Modeshift

Photo © Aaron Jaffe / Circle of Blue

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

In January, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that it was wrong in predicting that the glaciers of the Himalayas could be gone by 2035, skeptics of global warming used the error to assert that much of climate science was a fraud.

Next month, though, the Asia Society Museum opens a month long exhibition in New York of alpine photographs by David Breashears that are the strongest visual proof ever compiled that climate scientists may have been aggressive in predicting the rate of glacial melting at the top of the world, but not by much. Circle of Blue, the premier news organization covering the global freshwater crisis, this week anticipated the exhibition with a special report on climate change and the Himalayas.

Breashears’ work, collected by the museum in “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalayas,” documents the rapid retreat of one of the world’s thickest and most important sheets of ice. A mountaineer, Breashears has scaled the world’s tallest mountains to take photographs of dozens of glaciers from the same perches that great photographers of the early and mid-20th century used to shoot the highest, and some of the longest glaciers in the world.

In “Rivers of Ice,” the Asia Society Museum presents Breashears’ 21st century pictures alongside those archival photographs. The message, say the museum’s curators, is unmistakable: “The comparison starkly reveals the catastrophic glacier loss sustained during the intervening years.”

The Breashears exhibition coincides with a new scientific reckoning of the pace of Himalayan melting, and the consequences to watersheds, rivers, communities and nearly 3 billion people that rely on what some scientists have come to call “the water towers of Asia.” Two years ago, Circle of Blue documented the risks to Asia’s ten major rivers–the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim–as well as to hundreds of lesser streams that rely for water on snow, and glacial melt from the Tibetan Plateau and its young, heaven-scraping Himalayan range.

The mistake by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s preeminent climate research group, has only heaped more attention on the region. Three years ago the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Prize for its work to document the causes and effects of climate change, and for predicting an ecological calamity if emissions of carbon were not controlled. But in a too-hasty assessment of conditions in the Himalayas, the IPCC predicted wrongly that the region’s glaciers would be gone within 28 years.

Though the IPCC was embarrassed by its error on glacial melting, the panel’s substantive conclusion, that “more than one-sixth of the world’s population live in glacier-or snowmelt-fed river basins and will be affected by the seasonal shifts in stream flow,” was not jeopardized.

More recent studies conclude that without sharp changes in global policy to curtail carbon emissions the Himalayan glaciers–and there are more than 40,000 of them spread across the peaks and valleys of the Tibetan Plateau–could be mostly gone by 2070. The underlying and inescapable fact reached by scientists who study ice and the Himalayas is that atmospheric conditions are changing fast and dramatically.

A year ago Ravinder Kumar Chaujar, a scientist with India’s Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, published an important paper in Current Science on the increasing temperatures, diminishing accumulation of snow, and rapid retreat of the Chorabari glacier in northern India’s Himalayan territory. Surface temperatures around the glacier since 1980, said Chaujar, have increased 0.8 degrees Centigrade (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Average snow accumulation, Chaujar reported, has dropped from more than 2,000 kilograms per square meter in the decades of the 20th century to just over 1,500 kilograms per meter in 2006, the lowest snowfall in the 50 years of record-keeping.

Photo © Aaron Jaffe / Circle of Blue

Because glaciers provide regular pulses of freshwater that farmers in agricultural zones depend on in the spring and summer growing season, some agronomists worry that Asia’s already tenuous ability to feed itself could be at risk. This weekend, at the G20 economic summit in Toronto, heads of state briefly considered climate change and its effects on the global environment and food production. The leaders, in a statement that closed the two-day meeting, said the warming planet “remains top of the mind,” and that food security was an urgent global development challenge, which was being exacerbated by climate change.

“We want a comprehensive, ambitious, fair, effective, binding, post-2012 agreement involving all countries, and including the respective responsibilities of all major economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the leaders said.

It’s too bad that they weren’t shown David Brashear’s telling photographs, which explain why the IPCC scientists in 2007 were so pessimistic.

The blue glacial ice of such famed fields as Tibet’s Main Rongbuk Glacier below Mount Everest today are thin, black with soot, and shrinking. Climate scientists and geologists from China and India warn that the range of ice on the Tibet plateau and in the mountains could shrink by 43 percent by 2070. Between 1950 and 1980, about half of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau were in recession, according to a number of studies. By the first decade of the 21st century, 95 percent were retreating.

Ya Tandong, a Chinese glaciologist, recently described in a UN report the condition of Himalayan glaciers this way: “Studies indicate that by 2030 another 30 percent will disappear. By 2050, 40 percent. By the end of the century 70 percent. The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”

– Keith Schneider

The New York Times today published my latest piece in the Business section. Subject: What happened to all of those new car and truck dealerships that closed in the last several years. The crux of the piece, which focused on a closed dealership in Whitehall, Michigan is this: Since early 2009 some 2,300 auto dealerships have closed around the country, as new car sales plunged more than 40 percent and the government, after taking ownership stakes in General Motors and Chrysler, forced them to end longstanding franchise contracts. The closings put 70 million square feet of buildings and land on the market, according to CoStar, a commercial real estate research company based in Bethesda, Md.

But in the last five quarters 649 of those shuttered dealerships found new owners and were put to new uses. In the first quarter of this year, 152 dealerships were sold for a combined total of $300 million. Prices ranged from $500,000 to $9 million, Mr. Miller said, though most sales were for $1 million to $3 million.

See more here.

– Keith Schneider

Well, now the Senate is getting into the act, at last. Bolstered by new opinion polls and driven by a monstrous blowout that is closing Gulf Coast beaches at the height of the travel season, Democratic leaders stirred into action this week to develop and pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

They’re following, of course, the president’s lead. On Wednesday President Obama concluded an all hands cabinet meeting at the White House by publicly declaring again his resolve to develop a “new energy strategy that the American people desperately want.” The next day Democratic Senators caucused, apparently with considerable enthusiasm, to discuss the outlines of a comprehensive proposal to introduce and pass before the August recess.

According to news accounts, Democrats will prepare a bill that includes limits on carbon emissions, as well as new measures to advance clean energy development and more strictly manage deep water drilling. During a news conference Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described the meeting’s outcome this way: “A number of senators said this was the best caucus they’ve ever attended. It was really very, very powerful. It was inspirational, quite frankly.”

With the president and Senate Democrats motivated in a way they haven’t been before, could this be the season of energy policy making that has eluded presidents and Congress for 40 years? Maybe. The gears of legislative action have swung into motion and there is the scent of inevitability in the air, which is what big bills need to get approved.

There’s also the Republicans, who were wounded last week by Texas Representative Joe Barton’s apology to the BP chief executive. But they aren’t dead. They’ll revert to form and attack limits on carbon emissions and clean energy development as a government overreach that raises costs.

BP Disaster’s Aftermath
The Democrats and environmentalists should have a ready answer to both. Here’s why.

The April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and the helplessness of the government and BP in controlling the blowout has reacquainted Americans with the colossal hazards of a nation so devoted to a single fuel. The BP Gulf disaster is more evidence of what candidate Obama described on the day he announced his campaign for president as the “tyranny of oil.” It is the latest body blow – the others include 9/11, Katrina, and the Great Recession – that stem from a common source: the nation’s fruitless 40-year struggle to take efficiency seriously and to develop cleaner domestic sources of energy.

Republicans frame their critique strictly around prices and Government action. But how much higher do the actual costs — erratic fuel prices, climate effects, national security risks, lost jobs, depleted savings, diminished home values, and the sense of a crumbling way of life — need to go before the country responds? Maybe we’ve arrived at that place where costs of doing nothing and the benefits of pursuing a new development strategy around cleaner sources of energy have tipped far enough to merit a big policy response.

Democrats are fortified by the results of public opinion polls that find strong support for a new energy and climate policy. One of the most significant was a survey of 1,000 people released this week by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. It found that by a margin of 63 percent to 31 percent, Americans favor comprehensive energy and carbon reduction legislation. The survey’s findings were consistent with a burst of other national poll results in recent weeks, which also found that public support for new offshore exploration has steadily declined since the start of the BP disaster 67 days ago.

The Oil Judge
The energy industry and its allies in government will not give up easily, we also saw this week. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, who sits on the Louisiana federal bench, this week struck down the six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling that the Obama administration established late last month. Federal disclosure reports showed Judge Feldman invested heavily in oil industry assets, including holding and recently selling stock in Transocean, the company that owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon under contract to BP.

Back in Washington, the outlines of the Senate proposal are taking shape. Senator Reid said this in a statement: “There is clear agreement on the need to move forward this summer on comprehensive clean energy legislation. Whatever form that takes, we agree: it must deal with the catastrophe in the Gulf; it must create millions of jobs; it must cut pollution; and it must strengthen our economic security, our national security and our energy independence.”

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators meet with the president about energy legislation, which could be introduced next month.

– Keith Schneider

Given the emotional reserve of a man whose aides once referred to as “no drama Obama,” the president is getting pretty fired up about energy.  On Wednesday President Obama concluded an all hands cabinet meeting at the White House by publicly declaring again his resolve to develop a “new energy strategy that the American people desperately want.”

“It is time for us to move to a clean energy future,” the president said, adding that “the entire cabinet here recognizes, with all the other stuff that they’re doing, that if we get energy right, an awful lot of things can happen as a consequence.”

The unscripted outburst came eight days after the president delivered a formal Oval Office summons for a “national mission” to pursue cleaner sources of energy and new practices that limited carbon emissions.  The president’s “national mission” speech, in turn, followed five days after he alerted a bipartisan group of lawmakers and prominent business leaders that he wanted to “move much more aggressively on the energy agenda,”and three weeks after Obama told an audience in Pittsburgh that “the time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future.”

Not since President Jimmy Carter delivered his famous and perceptive April 1977 address, during which he asserted that solving the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war,” has an American leader staked so much political credibility on a new national energy policy. And as energy historians are quick to note, none of President Obama’s successors, starting with President Nixon, achieved anything close to the alternative energy goals they pursued.

Will It Work Now?
The obvious question is whether economic, environmental, and social conditions are sufficiently different today than they were in any of the last four decades, and whether the country is experiencing enough urgency to seriously reckon with how it produces and uses energy.

There are no ready responses. The president’s critics in the energy industry and the Republican party have expressed hostility to Obama’s call to action and have promised an aggressive counterattack. Some allies in the president’s party and the national media wonder if the White House and the nation have sufficient fortitude to accomplish such a significant adjustment in the country’s economic and environmental vector.

For his part, the president has vowed to “find the necessary votes” to pass a strong bill. And environmental advocates who’ve worked for decades to make the case for clean energy and climate action are pressing the Senate and White House to make sure the bill is comprehensive and includes credible measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

In a capital city devoted to process as much as to politics, the gears of legislative action are grinding to life. The summer of 2010 is shaping up to be a new season for clean energy and climate action, a season that until April 20 was not at all clear would occur at all.

BP Disaster’s Legacy?
That day, of course, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men. The blowout turned loose over 100 million gallons of raw crude with no end in sight.

President Obama understands the spill has pitched the country toward a new reckoning with its devotion to oil.  That involves carefully evaluating the deadening costs of a marine ecosystem deluged by oil, and the recklessness of heating the atmosphere with uncontrolled carbon. It also requires coming to grips with an economy distorted by the $400 billion-a-year price for imports that threaten U.S. security, as well as the essential values of choice and mobility that fewer and fewer Americans attain.

It’s for these reasons that President Obama is embracing the moment, and he’s apparently convinced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to join him in what both hope will be a steady push to pass comprehensive legislation in the Senate before the August recess. A year ago, the House passed its version of an energy and climate bill that awaits a Congressional conference committee.

The Senate isn’t starting from scratch. Senator Reid and the president have asked lawmakers to choose elements of three proposals, draw up new provisions to respond to the disaster in the Gulf, and introduce a new bill in mid-July. The three existing Senate proposals:

• In December 2009 Senators Maria Cantwell, a Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, a Republican of Maine, introduced the Carbon Limits and Energy for American Renewal (CLEAR) Act, which would set up a program for cutting carbon emissions by selling “carbon shares” to fuel producers. Most of the resulting revenue would generate checks to every American to compensate for what the co-authors predict will be higher energy prices.  The proposal has attracted considerable support from environmental organizations, including 350.org, a global climate advocacy organization.
• In May 2010 Senators John Kerry, a Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joe Lieberman, an Independent of Connecticut, introduced the American Power Act, which seeks to cut carbon emissions, finance new clean energy and transit programs, and provides considerable financial and regulatory support to develop new oil and gas resources offshore, coal reserves, and nuclear power. Environmental organizations expressed support and said they would to fix provisions they didn’t like. Republicans said they would work to defeat the measure.
• In June 2010 Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, introduced his Practical Energy and Climate Plan that proposes to increase vehicle fuel efficiency, develop cleaner fuels, increase energy efficiency in buildings, encourage more diversity in energy supply including more nuclear energy, and require the government to enhance its ability to monitor and report the effect of the program on greenhouse gas emissions.

Of late, political reporters are focusing on whether the president will take point or follow Senator Reid’s lead in shepherding a bill through the Senate, duplicating the president’s strategy during the bruising health care battle.

But that frame on an otherwise completely compelling political narrative is merely an exercise in Washington gamesmanship. In this instance, regardless of where the president situates himself, there is no mistaking where the urgency of the legislative initiative lies – in the BP Gulf disaster – and who’s driving hard to change the rules of the energy game – the president.

No Surprise, But A Big Blunder
Though the timing is almost serendipitous, nobody paying close attention to the president’s principles and values should be surprised. From the moment he announced his candidacy for president in February 2007, the president has set very clear clean energy and climate goals in order to “be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil.”

For climate and clean energy advocates, that’s an interesting statement from a president who blundered into a March 31 announcement to expand the offshore territory suitable for new oil and gas exploration, calling it safe.

The president, though, has pushed the country closer — albeit not nearly close enough — to a clean energy economy, and taken more climate action than any American leader. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included over $100 billion in public investment for clean energy, energy efficiency, and transit. The administration, under the authority of the Clean Air Act, has established significantly higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, and stricter emissions standards for greenhouse gases that go into effect in 2012 and will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and eliminate 900 million tons of carbon emissions in its first five years, according to the E.P.A.

The White House also is pursuing new regulations to limit mountaintop mining for coal, reduce the hazards of coal ash piles, increase energy efficiency in buildings, and promote cleaner and greener cities.

A comprehensive climate and energy bill that includes enforceable limits on carbon emissions is the single most important legislative tool to, in the president’s words, “turn this crisis of global warming into a moment of opportunity for innovation, and job creation, and an incentive for businesses that will serve as a model for the world.” President Obama vows to get it done. Most Americans, judging from public opinion polls, understand the gravity of the moment and support where he wants to go.

– Keith Schneider

In calling for a new “national mission” to achieve energy independence during his Oval Office address earlier this week, President Obama was clearly seeking inspiration from his predecessors, a number of whom actually achieved the big technological goals they’d pursued. At various inflection points in the nation’s history, presidents managed to cross the country with a unified rail line, developed the powerful bombs in the Manhattan Project that ended World War Two, and sent men and returned them safely from the moon with the Apollo program.

In pursuit of energy independence the president has described many steps to make the transition to a clean energy economy, but never specified a timetable or a deadline. There’s a reason for that, as Jon Stewart astutely pointed out this week on The Daily Show. Seven presidents before Obama, starting with Richard Nixon, did just that and came up with zilch.

It’s not that he isn’t trying. To his credit, President Obama has acted on his election promise to change the rules of the oil game, and to begin responding to the worst of its economic and environmental consequences, including climate change.

In February 2009 he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which invests over $100 billion in clean energy equipment, practices, and transit.  In September 2009 the president called on the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions during a speech at the United Nations and was one of the heads of state at the G20 economic summit in Pittsburgh, which issued a formal declaration to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel.

Two months ago, the administration issued new fuel mileage and carbon emissions standards for cars and light trucks that will take effect in 2012 and over the first five years reduce oil use by 1.8 billion barrels, says the E.P.A., and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 900 million tons. And last month the president ordered up similar new efficiency and emissions reductions standards for heavy trucks. (link to Michigan piece)

Then came the BP Gulf catastrophe, now in its 60^th day, which has turned the nation’s attention to all of the dimensions of what Obama and other presidents have called an “addiction” to oil, but which can also be accurately described as America’s steadfast devotion.

Obama knows that actually producing more energy at home than America imports, and making good on the greenhouse gas reducing commitments the president made last year in the Copenhagen Accord, takes another level of engagement. It means opening a new era of political partnership in Washington and pursuing much more aggressive designs for non-polluting and energy efficient economic growth.

The problem is that America is in a place it’s rarely encountered, which is stuck. Some 24 million gallons of oil – the government’s latest estimate – is gushing every 10 days from a hole at the bottom of the Gulf.  The president is unable to summon the technical skills needed to plug the leak. Instead he’s using legal and policy tools available to him to begin rebuilding the Minerals Management Service, promised more rigorous oversight of deep water drilling, and convinced BP on Wednesday to set aside $20 billion in a precedent-setting disaster restoration fund.

Decent responses as far as they can go. But not to the president’s opponents. Fox News commentators mounted a national right wing broadcast chorus to defend the oil industry and accuse the president of “demonizing” BP. The next day, in an instance as revealing as it was enraging, Representative Joe Barton of Texas, a senior lawmaker who receives more oil industry donations than any other House member, appeared at an oversight hearing on the spill to apologize to BP’s chairman for the president’s action in creating the restoration fund, which he called a “shakedown.”

Never has the United States sustained such a large oil disaster. Never have so many biologically rich coastal estuaries been in the path of so much oil. Never has the United States been so unprepared to respond to a manmade calamity that is producing so much damage to the people, the economy, and the environment of so many states. Never has the U.S. imported more of its oil or been further from achieving energy independence. Representative Barton’s apology, like so many other moments since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, illustrated just how grueling the last decades of the Age of Oil will be.

– Keith Schneider

Day 59. The morning after President Barack Obama called for a “national mission” in pursuit of a clean energy economy the BP blowout gushes oil into the Gulf at the new estimated rate of 60,000 barrels a day. And though the president said “we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater,” the language lacked the details for achieving that goal, and the candor about the stakes.

What the president did not do last night, even with his telling Oval Office appearance, is describe the extent of this moment of emergency. He did not say, though he should have, that the monstrous oil blowout, awful as it is, is not just a national calamity. It’s global.

The accident illustrates just how dangerous the last decades of the Age of Oil are almost certain to be. Industrial society’s devotion to fossil fuels is producing massive damage to the environment, the economy, and the quality of life for billions of people. The basic biology of the Earth has begun to buckle. The United States is now being hit with body blows — 9/11, Katrina, economic collapse, the Gulf disaster — that all have the same source: Development and profligate use of fossil fuels.  Moreover, as the president’s gingerly treatment of the issues last night displayed, our political systems are not up to the challenge of deciding and pursuing a new development strategy to avoid the worst of the inevitable consequences of the coming Age of Turmoil.

It’s not going to be messy. It already is. In the oil development arena alone, the Earth is bleeding. Almost every continent is affected.

Calamity in Spades
The Gulf of Mexico is the scene of an unstoppable deep water blowout that is heading past 100 million gallons.

Nigeria’s Niger Delta, a principal source of American crude oil imports, experiences 2,000 spills a year into one of the world’s most important wetlands. They are caused by attacks on pipelines, blowouts, and shipping accidents.

In Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest Chevron is accused by activists of dumping nearly 20 billion gallons of toxic waste, produced waters, and other contaminants into rivers — “4 million gallons a day for more than two decades,” according to the Amazon Defense Coalition. The company, which is the focus of 17 years of litigation that has moved to a Peruvian court, also is accused of discharging 345 million barrels of crude oil into the rainforest and wrecking an indigenous way of life, and an ecosystem that is about the size of Rhode Island.

In the Komi Republic in Russia’s Siberia, hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil have leaked and spilled from mismanaged drilling platforms, leaking pipelines, and broken pumps and equipment. The runaway crude is polluting the region’s lakes and rivers. (That’s a burning oil pit in the picture above in shot taken by Greenpeace.)

In Australia last summer, a blowout on the West Atlas drilling rig in 260 feet of water in the Timor Sea took 73 days to plug. And in a scene that foreshadowed the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the West Atlas rig caught fire in November 2009 and burned with the same hellish intensity. The Australian government is scheduled to release its formal assessment of the accident on June 18.

In Canada, development of the Alberta tar sands is steadily destroying a region of Boreal Forest, teeming wetlands and clean rivers. Oil industry investment in the tar sands has reached $12 billion annually. Production is now 1.3 million barrels of oil a day. For every barrel of oil produced, four barrels of fresh water are contaminated, and much of that is stored in enormous toxic and leaking ponds.

Action and Deception
As the president tries to marshal support for the clean energy transition, his administration is quietly negotiating agreements with Canada and pipeline developers to bring more tar sands oil, already the number one source of U.S. imports, to new refineries proposed for South Dakota, Michigan, and Maine.

Arguably the most significant consequence of last night’s speech, which called for much more serious regulation of deep water drilling, is to expand the market for tar sands oil. The industry, and perhaps the administration, will argue that the risks of development are lower.

What a mess.

– Keith Schneider

SkyTruth is an eight-year-old non-profit that uses satellite and aerial imagery to study landscapes. I’ve been keeping track of the Gulf Disaster with this organization’s state of the art remote sensing capabilities, all of it online and extremely useful. I’ve used SkyTruth’s work before in tracking big spills, and other disasters. Check it out.

– Keith Schneider

After six months of evaluation, a Massachusetts research center said yesterday that the greenhouse gas-reducing benefits of replacing coal and natural gas with wood biomass for electrical generation are lower than previously thought.

But the study by the Manomet Center for Conservation Science also found that specific wood biomass technologies, particularly state-of-the art wood biomass plants that generate combined heat and power, produce less than half of the CO2 emissions generated by a coal-fired power plant and 19 percent less than a plant fueled by natural gas.

The 180-plus page report, “Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study,” was commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. In its most important finding, the study’s authors concluded that the use of sustainably harvested forest biomass in conventional plants to replace coal would actually increase carbon dioxide emissions 3 percent over coal-fired power by 2050.

Lower Emissions in Combined Heat and Power Plants
But the authors also found that replacing coal-fired power with combined heat and power biomass plants would produce significant carbon emissions reductions. A conventional coal plant produces 642 pounds of carbon emissions per million BTUs of energy generated, said the Manomet study.  A combined heat and power biomass plant produces 287 pounds of CO2 per million BTUs, less even than a natural gas plant, which produces 355 pounds of CO2 per million BTUs.

“These findings have broad implications for clean energy and the environment in Massachusetts and beyond,” said Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian Bowles, in a statement. “Biomass energy can be renewable over the long term and it has benefits in independence from imported fossil fuels. But now that we know that electricity from biomass harvested from New England forests is not ‘carbon neutral’ in a timeframe that makes sense given our legal mandate to cut greenhouse gas emissions, we need to re-evaluate our incentives for biomass.”

The Manomet research could significantly influence the alternative energy policies in other timber-rich states hoping to advance wood biomass to replace coal, the dirtiest fuel of all. The study could also sway the investment decisions that utilities are making to meet the renewable energy requirements established by 35 states and whether wood biomass plants make sense for lowering carbon emissions and making the transition from fossil fuel.

That question is very much in play in my home state of Michigan. Full disclosure: Earlier this year I assisted Traverse City Light and Power develop a communications and public engagement program for its plan to develop 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources by 2020. One facet of the utility’s plan included generating part of its power from a state-of-the art, combined heat and power, 10 mw wood gasification biomass plant.

Biomass Splits Communities
That proposal split the Traverse region’s environmental community, with a group of advocates asserting, among other things, that the carbon emissions from the new biomass plant were too high. The Manomet Center study provides the first scientifically-qualified evidence this year that carbon emissions from the proposed combined heat and power plant would be much lower than coal, and nearly 20 percent lower than a natural gas fired plant. Traverse City Light and Power continues to pursue its plan to construct a combined heat and power 10 mw wood biomass plant in or near the city of 15,000 along the northern shore of Lake Michigan.

Similar civic resistance greeted wood biomass developers in Massachusetts and 17 other states. Late last year Massachusetts declared a moratorium on new biomass projects pending the results of the Manomet Center study.

The Manomet study was praised by activists who’ve been fighting to halt biomass energy proposals in four Massachusetts cities, and criticized by biomass energy  executives, who disputed some of the assumptions behind the findings.

“They’re making a fundamental assumption that is not correct,” said Bob Cleaves, president and CEO of the Biomass Power Association, in reference to the Manomet study. “I think they missed the point that the overwhelming feedstock for biomass projects in the country is tops and limbs from the forest products industry, rice hulls, orchard prunings, all byproducts of another process.”

He added: “To issue a study like was done yesterday and baldly assert that biomass is less carbon friendly than coal is flatly misleading, irresponsible and not an accurate portrayal of our industry.”

EPA Wants to Regulate Biomass Plants
The conclusions reached by the Manomet Center about carbon emissions from biomass are consistent with findings of other research groups in recent months, and were anticipated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In May, the EPA issued a “tailoring rule” that described how it would use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases. The agency said it would not exempt carbon emissions from biomass plants, a decision that the biomass industry is vigorously disputing.

Until very recently scientists concluded that the cycle of tree growth-harvest-combustion-and replanting would produced what they called a “zero emissions factor” for carbon dioxide because carbon released during combustion would be absorbed by growing new trees for fuel.

The Manomet researchers concluded that burning wood biomass in conventional plants would indeed produce an emissions bonus, but it would take 21 years to develop when using wood biomass to replace coal as a fuel source. That same 21 years, the Manomet researchers noted, is the time scientists say the world needs to act to significantly reduce carbon emissions to prevent the the worst effects of climate change.

As the scientific community tilts toward viewing wood biomass as a riskier clean energy alternative, it is not yet clear what the consequences will be for replacing fossil fuels to generate electricity globally. Last year, the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) reported that 52 gigawatts of biomass power capacity existed worldwide, about evenly split between developed and developing countries. The European Union and United States accounted for 15 GW and eight GW of this capacity, respectively.

– Keith Schneider

Late last year when Senator Lisa Murkowski announced she would vigorously oppose any effort to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions, environmental leaders in Washington understood the significance of the Alaska Republican’s challenge. A loyal ally of fossil fuel developers, Senator Murkowski attracts more campaign financing from the oil and utility industries than all but two other Senate lawmakers, according to federal election records.

The months-long skirnishing between Senator Murkowski and environmental advocates is now in its final hours, with both sides asserting they will prevail.

At stake is a vote in the Senate scheduled for Thursday night on a “resolution of disapproval” introduced by Senator Murkowski last January and meant to disrupt the Obama administration’s pioneering work to respond to climate change by limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases in the U.S.

Though the Murkowski resolution faces an arduous route through a Democratic-controlled Congress and White House, the Thursday vote will be the most important Congressional test yet this year on where the United States is going on climate action and clean energy.

The details of what’s been happening look like this: Senator Murkowski’s resolution, which has 41 co-sponsors, would overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s formal scientific finding on December 7, 2009 that carbon dioxide and five other climate-changing pollutants endanger human health and the environment.

The EPA’s “endangerment finding,” introduced at the start of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen last year, was saluted by climate activists and government officials around the world. The finding made it legally possible to use the Clean Air Act, the nation’s primary air pollution statute, to set and enforce new manufacturing practices and emissions limits that tamed the U.S. contribution to global climate change.

Moment of Reckoning For Both Sides
The vote couldn’t come at a more opportune moment for climate advocates and the fossil fuel industry and should provide a helpful sorting out of the relative political influence of both sides.

The last six months have been a period of dismay for the American climate action community, challenged by the disappointing results in Copenhagen, and fighting back against the furious attack by pundits and lawmakers on the validity of climate science.

The last six weeks have been equally dismal for the oil industry, which has attracted new public scrutiny because of the horrendous oil spill in the Gulf, and the equally destructive environmental consequences of mining and processing oil from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands.

If the resolution passes, an event seen as unlikely by Democratic Senate staffers, it would almost certainly have the effect of putting an even deeper  trench in the already difficult path that comprehensive climate and energy legislation has in the Senate. Conversely, if the resolution fails by a wide margin, that result would likely build new legislative enthusiasm for a climate and energy bill this year.

Important players from both sides are making their cases. Americans United for Change today began three days of cable TV advertising  in Washington, D.C., that explicitly link the BP Gulf disaster to the Murkowski resolution and the assertion that at Republicans are “working to gut the bipartisan Clean Air Act and give big oil a bailout.”

Senator Murkowski issued a statement this week that accused critics of the resolution of misrepresenting her intentions. “There has been a great deal of misinformation spread about my effort by groups — almost all of which are based outside of Alaska — who want to cut the emissions blamed for climate change no matter what the cost,” Murkowski said.  Her spokesman, Robert Dillon, said the resolution is not about debating the science behind climate change. Rather, he told the Associated Press, it’s about stopping an “out of control” government agency.

Senator Murkowski’s conservative supporters contend that using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions is a regulatory overreach by big government. “Every sector of our economy — transportation, power generation and manufacturing — would be subjected to EPA’s bureaucratic reach,” said Tom Borelli director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Endangerment Finding Put to Use
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has moved quickly to put the endangerment finding and its Clean Air Act authority into effect. In April the administration issued trend-setting fuel mileage and emissions standards for light vehicles that the agency said would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and 900 million tons of carbon emissions from 2012 to 2016.

Last month, President Obama ordered similar mileage and emissions reduction rules for heavy trucks. The administration has also made plain its intention to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from some 7,000 industrial installations – refineries, utilities, manufacturers, and mining sites – but leave small businesses alone.

U.S. climate and clean energy organizations anticipated Senator Murkowski’s challenge and began building support in January to defeat the resolution, which they called the “Dirty Air Act.” Among the allies in the campaign were dozens of environmental organizations, labor unions, governors, President Obama, Democratic senators, and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

Newspaper editorialists also weighed in, noting that the BP Gulf Spill has made it more urgent than ever to curtail the myriad hazards of America’s addiction to oil. “Murkowski plans to offer a resolution,” said the Washington Post on June 7, “making it less likely we move away from fossil fuels, making it less likely we act to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe (in this case, global warming) from occurring, blocking regulators from doing their jobs, and disrupting one of our best opportunities to prevent climate change rather than scramble to respond after its incalculable effects rip through our atmosphere.”

In an article on Monday for the Huffington Post, EPA Administrator Jackson said the Murkowski resolution “abdicates the responsibility we have to move the country forward in a way that creates jobs, increases our security by breaking our dependence on foreign oil, and protects the air and water we rely on.”

– Keith Schneider

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times this morning published a interesting piece on how solar energy development in Colorado is being impeded by local resistance to new transmission lines. The many examples of how community or landowner or other resistance to clean energy projects has been well covered here on ModeShift. The trend represents another authentic risk to the nation’s ability to make a transition to a low carbon economy. There are oil companies on one end of that conversation, and ordinary Americans on the other. Make no mistake. If the transition occurs, it will be the hardest economic change America has achieved since the Civil War.

– Keith Schneider