Category: Climate & Energy

Startling Environmental Facts – Take Action Now

Below are 10 startling facts we learned in 2009 that underscore the climate threat. I am republishing them from an email I received from the Environmental Defense Fund. 

  • A study published in the journal Science reports that the current level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere – about 390 parts per million – is higher today than at any time in measurable history — at least the last 2.1 million years. Previous peaks of CO2 were never more than 300 ppm over the past 800,000 years, and the concentration is rising by around 2 ppm each year.
  • The World Meterological Organization reported that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record with 8 of the hottest 10 years having occurred since 2000.
  • 2009 will end up as one of the 5 hottest years since 1850 and the U.K.’s Met Office predicts that, with a moderate El Nino, 2010 will likely break the record.
  • The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that while a bit more summer Arctic sea ice appeared in 2009 than the record breaking lows of the last two years, it was still well below normal levels. Given that the Arctic ice cover remains perilously thin, it is vulnerable to further melting, posing an ever increasing threat to Arctic wildlife including polar bears.
  • The Arctic summer could be ice-free by mid-century, not at the end of the century as previously expected, according to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
  • Recent observations published in the highly respected Nature Geosciences indicate that the East Antarctica ice sheet has been shrinking. This surprised researchers, who expected that only the West Antarctic ice sheet would shrink in the near future because the East Antarctic ice sheet is colder and more stable.
  • The U.S. Global Change Research Program completed an assessment of what is known about climate change impacts in the US and reported that, “Climate changes are already observed in the United States and… are projected to grow.” These changes include “increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.”
  • According to a report by the US Geological Survey, slight changes in the climate may trigger abrupt threats to ecosystems that are not easily reversible or adaptable, such as insect outbreaks, wildfire, and forest dieback. “More vulnerable ecosystems, such as those that already face stressors other than climate change, will almost certainly reach their threshold for abrupt change sooner.” An example of such an abrupt threat is the outbreak of spruce bark beetles throughout the western U.S. caused by increased winter temperatures that allow more beetles to survive.
  • The EPA, USGS and NOAA issued a joint report warning that most mid-Atlantic coastal wetlands from New York to North Carolina will be lost with a sea level rise of 1 meter or more.
  • If we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century, some of the main fruit and nut tree crops currently grown in California may no longer be economically viable, as there will be a lack of the winter chilling they require. And, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. production of corn, soybeans and cotton could decrease as much as 82%.

If these facts actually did startle you, then please Take Action to Unleash Our Clean Energy Future. If they didn’t then please check your pulse, or do us a favor and step into traffic. Happy Tuesday!

Our Last Best Chance

I’m approaching 30,000 words. While I’ve been moving at a much slower pace than I’d like, I’m coming up with a few subplots that will hopefully help my story. Tortoise and the hare, tortoise and the hare.

What some people are calling the last best chance for humanity to save itself from climate change starts today in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s the United Nations conference on climate change and its outcome will determine whether the world’s leading polluters are willing to take enough action to prevent catastrophic damage to the Earth’s air, land and sea. The key word here is “enough”. Everyone is willing to take steps but they are rarely adequate for real change, just press releases.

I’ll be following the developments as closely as I can. I hope you do too.

Coal Ash In The Mornin’, Baby

My wife is on a mission. The objective: get in shape. She and a friend are working out five days a week doing a mix of classes and running. I’m tagging along, though not working out nearly as hard. The point of this is that when I’m doing my cardio, I like to read. And now we’ve arrived at the problem. I try not to waste my time reading mindless entertainment or sports rags. There’s so much to know and learn that reading something worthwhile is the only way to go. Occasionally this backfires. One of those occasions was today.

When it comes to periodicals, on a regular basis I read Sierra, The Atlantic and Utne Reader. There are others I read off and on as well but not on any sort of schedule. In fact, I just reduced my subscription to the printed St. Louis Post-Dispatch from seven days down to one (Sunday) so that I can catch up on my magazines in the morning instead of reading news that I can easily find online. On today’s menu was the November / December 2009 issue of Sierra. About tw0-thirds of the way through I came across this small but potent piece:

Coal Ash: Close the Poison Pits
If the nuclear industry were allowed to just shovel its radioactive waste into open pits, nuclear power would look like a bargain. One reason coal appears to be America’s cheapest energy source is that the feds don’t regulate coal ash and other waste products left behind when coal is burned in power plants. So the industry does shovel its waste into open pits, abandoned mines, and huge slurry ponds like the one that burst its banks last December in Kingston, Tennessee, sending a billion gallons of toxic goo into and across the Emory River, covering 300 acres six feet deep.

Burning coal to produce half of the nation’s electricity and a third of its global-warming gases leaves behind some 131 million tons of ash per year. Ash piles up in the 584 dumps throughout the nation, poisoning streams, groundwater, wildlife, and humans. How poisonous is it? Back in 1980, Congress told the EPA to find out. It took the agency until 2002 to come up with a “risk screening”–which it would not make public. Freedom of Information Act requests by the Sierra Club forced the agency to divulge some material, although key sections were blacked out. The full report was not released until this March. It revealed that if you drink well water contaminated by arsenic from coal ash, you have a 1 in 50 chance of contracting cancer–worse odds than if you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.

And speaking of shoveling radioactive waste into open pits–that’s exactly what coal-fired power plants do. Because of the trace amounts of uranium and thorium in coal, reports Scientific American, fly ash “carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO
The EPA should regulate coal ash as hazardous waste. It will probably need to be stored in monitored, covered landfills with liners to prevent leaching into groundwater. Write to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson at action.sierraclub.org/bigpicture_ash.

DID YOU KNOW?
You might want to find out what’s stored in that ugly pond up the hill. Of the 584 coal ash dumps scattered across the country, the EPA judges 49 to be “high hazard,” at risk for catastrophic failure. Another Freedom of Information Act request by the Sierra Club led the EPA to reveal their locations. (The agency had initially refused, because of unspecified “national security concerns.”) These dangerous sites are found in 12 states, with the greatest numbers in North Carolina (12) and Arizona (9). Utility giant American Electric Power is responsible for 11 of the impoundments, followed closely by Duke Energy and Arizona Electric Power.

Thirty of the “high hazard” dumps are in impoverished areas. In Louisa, Kentucky, home to the Big Sandy coal ash site, nearly 33 percent of nearby residents live below the poverty level ($22,000 a year for a family of four).

Wow. As you probably noticed, I underlined a few lines in the article that stood out to me. Missouri is a coal whore. St. Louis itself is home to a few of the world’s largest coal companies, including Peabody, the largest. Peabody even has a massive brainwashing campaign underway at St. Louis Blues hockey games that blatantly misrepresents the facts about using coal for energy. In related news, the local utility, AmerenUE, is reporting it will be installing solar energy systems on two of its facilities to test the technology for future use in larger scale power generation. Hopefully this will piss off the coal companies.

Intergalactic Energy Battle

While there are not a plethora of lessons to be learned from Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, there is one in particular of which to take note. Amid the some of the best CGI ever seen and the slow-motion-hotness of the ever ungrateful Megan Fox (and regular-motion-perhaps-even-greater-hotness of coed Isabel Lucas) looms a battle for Energon, the source of life for the Transformers. Seems like even robots will kill each other for juice. Moral takeaways be damned, the movie rocked!

The charcoal-colored array of bad robots are a who’s who of oil and coal barons, destroying everything in their paths to accomplish their mission. Success seems inevitable for them until the good guys are helped by the T. Boone Pickens of Transformers. I’m not sure if the writers intended for the plot to mimic our own human struggles but nonetheless, the parallel is there. While an intergalactic energy battle hasn’t presented itself on earth (yet), we must not forget that even fiction is born from truth. We are tearing apart this planet searching for and protecting non-renewable energy sources. Instead, we should be investing even more resources in harnessing sustainable ones.

Progress is being made, and while I’m an admittedly impatient man, it is slow. The United States is filled with so many ignorant minions of the murderous Decepticons that the mind boggles. In the film, the evil Transformers destroy suns to harness energy. Funnily enough, our sun is giving us its energy for free and we refuse to take it. Stupid us.

Say “No” to Nukes

I really, really, really hope this:

“AmerenUE CEO Tom Voss said the company is suspending its efforts to build a second nuclear plant in Missouri because of the failure of legislation it was pushing in the General Assembly,”

is true. And by true, I mean that I hope this is a long term decision. So long in fact, that solar and wind energy have supplanted the dirty “nastinest” that currently powers America. Down with nuclear, down with coal!

There’s some chatter that Ameren is just regrouping and will be on the attack again. I trust the good guys will snuff out any efforts before they gain momentum. For those of you who haven’t been following this issue, the main point of contention hasn’t been nuclear power as the source of new energy in Missouri, but how the consumers would be affected by the construction of a new nuclear plant. In summary:

“At a news conference at Ameren’s St. Louis headquarters this morning, Voss said he had asked lawmakers to withdraw from consideration the bill the company had been pushing to repeal the state’s construction work in progress law. If passed, the bill would have allowed the utility to charge consumers for some costs of the proposed $6 billion-plus facility before it were up and running. Critics, including consumer groups and large industrial companies, said the bill would have led to huge price hikes and would have gutted the consumer protections available to the Public Service Commission.”

It’s the construction work in progress law, commonly known as CWIP, that’s the issue. AmerenUE embarked on a pretty expensive public relations campaign to convince the public that they wouldn’t get royally screwed by the company’s endeavor. Fortunately, for once, most of our elected officials weren’t fooled.

What’s next, clean coal?! Ha.

Blowing Away The Need For Coal

On Monday, a day the winds blew fiercely in St. Louis, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility. It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.”

Could you ever imagine a statement so progressive and bold coming from the Bush Administration? Hell no. A country without coal? Could it really happen? Probably not in the short term but it’s nice to dream.

In an article published yesterday:

Salazar said ocean winds along the East Coast can generate 1 million megawatts of power, roughly the equivalent of 3,000 medium-sized coal-fired power plants, or nearly five times the number of coal plants now operating in the United States, according to the Energy Department.

Five times people! A renewable energy future for this country and the rest of the world looks more likely every day. Combined with wave generation technology, solar farms and the continued development of more efficient technologies for appliances, automobiles, lighting, etc . . . we could be free of our dependence on oil and coal and all other polluting, environmentally unfriendly sources of energy forever.

Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind, which wants to build a wind farm off Cape Cod, Mass., estimates it would take hundreds of thousands of windmills. The average wind turbine today generates 2 to 5 megawatts per unit, he said.

“It would take a number of years to build out, but we’ve got to get going in this country with the first few projects,” he said.

No one said the task would be easy, and coal companies are critiquing the idea as expected. But, as Rodgers mentions, we have to start somewhere. And just because the average wind turbine today generates 2 to 5 megawatts, who’s to say the turbines of tomorrow won’t be able to do twice that?

Climate Action Summit: Local Action Against Global Warming

On March 8, 2008 I attended the Sierra Club / Missouri Coalition for the Environment sponsored Climate Action Summit. I was going to provide a summary of the key points and my thoughts related to them – and still might – but the Missouri Coalition for the Environment put up a summary page on their site that includes audio of each speaker’s presentation plus his or her presentation, if one was used. I’ve reproduced part of the page below so you can see who spoke. You can visit the link above to get more information but check back on this topic because I might still summarize what I learned from each speaker.

  • Henry Robertson, Sierra Club Energy Chair – “Cool Cities and Citizen Action”
  • Dennis Murphey, Kansas City Chief Environmental Officer – “Development and Implementation of the Kansas City Climate Action Plan”
  • Jay Hasheider, Columbia Water & Light – “Energy Conservation and Efficiency for Municipalities”
  • Linda Goldstein, Mayor of Clayton – “Clayton’s Action on Climate Change and U.S. Mayors’ Climate Protection Summit Report”
  • Tim Embree, Assistant to Mayor Francis Slay – “St. Louis’s Action on Climate Change”
  • Rick Hunter, St. Louis Chapter, US Green Building Council – “Green Building Solutions to Combat Climate Change”
  • Liz Forrestal, Missouri Votes Conservation – “Towards a Regional Sustainability Plan”
  • PJ Wilson, Renew Missouri - Optional Info Session on Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) Ballot Initiative. Visit Renew Missouri to get involved.

The Renew Missouri link will take you to a website for the effort to get renewable energy on the ballot this November. Over 20 states have separately mandated a certain percentage of the energy consumed in those states must come from X% renewable resources by certain dates. I believe MO aims to have 15% renewable energy by 2021 but don’t quote me on that. The effort needs 140,000 or so petition signatures by the end of April to get the measure on the ballot. I volunteered to help, though I’ve been admittedly useless to the campaign thus far – aside from this post of course. More on that later.

Livestock A Major Threat To The Environment

Just a little reminder from the Sierra Club:

Livestock create a beefy portion of all greenhouse-gas emissions: 18 percent, according to the United Nations. Could the answer be as simple as two slices of bread and a slathering of peanut butter and jelly? Perhaps. Compared with a burger, this classic sandwich saves as much as 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide, 280 gallons of water, and 50 square feet of land–even more if you wash it down with a glass of soy milk. “You don’t have to change your whole diet to change the world,” says the PB&J Campaign. “Just start with lunch.”

The report referenced is a little more than a year old but the facts hold true.  The difference in resources used between just one sandwich is mind blowing!

Just Checking In

My apologies for the quietude. I was traveling this week for work and haven’t had a chance to sit down and think about anything green. I did manage to read a few informative articles this week, and I’ve provided links to them below:

Have a great weekend, and for those of you in the U.S., Happy Mardi Gras!

Coal, Coal, Go Away

People all over the country are fighting the good fight against coal. According to the Associated Press:

In federal and state courtrooms across the country, environmental groups are putting coal-fueled power plants on trial in a bid to slow the industry’s biggest construction boom in decades. At least four dozen coal plants are being contested in 29 states . . . The targeted utilities include giants like Peabody Energy and American Electric Power down to small rural cooperatives.

This article, by Matthew Brown, gives these facts:

  • Coal plants provide just over 50 percent of the nation’s electricity. They also are the largest domestic source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, emitting 2 billion tons annually, about a third of the country’s total.
  • Environmental groups cite 59 canceled, delayed or blocked plants as evidence they are turning back the “coal rush.” That stacks up against 22 new plants now under construction in 14 states — the most in more than two decades.
  • The Sierra Club spent about $1 million on such efforts in 2007 and hopes to ratchet that figure up to $10 million this year.
  • Meanwhile, coal interests are pouring even more into a promotional campaign launched by the industry group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. It spent $15 million last year and expects to more than double that to $35 million in 2008, said the group’s director, Joe Lucas.
  • Utilities currently burn more than 1 billion tons of coal annually in more than 600 plants. Over the next two decades, the Bush administration projects coal’s share of electricity generation will increase to almost 60 percent.

I don’t believe relying on coal is the type of energy independence Americans are looking for. If we replace wars with pollution so rampant we have (another) national health crisis and (another) environmental crisis we will be no better off that we are now. Plus, we won’t be able to goad “allied” forces to die for us. We will die alone.

In the last few months of 2007, I wrote three pieces on coal:

The last piece, “Carbon Capture – Will It Work?”, was by far the most optimistic, and only because my hope is contingent on a new technology. We’ll see.

I fail to understand why major corporations keep making stupid decision after stupid decision. Perhaps the coal industry has no choice. Oil, natural gas, etc . . . have all been claimed. It’s fight or die for them too. Maybe instead of spending millions to maintain the status quo, some of that money should be spent on developing new technologies.

Take General Motors for instance. Toyota is kicking its ass, and rightfully so. Toyota is a better run organization that produces higher quality, more efficient, more attractive, more reliable vehicles. So what does GM announce? It’s going to partner with a company that produces ethanol, but we all know that ethanol wanks. Of course Toyota then announces yesterday it will sell a plug-in car starting 2010. Kudos are definitely due to GM for announcing the Chevy Volt many moons ago, but given American car companies’ tendency to destroy winning ideas (previous iterations of the electric car) I’m betting on Toyota’s plug-in.

I need to stop or I will spiral into a tangental abyss. Have a good day.