A majority of Americans across the political spectrum support policies that reduce carbon emissions, including a revenue-neutral carbon tax, according to a new survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

In a survey conducted between Oct. 20 and Nov. 6, 65 percent of respondents said they would support a revenue-neutral carbon tax to help “create jobs and decrease pollution” — including 51 percent of those identifying themselves as Republicans, 69 percent of independents, and 77 percent of Democrats.

Sixty percent said they would support a $10-per-ton carbon tax if the money was spent reducing federal income taxes. That support continued even when respondents were told the carbon tax would “slightly increase the cost of many things you buy, including food, clothing, and electricity.”

Support for the tax dipped to 49 percent if the revenue was instead returned to each family as an annual check, and to just 44 percent if it was spent paying down the national debt.

Sixty-nine percent said they oppose federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, while 54 percent opposed ethanol subsidies. Since May, there has been a 9 percent decline among those expressing “strong support” for renewable energy research.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Although the burning of natural gas emits far less carbon dioxide than coal, a new study concludes that a greater reliance on natural gas would fail to significantly slow down climate change. The study by Tom Wigley, who is a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), underscores the complex and sometimes conflicting ways in which fossil fuel burning affects Earth’s climate. While coal use causes warming through emission of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it also releases comparatively large amounts of sulfates and other particles that, although detrimental to the environment, cool the planet by blocking incoming sunlight. As always the final picture of climate effect is very complicated to put together.

Wigley’s computer simulations indicate that a worldwide, partial shift from coal to natural gas would slightly accelerate climate change through at least 2050, even if no methane leaked from natural gas operations, and through as late as 2140 if there were substantial leaks. After that, the greater reliance on natural gas would begin to slow down the increase in global average temperature, but only by a few tenths of a degree.

The burning of coal releases more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, as well as comparatively high levels of other pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particles such as ash. Since natural gas emits lower levels of these pollutants, some energy experts have proposed greater reliance on that fuel source as a way to slow down global warming and reduce the impacts of energy use on the environment.

But the effects of natural gas on climate change have been difficult to calculate. Recent studies have come to conflicting conclusions about whether a shift to natural gas would significantly slow the rate of climate change, in part because of uncertainty about the extent of methane leaks.

Wigley’s new study attempts to take a more comprehensive look at the issue by incorporating the cooling effects of sulfur particles associated with coal burning and by analyzing the complex climatic influences of methane, which affects other atmospheric gases such as ozone and water vapor.

By running a series of computer simulations, Wigley found that a 50 percent reduction in coal and a corresponding increase in natural gas use would lead to a slight increase in worldwide warming for the next 40 years of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit (less than 0.1 degree Celsius). The reliance on natural gas could then gradually reduce the rate of global warming, but temperatures would drop by only a small amount compared to the 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) of warming projected by 2100 under current energy trends.

The main direct effect of sulfates on the climate involves the scattering of light, effectively increasing the Earth’s albedo. This effect is moderately well understood and leads to a cooling from the negative radiative forcing, partially offsetting the larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. The effect is strongly spatially non-uniform, being largest downstream of large industrial areas.

For further information:  http://www2.ucar.edu/news/5292/switching-coal-natural-gas-would-do-little-global-climate-study-indicates

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy ENN.

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With demand for fossil fuels outpacing the growth of renewable energy technologies worldwide, the International Energy Agency suggests that fossil fuel subsidies worth $312 billion be realigned to develop cleaner alternatives.

Although renewable energy has seen growth of 30 to 40 percent in recent years, 47 percent of new electricity demand worldwide over the last decade was met with coal-fired energy, according to agency’s first clean energy progress report.

As of 2009, fossil fuels had received more than $312 billion in subsidies, compared with $57 billion for renewable energy. In some countries, aggressive policies have yielded progress in the deployment of renewable energy sources, according to the study.

For example, at least 10 nations now have sizeable domestic markets for solar technology compared with just three a decade ago. But increased growth depends on increased incentives for private sector investment and market mechanisms, the report says. “We must see more ambitious, effective policies that respond to market signals while providing long-term, predictable support,” said Richard Jones, IEA deputy executive director.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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The World Bank is planning to limit its funding for coal-fired power plants to the world’s poorest nations, bowing to pressure from environmental groups and governments that have criticized the bank’s record on funding fossil fuel projects, according to published reports.

Under proposed new regulations, the World Bank would provide loans or grants for coal plants only in “the very poorest countries,” and only if the applicants have shown that the plants are necessary and that alternative solutions, including renewable energy projects, are not feasible, according to the Guardian.

The proposed changes come a year after the World Bank gave a controversial $4 billion loan to a South African company to build one of the world’s largest coal plants. While the new rules would also favor increased investment in renewable energy, critics called the proposal inadequate.

The rules would allow the bank to spend as much money as ever on fossil fuels and “condemn” poor countries to a high-carbon future, said Alison Doig of the nonprofit group, Christian Aid.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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As President Barack Obama prepares to release his proposal for the next year’s budget this month, he is expected to call for eliminating $4 billion per year in subsidies to the oil industry. This is money that could be re-channeled into spurring clean energy development, reducing the deficit, and paying for basic government services during hard economic times. This common sense proposal should logically attract support from both sides of the political aisle, as it seems in line with Republicans’ calls for reduced spending.

However in practice efforts to end oil subsidies will likely to run into opposition from conservative lawmakers, who may talk big about reducing the budget but are reluctant to make spending cuts that affect industries they themselves support. The ability of oil companies to make hefty political contributions guarantees oil subsidies are not going to vanish without a fight. It is time for those who believe in doing business better to come together and get behind the president’s proposal to end wasteful subsidies to a polluting industry more than capable of standing on its own feet.

Right now the oil industry receives tax credits, loan guarantees, and other preferential treatment from the federal government. From the standpoint of economics this makes little sense: while these types of subsidies are useful for helping new types of energy get off the ground, oil companies have been well established for over a hundred years and clearly do not need the help. Unsurprisingly the oil industry and its allies in Congress are reluctant to give up their special treatment, and have successfully defeated earlier attempts to eliminate subsidies. However that was before the federal budget deficit became a matter of such bi-partisan concern. With deficit-inspired cuts being made to basic programs that keep families afloat during hard times, giving away billions of dollars each year to oil giants is inexcusable.

At the same time let’s not forget subsidies to the oil industry go far beyond the tax credits and other programs Obama is pushing to eliminate. Even more important is the fact that everyday Americans are subsidizing Big Oil by shouldering health costs associated with pollution. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling infrastructure exploded last April, it was coastal economies and not BP that suffered the most. Meanwhile the effects of pollution from automobile exhaust and oil refineries are similarly being born by people who pay the price in higher medical bills and reduced health. As long as this continues oil and other fossil fuel industries will remain a heavily subsidized business.

In light of this, losing $4 billion dollars in preferential treatment should seem like not such a big deal for Big Oil. Such an action would have a miniscule effect on industry profits, and be felt barely if at all by consumers at the pump. At the same time it would free up $4 billion to pay back the deficit, protect essential programs, and fund projects that spur economic development. It’s a win-win deal innovators across the political spectrum should be able to support.

Article by Nick Engelfried, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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The European Union has unveiled plans for a single European energy market, a 1 trillion-euro ($1.38 trillion) strategy to achieve energy security and cut fossil fuel emissions.

The 10-year plan would include upgrades to the continent’s aging pipelines and build infrastructure that allows energy to flow across borders from one end of Europe to the other. The new system also will help the expansion of renewable energy supplies, across the continent, the EU said.

“Looking at our network for gas, oil and electricity, we are all still stuck within the borders of the 19th century principalities,” Guenther Oettinger, the EU’s energy chief, told reporters. Within five years, he said, no European nation should be isolated from its neighbors. Without a single market, he added, the EU will not be able to meet its goals of cutting carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 or improving energy efficiency by 20 percent.

EU officials say detailed legislation should emerge over the next 18 months.

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The World Bank’s lending for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects increased by 300 percent between fiscal year 2007 and fiscal year 2010, to a record $3.4 billion.  But over that same period, lending to fossil fuel projects also jumped 430 percent.

Recent loans for coal-fired power plants is evidence to the fact that the World Bank is still in the business of loaning money for massive construction projects with the most favorable cost-benefit ratio — with benefits measured almost entirely in terms of economic benefits.

“[The World Bank] is constantly stalling on one very important policy: calculating the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by its own projects,” said Janet Redman, co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies. “In its actions, the World Bank has deviated from its rhetoric,” Redman said.

World Bank loans for fossil fuel projects topped $6.3 billion in the fiscal year ending in June, $4.4 billion of which was for the construction of new coal-fired power plants, according to the Bank Information Center, a Washington-based watchdog group.

One project in particular, the 4,800-megawatt Medupi Station in South Africa and will emit about 26 million tons of carbon dioxide annually until roughly 2050. Together with another World Bank project, India’s Tata Ultra Mega plant, set to go online in 2012, the two projects will emit 50 million tons of carbon dioxide annually — roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions of the country of Ireland.

But World Bank officials say 2010 was an unusual year for the bank in terms of loans for fossil fuel projects because in previous years, spending for renewables had outpaced traditional coal-fired generation.

And heavy criticism for the $3.75 billion loan for the South African Medupi Station — criticism that included a protest from the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Italy in the form of abstaining to vote on the approval of the loan — has led the World Bank to take steps to present the institution as pro-renewables, including the hiring of an internationally-renowned clean energy expert to help shape strategy.

In September, the World Bank announced that Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley would be the bank’s first chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Kammen is as serious as anyone about developing clean technologies of the future, but he’s also a pragmatist.

Kammen says project worthiness should not be measured by carbon emissions alone and that a broad World Bank energy lending portfolio would likely include fossil fuels for the immediate future. “No institution should be fixated on a single metric,” Prof. Kammen recently told The New York Times. “Things that are expensive from a carbon point of view might have a very high social value,” he said.

But a recent internal audit by the Independent Evaluation Group says the World Bank is not sufficiently weighing the long term impacts of energy projects.

The World Bank “and the world at large need to learn faster what works and what doesn’t and focus on results, not just dollars committed,” Kenneth Chomitz, the report’s author, said in a press release.

The independent evaluation recommended the bank help clients “find domestically preferable alternatives to coal power,” saying coal “should be a last resort.”

The bank is currently conducting an energy strategy review in 2010 in hopes of reconciling its mandate of alleviating poverty with the problems and environmental costs associated with traditional coal-fired power projects.

As that process goes forward, World Bank officials say there are currently no plans on the books to finance a new coal-fired power plant.

Article by Timothy B. Hurst, appearing courtesy Celsias.

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(Reuters) – A reduction of ten percent in oil demand could knock about $20 off the price of a barrel of crude by 2035 if nations meet their climate change pledges and cut fossil fuel subsidies, the International Energy Agency says.

“The weaker and slower the response to the climate challenge, the greater the risk of oil scarcity and the economic cost for consuming countries,” the Financial Times on Thursday quoted a draft of the 2010 World Energy Outlook (WEO) as saying.

The report by the IEA, which advises 28 developed countries on energy issues, is due for release on November 9.

The inflation-adjusted price of oil would be $113 by 2035 in the WEO scenario that takes into account new environmental policies, versus $135 in the main scenario, with demand at 99 million barrels per day (bpd) and 107 million bpd respectively.

The IEA also forecasts Iraqi oil output will almost double in the next decade, reaching 4.8 million bpd by 2020, overtaking Iran “soon after 2015,” according to the FT.

IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka told Reuters this week it would be “very difficult” to reach agreement at this year’s Cancun meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC).

The COP-16 will meet in Mexico from November 29 to December 10 as a follow-up to last year’s Copenhagen meeting, which produced limited results on commitments to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

In last year’s WEO, the Paris-based agency presented a business-as-usual scenario assuming no policies were adopted to curb emissions, where global temperatures would rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050 from pre-industrial levels.

The agency also presented a second scenario to cap global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius, which implied cutting emissions to stabilize the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide at 450 particles per million (ppm).

A scenario in this year’s WEO will include last year’s Copenhagen decisions, which would fall somewhere between the business-as-usual scenario and the 450 scenario of last year’s outlook, Tanaka said.

Article by Alejandro Barbajosa, edited by Himani Sarkar, appearing courtesy Reuters.

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The oil and gas interests that are behind Proposition 23 on the November 2nd ballot in California are faltering in the polls. That’s good news for the clean tech sector, but a less well-known ballot measure, Proposition 26, could still help pull the rug out from under California’s efforts to create markets for clean energy and clean transportation systems.

Just as vested special interests protecting the status quo thwarted efforts to pass any meaningful regulations on carbon and/or to promote renewable energy at the federal level this year, Tea Party activists (working with sympathetic apologists for the fossil fuel industry) are trying to roll back California’s climate change regulations through the much maligned ballot initiative process.

The irony is that Silicon Valley and Hollywood are outspending the out-of-state oil companies behind Proposition 23, which would, in effect, undo AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 requiring the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 25 percent by 2025. (Since 40 percent of California’s climate change gases are linked to the transportation sector, this ballot measure could have a crippling impact on emerging markets for plug-in electric vehicles.)

Prop 23 would suspend the nation’s most aggressive climate change law until unemployment (currently standing at above 12 percent) drops to 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters. That low of a level of unemployment has only occurred three times over the last four decades.

Recent reports on campaign spending show that Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which was a prime mover behind AB 32, has pumped $250,000 into the “No on Prop 23” campaign. Another notable financial supporter of this effort to protect environmental regulation is Gordon Moore, the legendary co-founder of Intel, who has contributed $1 million to the same effort.

The prime funding sources behind Prop 23 are Tesoro and Valero, both oil companies hailing from Texas, and the infamous billionaires Charles and David Koch, who own oil refineries in Alaska, Texas and Minnesota. At present, the pro Prop 23 interests are being outspent at a rate of 3-to-1, $30 versus $10 million. Despite the economic doldrums facing the nation and state, recent polls show that 48 percent of voters oppose Prop 23, while only 37 percent support it (with the rest still undecided.)

Of course, the battle might not be over on November 2nd. Attorneys general from Alabama, Nebraska, North Dakota and Texas claim they will go to the court if voters reject the measure, basing their legal arguments on the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause. In lawsuits where states are the opposing litigants, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction. That means a trial would need to take place at the Supreme Court.

While the clean tech sector may be crowing about their seemingly successful effort to beat back Prop 23, Proposition 26 has largely been under the public’s radar. The outcome of this ballot measure is less certain. It would reclassify environmental impact fees as taxes and then require a 2/3 vote in the California Legislature (rather than a simple majority) to impose them.

The two-thirds voting requirement for passing a state budget has mired the state in an annual fiscal crisis due to gridlock between majority Democrats and the minority Republicans. Environmentalists and their clean tech allies fear passage of Prop 26 could cripple efforts to levy fees to implement the variety of programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Interestingly enough, the prime funders behind Prop 26 are California oil companies that have all dissociated themselves from Prop 23. Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum have all ponied up on behalf of Prop. 23. Chevron is the largest single contributor at $3.7 million. In this campaign, proponents have been outspending the opponents at a more than 2-to-1 ratio, with over $16 million versus less than $6 million.

Peter Asmus is an analyst at Pike Research specializing in renewable energy. Article appearing courtesy Matter Network.

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Venezuela is not a country known overall for her renewable energy policy. The nation is an oil giant in the South American region and supplies a fairly large quantity of crude oil to the United States, and other countries, on a yearly basis. Considering the fact that the oil industry in Venezuela continues to promote the fossil fuel industry and the pollution of the lands and seas around the nation, the need for them to begin adopting renewable energy seems to be a bit high. In an announcement yesterday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez revealed an agreement his nation has made with Portugal in order to bring renewable energy to their shores.

In hopes of strengthening ties with Portugal, diversifying their oil client list, and bringing on the renewable energy, Venezuela has signed an agreement with the European country in a move has surprised some. The deal will have the Portuguese setting up renewable energy projects in Venezuela as a way of boosting their own economy as they try and come out of a recession from last year. Currently, Chavez has said that they are hoping to start four wind projects throughout Venezuela as their way of kicking off the renewable energy revolution in the country. Chavez also said in his statement that the agreement between the two countries would be beneficial to both in the changing global economic environment and because he believes that renewable energy is the future.

Although it is true that the agreement works for both nations economically, Venezuela also benefits from choosing Portugal due to their renewable energy portfolio. Since Portugal relies almost entirely on foreign oil imports, they have been spending a considerable amount of time working on a plan to fully convert the nation into a renewable energy powerhouse. Their wind and solar projects are quickly spreading across the nation and many believe they will surpass their other ambitious European comrades in no time at all as they reach for higher and higher renewable energy goals. Paired with their rather impressive attempts at wave and tidal energy, Portugal was a good choice to work with if Venezuela wants to move into renewable energy quickly and efficiently.

Overall, Venezuela is in dire need of some strong renewable energy projects if they plan to move away from an energy system that relies solely on oil, natural gas, and coal. However, some critics of the announcement remain unconvinced that Hugo Chavez has any real plans to commit to a gradual and substantial change towards renewable energy systems. We will find out soon enough whether or not Venezuela does end up committing to any change towards renewable energy and, if they do, it will be interesting to see a nation so strongly embedded in the oil energy making huge strides towards renewable energy.

Article by Richard Cooke, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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