Knock it off, NYT: In defense of James Hansen and other climate hawks
By Bill McKibben 5 Mar 2013 2:56 PM
James Hansen being arrested at a Keystone protest.
I’ve met many good people in my life, and a few great ones. And one of the marks of the latter, it seems to me, is that they’re often under attack.
Like this morning. I opened the newspaper to read a column in the New York Times by Joe Nocera. [ http://grist.org/climate-energy/joe-nocera-knows-from-boneheaded/ ]It’s his fourth column pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline; fair enough (Though in the third, [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/nocera-how-not-to-fix-climate-change.html?ref=joenocera&_r=0 ]he managed to get the economics of carbon so completely backward that he had to append a long correction to yet another column. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/opinion/this-war-is-no-longer-invisible.html?ref=joenocera ] ) This time, though, the vehicle he used was an attack on NASA scientist James Hansen, who had correctly identified the huge amount of carbon in the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela. Nocera didn’t like Hansen lending his credibility to the fight against Keystone XL, and even though Hansen been meticulous to make sure he’s always spoken as a private citizen, the columnist insinuated he should lose his job: Are these, he asked, “the sort of statements a government scientist should be making?”
If Nocera’s crusade against Hansen leads to pressure from his employers, it wouldn’t be the first time — he’s been in trouble with every presidential administration since George H.W. Bush, and for precisely the same reason: Unlike most scientists he’s been willing to loudly sound the alarm about climate change, and try like hell to get across the message that we must act. From the very first day he came to public notice, warning Congress in 1988 that global warming was real, the establishment has tried to tell him to speak more softly. He hasn’t listened — not because he’s an ideologue, but because he’s a father and a grandfather.
Meanwhile, a few hours later, pictures started pouring in from the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. The images were even uglier than Nocera’s attack: They showed hooded and helmeted policemen arresting Mohammed Nasheed [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/us-maldives-nasheed-idUSBRE9240IT20130305 ] and carting him off to jail.
Presidency Maldives Mohamed Nasheed.
The same jail, apparently, where he was held and tortured for years [ http://grist.org/climate-change/triumph-tragedy-and-climate-change-the-island-president/ ] by the longtime Maldivian tyrant Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, a kleptocrat who ruled for three decades. Ruled until Nasheed, the “Mandela of the Indian Ocean,” managed to force an election which he won handily. But establishments never really give up, and this one eventually ousted him in a coup some months ago. Faced with the prospect that his unabated popularity was going to win him a free election, they’ve now jailed him again on a trumped-up charge.
I know Nasheed because he’s not only a hero of democracy, he’s a hero of the climate. Since the Maldives lies a meter or two above sea level, it has an obvious interest in the temperature of the planet, and Nasheed has been one of the most charismatic and committed leaders in the so-far futile global fight against carbon. He did all he could to transform the bureaucratic U.N. process into a working forum — when the Copenhagen talks were fizzling, he at least tried to salvage something.
And now he’s behind bars again, and God knows what they’re doing to him. One guy who could find out is Secretary of State John Kerry — a phone call from him to the coup leaders would probably be enough to set him free. Kerry, oddly, could also stop the Keystone pipeline, since it requires a permit from the State Department. It will be interesting to find out if he’s a good man or a great man.
NRG Skirts Utilities Taking Solar Panels to U.S. Rooftop
Photograph: Iconica
NRG Energy Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Crane said, consumers are realizing “they don’t need the power industry at all.” Peter Foley/Bloomberg
By Christopher Martin & Naureen S. Malik - Mar 25, 2013 8:38 AM CT
NRG Energy Inc. (NRG), the biggest power provider to U.S. utilities, has become a renegade in the $370 billion energy-distribution industry by providing electricity directly to consumers.
Bypassing its utility clients, NRG is installing solar panels on rooftops of homes and businesses and in the future will offer natural gas-fired generators to customers to kick in when the sun goes down, Chief Executive Officer David Crane said in an interview.
NRG is the first operator of traditional, large-scale power plants to branch into running mini-generation systems that run a single building. The endeavor strikes at the core business of utilities that have earned money from making and delivering electricity ever since Thomas Edison flipped the switch on the first investor-owned power plant [ http://www.coned.com/history/electricity.asp ] in Manhattan in 1882.
Consumers are realizing “they don’t need the power industry at all,” Crane, 54, said in an interview at this year’s MIT Energy Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “That is ultimately where big parts of the country go.”
NRG, which acquired GenOn Energy Inc. for $2.2 billion in December and Texas Genco for $5.8 billion in 2006, has stakes in 94 power plants, with all except about 1.5 percent of the generating capacity driven by fossil fuels.
With $8.4 billion in 2012 sales, the Princeton, New Jersey- based company has become strong by suppling power to the businesses that it’s now competing against with its NRG Residential Solar Solutions unit. The shares rose 0.6 percent to $25.94 at 9:34 a.m. in New York.
‘Potential Threat’
“It is obviously a potential threat to us over the long term,” said Jim Rogers, chairman and chief executive officer of Duke Energy Corp. (DUK), the largest U.S. utility owner.
Duke’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization grew 25 percent last year to $6.43 billion, compared with NRG’s 15 percent decline to $1.59 billion.
Other energy companies are challenging traditional utilities by providing rooftop solar panels to power individual buildings. That includes SolarCity Corp. (SCTY), which raised $92 million in its December initial public offering. The San Mateo, California-based company had installed 287 megawatts of commercial and residential solar projects, as of the end of last year.
It’s one of at least a dozen U.S. companies that provide rooftop panels at no upfront cost to customers, who typically make fixed monthly payments for the output under decades-long contracts, known as solar leases or power-purchase agreements.
These companies typically offer customers lower prices for power from rooftop panels than they pay utilities, reducing monthly bills. The model is contributing to the growing wedge between utilities and consumers.
Solar Leasing
Other companies offering solar leases and power-purchase agreements include Sunrun Inc., Sungevity Inc., which offers its services at home-improvement stores owned by its minority owner Lowe’s Cos., and Vivint Inc., which was purchased in September by Blackstone Group LP for about $2 billion.
That model is something NRG is “looking at in a very serious way,” Crane said. The rooftop solar model is also missing an important component, because panels can’t provide constant power. “We think the product offering could be better across the industry,” he said.
The other part of the package is the growing underground network of pipes that delivers gas to about half the homes in the country. Crane wants to provide customers with fuel cells and microturbines, which produce electricity from gas.
“The individual homeowner should be able to tie a machine to their natural gas line and tie that with solar on the roof and suddenly they can say to the transmission-distribution company, ‘Disconnect that line.’ ” Crane said.
Disrupting Utilities
Utilities are aware that generating power at customer sites will disrupt their business.
“There’s been a huge effort to build solar on the rooftop, both residential and commercial,” Duke’s Rogers said, as well as systems that generate power at industrial sites. “All of this is leading to a disintermediation of us from our customers.”
Duke is also considering a move into rooftop solar, a business that presents an “opportunity in the short term,” Rogers said.
In the long term, however, he recognizes that his business could become far less important.
“If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using us for backup,” he said.
Other independent power producers may be evaluating the merits of distributed generation, building many small systems at customer sites instead of a few large ones.
Distributed Generation
NextEra Energy Inc. (NEE), the largest U.S. producer of renewable energy, now has a vice president of distributed generation, Andrew Beebe, who stepped down as chief commercial officer for the struggling Chinese solar-panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co. in September. Suntech defaulted on a $541 million bond March 15.
NextEra expects to have about 900 megawatts of utility- scale solar plants in operation by the end of this year. Steve Stengel, a NextEra spokesman, wouldn’t discuss the company’s distributed-generation plans or say when it hired Beebe, who was unavailable for an interview.
The shift to distributed generation will have more of an impact on utilities than on customers, Crane said.
“The vast majority of people don’t want to be bothered every day by what’s going on with their energy consumption,” Crane said at the March 1 event. “We’d like to present one bill and you can figure out what you saved that month.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Christopher Martin in New York at cmartin11@bloomberg.net; Naureen S. Malik in New York at nmalik28@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net
James Hansen is Leaving NASA to Intensify His Campaign for Carbon Cuts
NASA scientist James E. Hansen testifying at a Senate hearing on global warming in June 1988. NASA
By ANDREW C. REVKIN April 1, 2013, 8:05 pm April 2, 7:38 p.m. | Updated with new Hansen study below
After nearly half a century of research in planetary and climate science for NASA, James E. Hansen is retiring on Wednesday to pursue his passion for climate activism without the hindrances that come with government employment.
Justin Gillis has filed a thorough look at Hansen’s journey from climate scientist to impassioned carbon campaigner. Here’s an excerpt and a link to the rest:
[R]etirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.
“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.
Dr. Hansen had already become an activist in recent years, taking vacation time from NASA to appear at climate protests and allowing himself to be arrested or cited a half-dozen times.
But those activities, going well beyond the usual role of government scientists, had raised eyebrows at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the ‘sideshow’ would exit,” Dr. Hansen said in an e-mail.
At 72, he said, he feels a moral obligation to step up his activism in his remaining years.
“If we burn even a substantial fraction of the fossil fuels, we guarantee there’s going to be unstoppable changes” in the climate of the earth, he said. “We’re going to leave a situation for young people and future generations that they may have no way to deal with.”
Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es3051197 [ http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197 ]).
There’s much more on Dot Earth on Hansen’s journey, including these posts:
And for those who might have missed it, here’s my 2008 video chat with Hansen about his approach to communicating risks from greenhouse-driven warming [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auTEWanRTfM ]:
WATCH ARCTIC MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT PROGRAMME (AMMP) VIDEO ON OCEAN ACIDIFICATION http://vimeo.com/65512340
The release of a new Cooperative Research Report (CRR) takes an in-depth look at the chemical aspects of ocean acidification.
Published: 21 October 2013
??????????????????????????????????????????????The level of global atmospheric CO2 is now approaching 400 parts per million (ppm) – an increase of over 40% from the pre-Industrial Revolution level. This is largely a result of the release of geologically-stored carbon through the burning of fossil fuels, and also changes in the use of land. From a geological perspective, it is happening in an instant. The oceans absorb about a quarter of these emissions, and current atmospheric CO2 levels would be even higher but for this.
The downside of this oceanic uptake is that CO2 reacts with water to form carbonic acid and thus decreases the pH level of seawater, a process referred to as ocean acidification. Since pre-industrial times, the pH of the global surface ocean has decreased from 8.2 to 8.1 (equivalent to a 30% increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions), and it is predicted that with business-as-usual trends, the pH level could drop to 7.9 by the end of the 21?st century. There are widespread concerns as to how marine organisms, especially calcifiers such as shellfish and corals whose ability to build calcium carbonate shells and skeletons can be impaired by ocean acidification, can adapt to a rapid rate of change probably not evident in the last 55 million years.
The implications for marine ecosystems that will be subjected to this stress – alongside others such as climate change – and for the key services these ecosystems provide to mankind need to be elucidated. Research to date suggests complex biological responses can be expected with potential winners and losers, but proxy studies such as those on high C02 environments around cold water volcanic seeps and paleo-studies serve to underline the concerns.
In this context it is essential that coordinated long-term ocean acidification monitoring is undertaken to assess variability and trends in the ocean carbon system and support assessment of the risks to and impacts on marine ecosystems and services. Ocean acidification is influenced by physical, chemical, and biological processes which lead to spatial and temporal variability on a range of scales. Knowledge is needed in order to understand the current conditions to which marine organisms are exposed and to help distinguish long-term anthropogenic acidification from natural variability and cycles. However, monitoring the marine carbonate system is not a trivial task, and relies on the diligent work and studies of several groups.
The ICES Cooperative Research Report on Chemical aspects of ocean acidification monitoring in the ICES marine area originated from the Marine Chemistry Working Group's (MCWG) contribution to ICES advice to OSPAR on this topic. The report considers and makes recommendations on the approach and tools available to achieve coordinated monitoring of changes in the carbon system in the ICES marine area, i.e. the Northeast Atlantic and Baltic Sea, and outlines current monitoring activities in the region
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