Are utilities moving quickly enough to cut carbon emissions?

Posted on 05/17/2013 by Dan Haugen

The smokestack at the #4 unit of the Boswell Energy Center near Cohasset, Minnesota is seen in this 2006 photo. (Photo by Than Tibbetts via Creative Commons)

The smokestack at the #4 unit of the Boswell Energy Center near Grand Rapids, Minnesota is seen in this December 2006 photo. (Photo by Than Tibbetts via Creative Commons)

In January, northern Minnesota electric utility Minnesota Power announced a new direction forward for its generation portfolio.

The company’s “Energy Forward” plan calls for adding wind and hydropower, retiring one coal-burning unit, and converting two others to natural gas. Along with continued conservation efforts, the investments are projected to lower the utility’s carbon emissions 30 percent by 2015 compared to 2005 levels.

It’s the years beyond that, however, that worry climate activists.

That’s because Minnesota Power has also proposed investing more than $350 million on an air-quality project at the utility’s largest generator, a 585-megawatt coal-fired unit near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, known as Boswell 4.

The project, which has the support of the Minnesota Department of Commerce, would bring dramatic reductions in particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and mercury emissions, which would mean less haze over the region’s scenic lakes and forests and a lower risk to residents for respiratory and neurological health problems.

But it could also financially commit the company to burning coal for another two decades, during which the unit could spew more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases at a time when scientists warn major reductions are needed to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

‘We need much bolder action’

A coalition that includes Fresh Energy, the Sierra Club, the Izaak Walton League, and the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy is asking the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to require an in-depth study of carbon and other environmental impacts. A public comment period is open until Monday, May 20.

All four groups are members of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News (which is based at Fresh Energy).

If Boswell 4 were to continue to operate past 2030, it’s less likely Minnesota Power will be able to continue the pace of the carbon reductions it’s achieving through 2015.

In that context, the Minnesota case provides an example of a much larger concern — not just in the Midwest, but also globally.

“We need much bolder action,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that is not directly involved in the Boswell 4 case. “Incremental steps like those proposed by Minnesota Power are probably not enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.”

Minnesota Power is on track to exceed the state of Minnesota’s goal of a 15 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2015. Once it finishes implementing its plan, its generation mix will consist of one-third renewables, one-third natural gas and one-third coal — down from about 60 percent coal today.

“We think we’re certainly hitting on all cylinders,” said Al Rudeck, Minnesota Power’s vice president for strategy and planning.

Rudeck said the utility has a successful conservation program that routinely meets the state’s 2 percent annual requirement. And it continues to add renewables, including 400 megawatts of wind power from the Bison Wind Energy Center in North Dakota and a 250-megawatt purchase agreement from Manitoba Hydro.

The company is retiring a 75-megawatt coal unit at its Taconite Harbor facility and converting two 55-megawatt coal units at its Laskin Energy Center to a natural gas peaking plant.

Even if the company can continue to find more opportunities such as these to keep pace with Minnesota’s voluntary state goal of 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050, will that be enough to avoid extreme climate change?

While it is difficult to project the exact impact of rising carbon emissions, recent research suggests targets like Minnesota’s may be too hopeful.

In February, the journal Energy Policy published a paper by Netherlands researcher Michel den Elzen that concludes developed nations need to cut carbon emissions in half by 2020 to have a “medium chance” of preventing climate change’s worst impacts.

And in November, PricewaterhouseCoopers projected that in order to avoid jumping over the guardrail from uncomfortable to dangerous climate change, the global economy needs to cut its carbon intensity 5.1 percent every year from now until 2050. The average annual rate since 2000 has been 0.8 percent.

The United States has pledged to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. As of 2011, the country had achieved a 7 percent reduction (though that progress was aided by the recession). One way for the U.S. to meet its 2020 goal, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers: replace all coal-fired generation with natural gas, which emits significantly less carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced.

Continuing to burn coal may not make these targets impossible, but it certainly makes them more difficult to hit.

“We are very concerned with what we call life-extension projects at coal plants,” said Beth Goodpaster, an attorney for the environmental groups intervening in the Boswell 4 case. “When you’re putting over $350 million into a coal-fired power plant, you are making it ever so much harder to … phase it out.”

‘We think that we have a better plan’

Goodpaster said they don’t believe Minnesota Power has fully evaluated all of the possible alternatives, such as replacing the unit with a mix of energy conservation, renewables, natural gas, and grid power purchases. Those it did consider were evaluated too narrowly, without considering health and environmental costs, she said.

Jessica Tritsch, an organizer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said Minnesota Power needs to study a broader range of alternatives that include things such as energy conservation, wind and solar power. “We’re not convinced Minnesota Power has fully studied those options.”

Minnesota Power spokeswoman Amy Rutledge quickly dismissed the environmental groups’ allegations.

“It’s clear that their agenda is really to shut down every baseload power plant in the state,” Rutledge said. “We think that we have a better plan.”

Minnesota Power’s plan is the result of a process that, as required by regulators, seeks out the lowest-cost, reliable generation mix that meets environmental regulations. Rudeck said an all-conservation option isn’t a suitable replacement for the Boswell 4 unit.

“If that was the best option for customers, the resource [planning model] would pick it,” Rudeck said. “Clearly it doesn’t.”

The Minnesota Department of Commerce agrees. In comments filed Tuesday, the department’s Division of Energy Resources said the emissions-reduction project at Boswell 4 is “reasonable” for meeting state and federal mercury rules, and that it believes the project is in the public interest.

The utility’s Boswell 4 evaluation compares the emissions-reduction project with two natural gas alternatives, which it concludes would be more costly to customers.

Until Congress or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decide to regulate carbon emissions from existing coal-burning power plants, the company isn’t under any legal obligation to consider climate impacts. Minnesota recently postponed a rule to require carbon accounting in utility planning.

The environmental groups say that conservation and renewables can win in an economic comparison with fossil fuels. They want state regulators to deny the Boswell 4 upgrades, let it retire in 2016 when new federal mercury rules take effect, and replace it with wind, solar, efficiency, gas and grid power purchases.

“You could have showed us why those other options are impossible,” Goodpaster said.

Minnesota Power studied retirement options for its coal-fired power plants last year, however, and state officials say that study, and the Commerce Department’s own calculations, show that replacing Boswell 4 isn’t possible without increasing costs, even under “extreme assumptions” about carbon and fuel prices.

“[I]nitial Department analysis determined that, at the expected level of environmental compliance costs, retiring Boswell 4 is not a cost-effective option,” the state’s Division of Energy Resources said in its coal-diversification study comments.

It’s the environmental costs that concern the petitioners:

“The decision to retrofit [Boswell 4] rather than retire it or replace it with a natural gas plant would, over time, result in the emission of an enormous amount of additional air pollutants, especially greenhouse gases,” the environmental groups say in their filing. “Continued emissions of GHG are contributing to the environmental and public health problems caused by climate change which are numerous, severe, and irreversible.”

Business groups lower local emissions, without mentioning climate change

Posted on 05/16/2013 by ClimateWire

Downtown Cleveland. (Photo by Emily Bell via Creative Commons)

By Evan Lehmann

Cleveland’s chamber of commerce is ready to launch an unusual program to help businesses get loans for energy efficiency retrofits. In Salt Lake City, the local chamber is promoting “clean air” to reduce gasoline use.

These out-of-the-ordinary pursuits by local business associations are increasingly being used in regions where the politics of climate change might not fly, but profits from clean energy do.

Local chambers are devising ways to reduce the travel time of big trucks, swap gas guzzlers for natural gas haulers and erect wind turbines in conservative states. →

Commentary: Be cautious linking extreme weather to climate crisis

Posted on 11/13/2012 by guest contributor

A flooded parking garage in New York City following Hurricane Sandy. (Photo by dsgray16 via Creative Commons)

By Amy Luers
For the Daily Climate

Many climate advocates hope that the recent bout of extreme weather will awaken Americans to the dangers of climate change.

Advocates and scientists have pointed to superstorm Sandy and the Texas drought as clear and present signs of the climate crisis. Although the public does seem to be taking notice, I fear these efforts could backfire if we do not proceed cautiously with our framing around extreme weather and climate change. Our challenge to solve the climate crisis could become more difficult in the end.

How? Let’s consider where efforts to tie extreme weather to climate crisis might lead: →

Q&A with Maggie Koerth-Baker

Posted on 04/09/2012 by Tom Vandyck

Maggie Koerth-Baker (Photo courtesy Leah Shaffer)

Dealing with the looming energy crunch is more than doable, says Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of the new book Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us. We already have the technologies to get started.

All we need to do now is change everything.

Koerth-Baker, a science editor for the website BoingBoing, who was born and raised in Kansas, and now lives in Minneapolis, wrote the book from the perspective of a Midwesterner.

“This is a book about what everybody is doing, not just something for California hippies,” she said, seated in a coffee shop across the street from the old house that she and her energy consultant husband have refitted with pre-programmed thermostats in almost every single room, in her walkable Minneapolis neighborhood, on a busy bus line. “I wanted to talk about how this affects the Midwest, how people in the Midwest think about this stuff, and what they’re doing.”

Before the Light Go Out is not just another rave about electric cars and rooftop solar cells. Koerth-Baker does talk about those things, but above all she takes a long, hard look at the underlying mega-structures that connect all the sexy gadgetry.

“We talk so much about individual technologies, but we don’t talk so much about systems”, she said. “But if you don’t understand how the systems work, you’re not going to understand what the actual problems are, or the solutions.”

Q: Your overarching message is: If we want to do what’s good for us, we have to change everything.

A: Instead of just patching bits and pieces into this system, we have to change the system itself. It’s like your house. You can make your house more energy efficient by replacing a boiler or a dishwasher with something more energy efficient. But if you build a house that makes it really easy for you to save energy, simply because the house itself doesn’t need to use as much, that solves the problem better than just replacing every appliance.

Changing the system is easier said than done. Can we do it?

That’s where I start to get sort of pessimistic. I think we have the technology to do this, and there’s still the possibility that we have the political will to do it. But even if we do that, it’s a coordination job unlike anything we’ve ever done before. Think about the Apollo project. That scale of integration and coordination needs to happen now, but on a much broader level. It would be very, very difficult. I think we’ll do something, but I don’t know if it will be everything we’re capable of doing.

One of the central claims in your book is that you don’t have to believe in climate change to want to do something about energy.

In order to do everything that we can do, you’re going to have to have people buying into climate change more than they do now. But I think that there are a lot of changes that we can make without that kind of public consensus. We don’t have to just sit around twiddling our thumbs until we can get everybody to accept climate change. We can start making changes based on what we can agree on.

Meanwhile, polls show that fewer people believe in climate change now than just a few years ago.

I think there’s a lot of fear behind it. James Inhofe, the Senator from Oklahoma, was on The Rachel Maddow Show recently, where he was talking about how he used to accept climate change, but he decided that he didn’t anymore, because if you believe that climate change is real, and that you had to do something about it, it would just be too expensive. For most people, it’s probably not as conscious as that, but there is a lot of that same reaction. It’s overwhelming. The solutions to this are not easy – they’re hard to wrap your head around, because it’s not just “Replace fossil fuels with magical fuel X.” I think a lot of people get freaked out, and would really just prefer that we don’t have to do anything.

Why did you decide to limit yourself to current technologies for the book? You hardly wrote anything about hydrogen, let alone nuclear fusion, which some scientists claim is now really only ten years away.

I want people to understand that we don’t have to wait for technologies to appear. We already have the technology we need to start making a big difference. While I think we should be doing the R&D on some of these long range things, I think it’s incredibly foolish to sit around hoping that you’re going to have a magic bullet that’s going to solve all your problems.

I think that’s the other reaction you get from people. If they don’t retreat into thinking there’s no problem, they retreat into thinking, “Oh, nuclear fusion will just solve it, and it’s just ten years away, so I don’t have to do anything.” I think it would be great if fusion worked. We should keep trying all these things. But it’s really short-sighted and stupid to count on it.

There is always a lot of talk about giant solar farms and electric cars – the sexy stuff, so to speak. You focus on the things in between: transmission, storage and load management.

My husband is an energy analyst. He figures out how to make buildings as energy efficient as possible for the lowest amount of money. Over the years he kept coming home and talking about things he realized people weren’t getting as he explained how energy worked to his clients. It just started to occur to me that there’s a big gap between what energy experts know and what the general public knows. And as long as the general public doesn’t know what happens between their light switch and the wind farm, they won’t be able to understand what our problems are. A lot of people think about that as boring, so we kind of gloss over it, but it really determines what we can and can’t do with our energy system.

At the same time, more than a few people within the environmental movement believe that climate change and peak oil will lead to a collapse of the current system, and that we will be forced to live in small scale, agrarian communities, closer to the 19th century than the 21st.

I don’t think that’s constructive. A lot of the stuff that I’ve read from that movement is way too excited about the end of the world.

You can’t help but get the feeling that some of the so-called collapsitarians want to be right so badly that they’re almost looking forward to the end of society as we know it.

Yes, and that bothers me. Also, a lot of times, they don’t look at energy the right way. They tend to think that small towns are the most sustainable way to live. No, they’re not. Dense cities are. The people that use the least energy in America right now live in New York City. We have to pay attention to those facts.

We don’t apply the same standard of evidence-based reality to energy, sustainability and the environmental movement that we do to other things. A lot of it comes back to culture and lifestyle. I think it fits in with this very baby-boomer hippie idea of what is good for the environment, but that doesn’t necessarily match up with the data.

In your book, you make short shrift of the idea that getting a Prius and LED light bulbs are sufficient to do one’s part to save the plant.

It was disappointing for me to find out that your individual choices don’t really matter that much. It all comes back to systems. The reason why Europeans use less energy than us isn’t that they’re more moral or just better people, but because they live in these systems that make it easy to use less energy, where you don’t have to think about it. If they had the systems we have, they’d use every bit as much energy as us.

It’s all about incentives, you write. So what are the best incentives to change things in the Midwest?

“This is where it gets tough, because I’m not a policy wonk. I know that if we had more public transportation in the Midwest, fewer people would drive and they’d drive fewer miles. There’s been some good data that show that if you change zoning laws, so that people can build multistory, mixed use buildings, and add more public transportation to that mix, the vehicle miles traveled fall dramatically.

Right now I can get on the bus and go anywhere in Minneapolis, so my husband and I only have one car. But I can’t tell my friends in Kansas City to only have one car, because, frankly, their bus system sucks. If they had just one car, they’d be cutting themselves off from services they need, their community and their jobs. It wouldn’t be fair to expect people to hurt themselves for the environment. We have to make it so that they don’t have to do that.

The conundrum is: How do you get people out of their cars and exurbs, and into buses and dense urban neighborhoods? A carbon tax comes to mind.

I have come to think that that is absolutely necessary. When people ask me, “What is the one change we could make?”, it’s that. I don’t know if “tax” is the right word, but you have to put some kind of price on carbon, and value it at what it’s actually worth, both terms of its value and its cost. All the other stuff that actually needs to happen would follow from that.

Saving money is a better motivator than saving the planet?

For some people it is. I think we have to be careful about how we use that motivator, though, because a lot of the things that we have to do aren’t going to save people money in the short term. But it’s going to save them money in the long term, because of the things you wouldn’t have to deal with in terms of climate change and peak oil.

“Governments make change mandatory, then businesses find a way to make it cheap”, you write.

They do. We saw that with sulfur and CFCs.

There’s a palpable fear among many entrepreneurs and politicians that a carbon tax and/or a cap-and-trade regime would destroy business.

Those other things didn’t. This would be bigger, obviously, but we have seen that when we make these kinds of mandates, it’s cheaper and easier to solve the problem than we thought it would be, because innovation is driven by the incentive to save money. I absolutely believe in the power of business to do that.

Will we have to build new nuclear power plants to buy ourselves time until green technologies mature enough to be scaled up in sufficient ways?

I have started describing my relationship with nuclear as “frenemies.” I think there are some serious issues that have to be addressed in terms of how we do regulation, and I think we need to figure out what the hell we’re doing with the waste. But I don’t think we can get rid of the nuclear power we have. And we’d probably be better off with more nuclear than with more coal and natural gas.

Look, we’re not going to be all solar and all wind any time soon, so you’re going to have to make choices. We have to have mature, non-crazy conversations about what risks we’re willing to take, and which ones we’re willing to live with. Because they all have risks. Coal kills 25,000 Europeans per year.

People are justifiably horrified when nuclear accidents happen, while coal largely flies under the radar. But coal’s human cost, as you describe it in your book, is staggering: Almost ten 9/11s per year, in Europe alone.

The number one problem with coal is respiratory issues — particulate matter in the atmosphere. And you’re also talking about radiation. Coal contains radioactive material, and it does the exact same thing in terms of cancer that a nuclear accident would. So you have to account for that. When you have fossil fuels burning at ground level, you also get ground-level ozone, and that, combined with really hot days, can lead to cardiovascular problems. There are a number of ways in which these things happen, but they happen in ways that we just don’t connect back to the source.

There are several different studies with different estimations of how many people died a result of Chernobyl in all the years since it happened. The lowest is, like, 10,000, the highest is more than 800,000. We can argue about which of those studies is correct, but the point I like to make is that in all but one of those studies the death toll from Chernobyl is still lower than the death toll over the same time period from coal.

If all the things that you’re hoping for in the next few decades actually do happen, what will the Midwest look like?

I think we’ll have denser cities. And we’re going to need better ways of transporting people from city to city. When you’re talking about farmland, you’ll have to have personal transportation. You’re not going to replace that with a bus or a train. But you need some way that those people can take their car shorter distances and then meet up with public transit from there. I think buses or trains could work, or even some kind of van pool, if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, Western Kansas. If we’re all going to the same places, at the same time, than why don’t we pool our resources together?

We’ll also start looking more at: What can our communities do? What resources do they have that can be used for energy? In the book I talk about the idea of having one of those maps from grade school social studies class, where you have water resources over here, and you’ve got wind or trash over there. And then you could try to combine all those resources, based on what’s available.

The Plains states are these great wind systems. Every major area has its landfill that we should be using for landfill gas. Some places can have way more small-scale hydro development than they have now. There’s a ton of different things you can do just based on what’s available in your area.

How about people’s daily lives? Will we all have the proverbial electric car that sits hooked up in the garage and feeds power from our rooftop solar panels back into the grid?

For starters, we’re going to have to think about how our houses are built. If we’re going to make our cities more energy efficient, we’re not going to have houses that are built like they were in the 1950s, with super thin walls, and single pane windows.

You can’t go knocking them down, though.

That’s true. You have to work with what there is. But one of the nice things we have in the Midwest is that we have tons of these 1920s and ’30s houses that have a lot of energy efficiency built into them already. My own house has really good thermal massing because of the stucco walls. Older houses are also generally built with windows that give you heat gain in winter, and light during the day. They’re designed for a way of life where you didn’t have energy so easily accessible. So we can use a lot of that to our advantage now.

Also, battery facilities are going to be all over the place, we’ll have to have energy storage everywhere. And your house is going to have some sort of smart panel where you can be a demand-response customer to the grid, and where you can program that stuff into your house.

We’re just going to have people thinking about energy differently, and we’re going to find ways to do this. Because we have to, for one thing, but also because the Midwest comes from this farming-community background. We value frugality, and we don’t waste stuff just because we can. We want to be responsible with what we have, and I think we’ll find ways to do that.

Maggie Koerth-Baker will appear at an Earth Day Tweetup with Will Steger and Sean Otto at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul on April 21 (click on “events”), and will be interviewed as part of Minnesota Public Radio’s “Bright Ideas” series on April 24.

Tom Vandyck is an international freelance writer based in St. Paul. In addition to being syndicated by the International Features Agency in Amsterdam, his work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor.

This work by Midwest Energy News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Why people are confused about climate change

Posted on 03/23/2012 by Ken Paulman

Temperature departures from average from March 8-15. (NASA image, lazily pilfered from Climate Central)

Last spring, I wrote about how asking whether climate change “caused” a weather event is simply a bad question:

A better question might be, “how likely would this weather event have been if not for global warming?” Or, “as the atmosphere warms, will this sort of thing become more frequent?”

As we are confronted with yet another outbreak of off-the-charts bizarre weather, it doesn’t look like reporters are doing much better on this front. At least, not if this story from yesterday’s New York Times is any indication:

The rapid mating cycle started a few years ago, said Jeffry Mitton, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. He and other researchers blame climate change. Some meteorologists suspect the warm weather is an effect of recent solar flares. Still others say the early spring is part of the weather pattern known as La Niña. And then there is the explanation from the National Weather Service: a large subtropical high-pressure system is lingering above the western Atlantic, blocking cold air from blowing down.

Whatever the reason, the early weather is throwing all kinds of ritual spring activities off kilter.

Wow, can’t those scientists and meteorologists get their acts together?

The problem here is that the reporter is treating these explanations as mutually exclusive, when they’re not (except maybe the solar flare thing). Nothing about the immediate weather phenomena leading to the heat wave is inconsistent with a warming atmosphere.

It’s a bit like saying: “Some say it’s snowing because it’s winter. Others say it’s because there’s moisture falling from the sky. Whatever the reason, we’re going to have some shoveling to do tomorrow!”

It’s frustrating that while the Times has ample column inches to tell us about restaurant patrons who are confused about why they can’t get fresh asparagus in March, it can’t take the two or three sentences needed to make the relationship between weather and climate clear. Andrew Freedman of Climate Central shows how it’s done:

Although studies have not yet been conducted on the main factors that triggered this heat wave and whether global warming may have tilted the odds in favor of the event, scientific studies of previous heat events clearly show that global warming increases the odds of heat extremes, in much the same way as using steroids boosts the chances that a baseball player will hit more home runs in a given year.

See? Not that hard.

There’s a big difference between carefully reflecting the genuine uncertainties of climate science and obtusely sowing confusion about it.

Should red and blue states be green and black instead?

Posted on 01/25/2012 by Dan Haugen

A presidential election year is upon us again, and that means the return of maps splitting the nation into red and blue states.

James Lenfestey thinks we should be seeing green and black instead.

Lenfestey, a Minneapolis poet and former journalist, spoke at a monthly Environment Minnesota breakfast Tuesday about the politics of energy. (Environment Minnesota is a member of RE-AMP, which publishes Midwest Energy News.)

The oil and coal industries have influenced U.S. politics so much in recent decades, Lenfestey explained, that many red states would be better represented as black for the oil and coal interests they support. Blue states, meanwhile, have led the way on green energy.

Lenfestey’s first exposure to the fossil-fuel industry’s political machine came while working as an editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune in the early 1990s. After writing editorials about climate change, he began receiving mail from an organization called the Global Climate Coalition.

The now-defunct GCC was among the earliest fossil-fuel backed groups to begin spreading scientific-sounding misinformation about climate change issues. He calls them Potemkin villages — fake groups meant to give the appearance that science or the public is behind it.

The mission of these groups has been to confuse the public about the science behind greenhouse gases and global warming. They not only borrowed strategies from the tobacco industry, but some of the same individuals who defended tobacco now work for these fossil fuel groups.

The latter claim is documented in the recent book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth About Climate Change,” by Naomi Oreskes (who penned an editorial this week in the Los Angeles Times and appeared Tuesday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.)

Lenfestey characterized it as an information war, and the side that believes society needs to take action to curb greenhouse emissions is “absolutely losing” the public battle.

One reason countering climate misinformation is so difficult is that those spreading it only need to sow enough confusion to stall action. “All they want is stalemate,” said Lenfestey.

Another factor that makes it challenging is the state of media. “My old game, the mainstream media, is very much part of the problem,” he said. The amount of coverage of climate change issues has plummeted in the past half decade, and much of the coverage that remains focuses on the controversy rather than the facts.

How do climate-change believers turn the conversation around? Lenfestey offered some advice for how people can better communicate. When people criticize government subsidies for clean energy technologies, for example, remind them that hydraulic fracturing wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for years of government support.

Perhaps Lenfestey and President Obama’s speechwriters are reading the same pointers, because that’s how Obama framed the issue in Tuesday evening’s State of the Union speech.

“[I]t was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground,” the president said.

Obama only mentioned climate change once in the speech, in noting that Congress is too divided to take on the issue at all.

Lenfestey noted that presidents and their advisers have been talking about the risks of climate change or fossil fuel emissions since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Whether more energy-politics-as-usual will follow this speech is to be seen.

Changing the conversation to conservation

Posted on 01/19/2012 by Ken Paulman

In Kansas, it seems, the first rule of climate change is: Don’t talk about climate change.

That’s what EnergyNOW found in this segment (originally aired in August) on Kansas towns that have embraced renewable energy and conservation efforts in large part by avoiding politically divisive conversations about global warming.

Take, for example, Father Kerry Ninemire of Salina, who was heavily involved in the formation of Interfaith Power and Light, a religious group formed to fight climate change. Ninemire was unable to convince his own congregation to sign on with the organization (“It got associated a little bit more with the Democrat party. And Kansas is very Republican.”), but they nevertheless adopted efficiency measures that helped the church cut energy use by 10 percent.

Mild winter foreshadows climate stress for forests

Posted on 01/09/2012 by Dan Haugen

A snow-free landscape at Kinnickinnic State Park, near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, on Dec. 18, 2011.

As I sit down to write this, the sun is shining, the sidewalks are sloppy, and it’s a balmy 46 degrees outside. It’s January in Minneapolis, but it feels like late March.

It feels fantastic, to take a deep breath outside without the burn of winter we expect here this time of year.

It’s also unsettling.

We’ve seen the news reports about how the winter-that-wasn’t has affected businesses and recreational activities. But as I walked the dogs Friday afternoon — gloves tucked in the pockets of my unzipped jacket — I wondered about the environmental impact of this weird and warm winter.

I called Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Forest Ecology, to find out whether we’re likely to see consequences in our forests.

The short answer: it’s too soon to say. But a continued lack of cold or snow could cause stress for trees. And it foreshadows a climate shift that would bring huge changes to the region.

“One winter like this might not have a very big impact, but in the future, in a few decades, they mostly might be like this,” says Frelich.

Among the shorter-term risks: frozen roots, false starts, and a frenzy of pests.

Cold soil

A few winters ago, Frelich’s team buried temperature sensors near Seagull Lake, just south of the Canadian border in northern Minnesota. The devices recorded hourly temperatures four inches beneath the surface for two years. Not once did the temperature fall below 30 degrees. The reason? “Snow is a really good insulator,” says Frelich. Because there’s no snow on the ground this winter, the soil is actually colder than it was a year ago.

Ironically, Minnesota’s trees are less equipped to sustain cold ground temperatures than trees from Iowa or Missouri, where snow-less winter months are more common. A sharp cold snap without any snow to insulate the soil would mean widespread root damage, which would make trees more vulnerable to drought until their roots reestablished themselves. “If we ended up with an Arctic air outbreak without any snow on the ground, and the soil temperatures got down to, say, 15 to 20 degrees in the top couple of feet, we could have huge tree mortality.”

Leafing out

“Warm spells in the middle of winter can be quite stressful for trees because they could cause trees to come out of dormancy at the wrong time,” says Frelich. It would require several consecutive days in the 50s or 60s, like the record-setting warmth western Minnesota saw last week, in order for a tree to prematurely “leaf out.” If it turned cold again, Frelich says “the new buds that it had started to grow would be killed, and there would be major damage for the trees.”

Native Minnesota tree species aren’t used mid-winter warm-ups, but trees from further south aren’t fooled as easily. That’s why species like the catalpa tree, originally from the south, are the last to bloom in the spring. They sacrifice some of the growing season so they won’t be duped by a false spring in the middle of January. “They’re very conservative about leafing out,” says Frelich. “The problem is that when you move them north, they waste a significant part of the summer, so they’re not going to grow as well as trees here that take off right away.”

Bugs and pests

Trees have many tiny enemies that eat away at their leaves and bark and spread disease. Generally, prolonged deep freezes are good for Minnesota trees because they kill off many of the bugs and pests that torment them, says Frelich. Winters without extreme cold temperatures allow some of these pests to start the spring in greater numbers. Mild winters have allowed species like the mountain pine beetle to invade parts of the Rocky Mountains and Canada where it would have frozen to death in the past.

While this winter may seem like a gift to any creature trying to survive the elements, bugs that winter on the ground are likely having a tough time, says Frelich, because of the cold soil temperatures from the lack of snow cover. Bugs that spend the winter in crevices of the bark, meanwhile, are enjoying an easier winter than last year. “What’s good for one is bad for the other,” says Frelich.

So is Frelich enjoying the weather, or is it making him uneasy, too?

“Both,” he says. “It’s nice when I have to drive somewhere I haven’t had to worry about getting stuck in a blizzard, but on the other hand, it’s really scary to think that the climate could be changing this much, that winters like this might become common, if they did become common, what that would do to the natural resources of Minnesota would be huge. Even though one winter might not have a huge effect, if we had lots of winters in a row like this it would.”

Photo by Mike in Minnesota via Creative Commons

Bill McKibben talks Keystone XL on Colbert

Posted on 11/15/2011 by Ken Paulman

Climate activist and founder of 350.org explains why he opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, and admits being a “hypocrite” for using fossil fuels:

The Daily Show and the War on Science

Posted on 10/27/2011 by Ken Paulman

Most readers of this site are probably aware of the recent skeptic-funded Berkeley study that confirmed, once again, that the earth is warming. And most are probably aware that this study received practically zero media attention.

What story could possibly be more important? Watch:

But that’s not the best part. The Daily Show takes it a step further, with this spot-on mockery of conservative demonization of scientists:

Aasif Mandvi’s interview with GOP strategist Noelli Nikpour defies parody.

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