend that a two-hour movie is a substitute for a rigorous science curriculum. Students should expect, and parents should demand, that educators present an honest and unbiased look at the true state of knowledge about the challenges of the day.

As for Exxon Mobil — which just began a fuzzy advertising campaign that trumpets clean energy and low emissions — this story shows that slapping green stripes on a corporate tiger doesn’t change the beast within. The company is still playing the same cynical game it has for years.

While NSTA and Exxon Mobil ponder the moral lesson they’re teaching with all this, there are 50,000 DVDs sitting in a Los Angeles warehouse, waiting to be distributed. In the meantime, Mom and Dad may want to keep a sharp eye on their kids’ science homework.

Read the whole article.

2 comments November 26th, 2006