Blogs / Reality Base

Last week we discussed the “heavy greening” efforts touted by planners behind both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. So how are the ultra-environmentally-friendly efforts in Denver faring so far? Here’s a report from Playboy.com blogger Carol Keeley on the bag of freebies presented to all credentialed journalists:

The media swag bag was surreal. Examples: a flat white plastic UPS truck that contains mints; an AT&T DNC ringtone gift card; a shitload of advertising for all things green, using shameless quantities of paper and plastic; a card with an embedded radio; Joint Juice; a metal pin of a bicycle advertising a phone company; a metal pin of a windmill; a plantable card; a card announcing that Coca-Cola is the Official Recycling Provider at the Pepsi Center; a plastic water bottle; and Dale Carnegie’s Golden Book, which includes his bio plus tips from How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Et tu, DNC committee?

The 2008 conventions are fast approaching, and the host cities—Denver for Democrats followed by Minneapolis/St. Paul for the RNC—are bracing themselves for the mass influx of reporters, supporters, and political insiders. Which leads to the inevitable question: What is each party doing to keep the events environmentally conscious?

For its part, the RNC has sprung into action to keep its energy use and waste to a minimum. The St. Paul Pioneer Press via Politico reports that their efforts will include the following:

[H]ybrid electric trucks delivering soft drinks to the Xcel Energy Center. Almost 300 containers for used cans, bottles, paper and all other things recyclable. A thousand bicycles available for convention-goers to get around the Twin Cities. Recycled desk chairs, cubicles and carpeting. Even 45,000 biodegradable discount cards for visitors.

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It sounds more and more like some offshore oil drilling is going to happen.

Congress can’t be like “mountain sheep, standing back and butting heads” over drilling, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today. Reid, on a conference call with T. Boone Pickens about their National Clean Energy Summit to be held Tuesday in Las Vegas, praised the recent Senate compromise that would allow some drilling as near as 50 miles from shore.

There are a number of well-known problems with offshore drilling: It probably won’t make any sizable dent in the oil market, the oil wouldn’t be available for the better part of a decade, and there’s already a shortage of oil rigs to do the drilling, plus any leaks or other environmental hazards that drilling could create. But a compromise on drilling could be necessary to get what Reid repeatedly praised today as the real key to promoting alternative energies technologies—tax credits. As we covered on Monday, the renewal of solar power tax credits is being held up in the Congress by the current drilling deadlock.

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Offshore drilling has become a central issue in the campaign, despite the fact that it’s pretty assured that ripping up the Outer Continental Shelf won’t do jack to reduce oil prices, or decrease our dependence on foreign oil. Still, GOP members of the House of Representatives are clinging like static to the issue, to the point where they’ll forgo a perfectly good August vacation to stay in D.C. and recruit tourists to their cause. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

Nearly 90 GOP lawmakers, about 40 percent of the Republican caucus, have come back to Washington since the House voted to adjourn on Aug. 1 to protest Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to allow a vote to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling.

“The American people deserve more access to American oil, and Congress should be in session until we vote,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R) of Indiana, speaking to a chamber half-filled with tourists, escorted by GOP lawmakers to break off their tours of the Capitol and take a seat on the floor. He urged the tourists, many of whom seemed astonished to find themselves on the floor of the US House of Representatives, to “call to a Democratic member of Congress from your state” to demand a vote.

Funny how Pence neglected to mention that, even if a vote happens tomorrow and the moratorium is overturned, it would likely be 2013 at the earliest before our oil supply saw any increase. So you may as well enjoy that August holiday, ladies and gentlemen.

Image: iStockPhoto

The New York Times has a report on the new trend of massive retail chains, including Safeway, Whole Foods, and Wal-Mart, installing solar panels on their store roofs to generate large-scale electricity. Their motives, of course, are the big juicy tax incentives that Congress has implemented to urge major retailers to transition from coal-based electricity to solar. Many of these stores use huge amounts of electricity, and solar panels won’t be enough to eliminate the need for coal entirely. Still, experts estimate that, on a good day, the roof panels could generate 10 to 40 percent of a store’s total power.

But one of the most important details of the piece is buried towards the end: the fact that the tax credit for renewable energy—an invaluable credit that Congress has struggled to keep afloat—is getting held up yet again because of the deadlock over offshore drilling. So not only is offshore drilling not a solution to our energy problem, but it’s actually getting in the way of a huge source of government support for solar energy. Which could make all those retailers pretty upset if they invest in boatloads of solar panels only to be told that the tax credit doesn’t extend into 2009.

• The Olympics are here! We may not miss a chance to knock China’s political regime, but we’re more than happy to make money on the games—and discuss the smog problem ad nauseum.

• Americans aren’t the only casualty of a shrinking federal budget: Facing lack of funds, the National Center for Atmospheric Research shut down a program focused on helping poor countries forecast and deal with droughts, floods, and other climate-related disasters.

• The latest in obesity research technology: virtual reality studies.

• Researchers have created ten different stem cell lines that can be used for research on diseases from Down’s syndrome to Parkinson’s. And any protesters can relax: They’re all adult stem cells.

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Over at Better Planet, Ben Nugent discusses a recent poll showing that voters view the economy and high fuel prices as the biggest concerns this election season. In another AP-Yahoo News poll that’s been running since last November, 87 percent of the respondents now say gas prices are a “very important” issue to them personally, while “roughly the same amount as before the primaries — 62 percent—say the environment is at least a very important issue.”

All of which is good news, from an environmentalist perspective—high gas prices have thrust conservation and alternative energy into the everyday lives of most Americans, and have thus made it to the top of the candidates’ priority list. The less good news is the political lean that these priority lists are taking. While a few months ago, according to the AP, more voters were swinging towards energy conservation efforts, now the pendulum has swung back, with voters evenly divided between support for “drilling and other exploration” versus conservation.

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Good news for the already burgeoning Texas wind-power industry: State regulators are funneling nearly $5 billion into creating transmission lines to carry wind electricity from remote parts of the state to cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. According to the New York Times, the new lines will be able to transport 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for “3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running.”

Texas is already the nation’s leader in wind power (with California coming in a distant second) and the state already has 5,300 installed megawatts of wind-generated energy in place. The new project is expected to save customers money on energy costs, not to mention boost the wind industry, which is already well on its way towards becoming a major market player. Now if we could just get those darn tax breaks worked out…

Image: iStockPhoto

Over at 80beats, we offered a breakdown of this week’s biofuels controversy. To summarize: The Guardian got hold of a “secret” “internal” report from the World Bank stating that biofuels had forced global food prices up by 75 percent—a sharp contrast to U.S. government’s claim that the plant-derived fuels were responsible for less than 3 percent of recent price increases.

But it wasn’t the whole story: The Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blog revealed that the reports of “damning unpublished assessment” declaring the evils of biofuels was somewhat overblown, and the “secret report” was neither secret nor a report, but rather an internal working paper.

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Popsci.com’s Dawn Stover offers an interesting insight into the reasoning behind the Department of Transportation’s modest (to put it mildly) CAFE standards put forth in April: They were based on a mistake.

Apparently an environmental impact report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which analyzed the costs and benefits of raising fuel efficiency standards, had relied on a “high-case” gas price estimate of $3.37 per gallon in 2011-2015, with a “low-case” scenario of $2.04 per gallon. Using these clearly erroneous numbers, the government proposed standards that would increase average passenger car and truck efficiency by a mere 4.5 percent per year from 2011 to 2015—meaning a total jump from the current 27.5 mpg to 35.7 mpg in seven years, an increase that won’t bring much comfort to anyone emptying their savings to pay today’s fuel prices.

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Over at Salon, climate expert Joseph Romm has a poignant update on the Senate’s most recent bout with global warming denial. The setting was a debate over the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, intended to regulate CO2 by setting emissions caps and creating a trading system for carbon allowances. Among the highlights he describes:

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.: “The vast majority of scientists do not believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change.”

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.: This bill means “people must turn off air-conditioning in the summer.”

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.: “This bill will attack citizens at the pump” and “increase job losses.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.: This bill will “leave us less competitive in the world marketplace.”

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.: This bill “could bankrupt U.S. air carriers.”

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo.: “Nobody in their right mind” believes we can get half our power from wind and solar or drive a “fleet of golf carts.”

Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo.: “It’s unclear as to what the long-range trend is as far as the temperature of the Earth is concerned.”

His point is as troubling as it is well-made: Conservatives have a powerful political edge in the climate change debate, and they’re pulling it out at every opportunity.

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Climbing fuel costs have likely been sweet music to climate activists’ ears. But one unexpected downside of the hefty prices is that ocean researchers who study climate change can’t afford to make their trips.

The federal government is scrapping at least four trips for The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and slashing the number of days at sea for research vessels—in 2000, the number was 5,000 days, and it’s now at 4,000 and dropping.

Those given the ax include a cruise to measure the effects of factors like hurricanes, disease, and climate change on marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico. In Alaska, a salmon survey in the Bering Sea and a North Pacific marine ecosystem study have both been tossed.

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Earlier this month, Senate Republicans blocked a proposal to tax the windfall profits of the five largest U.S. oil companies. The GOP’s filibuster of the bill, which would have rescinded $18 billion in tax breaks for oil companies, not only lessened the chances of Big Oil footing some of the bill for record high gas prices, it also meant the likely death of tax breaks for another cause: growth and development of wind, solar, and other alternative energy sources.

Existing tax breaks have been crucial for alternative energy providers, allowing them to raise the capital they need for growth. But while most members of Congress express continued support for the tax breaks, and even take occasional action to safeguard them—the Senate voted overwhelmingly in April to give the breaks a one-year extension—they’ll nonetheless expire by the end of this year. Last week, the breaks lost another battle when Republicans blocked yet another Senate vote, this time on a proposal to raise the $18 billion for alt-energy tax credits by closing a tax loophole for hedge-fund managers.

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Exactly twenty years ago, on June 23, 1988, James E. Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies testified to a Senate committee that he could state with “99 percent confidence” that a recent, persistent rise in global temperature was occurring, and had long been expected. That landmark statement, and the dawn of the global warming discussion, was covered by Andy Revkin, then a DISCOVER senior editor and now an environmental reporter for The New York Times. (More discussion of Hansen’s testimony can be found on Revkin’s blog.) Revkin kindly agreed to take our questions about his piece.

Q: How, if at all, were the 1988 predictions wrong?

A: Not much was really wrong. The range of warming projected—a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations from the preindustrial norm—remains similar today.

The things that were uncertain in 1988 remain uncertain now, including the mix of warming and cooling influences in clouds. As Steve Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado—who is still a frequent source of mine—put it in 1988:

“Clouds are an important factor about which little is known… When I first started looking at this in 1972, we didn’t know much about the feedback from clouds. We don’t know any more now than we did then.”

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Climate activists and consumers alike have been buzzing about an entrepreneur who has created a system for producing ethanol in your own backyard. But questions remain as to whether the device, or others like it, can ever be commercially successful. Part of the problem, Times writer Michael Fitzgerald points out, is that it’s illegal in the United States to operate a car on 100 percent ethanol.

Given that the government has gone to so much trouble to make sure ethanol is produced en masse, it seems odd that it would keep a law on the books that outlaws using a pure version of it as fuel. Flexible-fuel cars in the U.S. run on an 85 percent ethanol/15 percent gas ratio. In fact, it’s illegal to purchase 100 percent ethanol without a government-issued license.

Meanwhile, running cars on 100 percent ethanol is not only possible, it’s done frequently. The Indy 500 has begun running all its cars on pure ethanol, while nearly half the cars in Brazil do the same.

So why the balk on pure ethanol in the U.S.? The answer lies in the cars.

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