A news story on Monday, McCain urges free-market principles to reduce global warming.  Which"free-market principles" does McCain mean?

McCain's major solution is to implement a cap-and-trade program on carbon-fuel emissions, like a similar program in the Clean Air Act that was used to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that triggered acid rain.

I thought we'd raise the issue, again, of nuclear, gas, coal and carbon with regards to capacity factors. Capacity factors are basically the nameplate maximum power over a period of time that a given form of generation can perform under optimal conditions.

So, from http://www.eia.doe.gov/... the Energy Information Administration of the DOE we get the following for the year ending 2006:

Coal:                           335,830 MWs or 335 GWs.
Natural Gas:                442,945 MWs or 442 GWs
Nuclear:                      105,585 or 105 GWs
Renewables, excluding hydro but including wind, solar, swamp gas, etc: 26,470 MWs or 26 GWs.

From today's New York Times:

Marco Di Lauro for The New York Times

At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Italy’s Civitavecchia power plant is converting from oil to coal.
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.

And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

Happy Earth Day...from Santa Barbara, California home of the national disaster that helped Nixon to create the EPA and spark the Environmental Movement and Earth Day Celebrations.

Ecological disaster brought reality check. Crude oil blasted nine stories into the air on Jan. 28, 1969, from a pipeline that blew out in the Santa Barbara channel. For the environmental movement, this disaster was the spark that launched Earth Day. Bridgeport Connecticut Post

The story goes that Earth Day was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson after a trip he took to Santa Barbara right after that horrific oil spill off our coast in 1969. He was so outraged by what he saw that he went back to Washington and passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth. - CEC

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) meets tomorrow. Their plan is to weaken the laws that govern pollution from automobiles. In particular they plan to reduce the number of Zero Emission Vehicles that were originally required by the law popularly known as the Zero Emissions Mandate or ZEV Mandate. In a show of public will we need anyone available from San Francisco to Reno to come to the rally and let CARB know that Zero Emission Vehicles, with out any dictates to which technology will get us them, should be in large numbers on the road. Plug-in hybrids should be encouraged as well as pure electric vehicles that use batteries and if the automakers want to make fuel cell vehicles sooner rather than later in large numbers they are certainly welcome to do so. The point is, we need those vehicles on the road now, so CARB shouldn’t be working to limit the numbers of vehicles in the near future. Be there to show your support for clean air that comes from having cleaner cars.

Plug in America Press Conference and Rally

Date: Wednesday - March 26, 2008

Time: 10:30 a.m.

Where: California EPA Building

..........1001 I Street

..........Sacramento, Ca

Action Gram

Now is our chance to save electric cars and revive California's popular Zero Emissions Vehicle Program. We need to take action today!

In only two weeks the California Air Resources Board will vote on a proposal that would allow automakers to delay meaningful EV production for years.

Proposed revisions will profoundly weaken the program again instead of propelling our country toward a pollution-free and petroleum-free future.

Plug In America is spearheading a campaign to demonstrate widespread support for EVs.  CARB needs to strengthen the Zero Emission Vehicle Program. Remember:  in addition to California, ten states which together make up roughly half of the country's population follow California's auto policy. Wherever you live, we need your help!

Click here to send a message to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and here to send a message to CARB Chair Mary Nichols.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

In my 3,543rd iteration of what Digby said, I hope it’s abundantly clear by now what an incredible mistake it was to disenfranchise the voters of Florida and Michigan is some juvenile Party game of hardball.  No, no one thought it would ever matter at the time, but disenfranchising voters should never be an option, and we as a Party may have hell to pay for blowing that risk, we really won’t know until the convention.

As a base citizen the entire Democratic Party nomination has left me greatly concerned this year in a new way, for in the past one bitched Iowa and New Hampshire choosing the nominee in a media circus and that was it.  Now one sees how absurd it is to have a duality of counting systems—either the Party all caucuses or goes for one vote, the will of the people is inherently scrambled in the present process, it doesn’t work.

Why are we feeding machines with fuel/energy from organic surces?  Machines are not alive and can be fed with non-organic energy sources.

Wind, geothermal, hydro and solar energy/fuel harnessing systems have been with us almst as long as organic energy/fuel systems. This accounts for less than 2% of all energy consumption.

The Greeks built windmills on Mykonos. The Romans built bathhouses that tapped into the earth's geothermal heat.   I made SUN-TEA in large glass jars filled with spring water & exotic loose-leaf teas.  This is a flour mill near my home - where I was born.  http://flickr.com/...

Non-organic fuel use should be expanded.

Whenever we use organic matter as fuel/food we leave a carbon footprint.   Whether it's pile of carbon-rich feces or CO2 released to the atmosphere, it's still a carbon footprint or more colorfully, carbon-droppings.

If we are tired of the carbon 'feces' from our machines as CO2, we have to put our machines on a carbon-free diet.

It's as simple as that.

Two papers published in Science yesterday explore the effects of biofuels cultivation on CO2 emissions, food production, and land use patterns. The authors argue that all three are intertwined, and when considered together biofuels have little or no environmental benefit beyond conventional fuels, and may in fact lead to dramatic deforestation and CO2 increases.

NYTimes:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded...

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

Several major banks, in consultation with ED and NRDC, have begun hedging their bets against a major Democratic win in November, which would likely bring increased action against global warming:

WSJ:

Three of Wall Street's biggest investment banks are set to announce today that they are imposing new environmental standards that will make it harder for companies to get financing to build coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley say they have concluded that the U.S. government will cap greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants sometime in the next few years. The banks will require utilities seeking financing for plants before then to prove the plants will be economically viable even under potentially stringent federal caps on carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas.

Yes. I have a temp job at our local Elections Office and have been sitting on my "Vote by Mail" ballot for awhile. It was a little slow today, so thought I would fill out my ballot. For President, I proudly cast my vote for Edwards. He seems to be the only one really talking about the issues that resonate with me. To paraphrase Senator Edwards..."tell me which American doesn't deserve clean air? clean water? Toxin free homes and schools?" Anyway...onto Environmental News to USE!

Rudy Giuliani and air quality after 9/11. In his run for President, Rudy Giuliani has showcased his leadership on 9/11 and in the following days, weeks, and months. But far less understood is how he responded to early concerns about the air quality in Lower Manhattan. New York WNYC Radio

Plans to privatize I-81 in Virginia and build an eight-lane truck tollway through Civil War battlefields in the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains of Southwest Virginia were dealt severe blow this week. KBR/Halliburton along with a consortium of state and national contractors, financial institutions and lobbyists, called STAR Solutions (website just pulled frome the internet), dropped their plans to build an 8-lane, tolled super-truckway. In 2002, STAR proposed building four exclusive truck lanes in the center of I-81, in a typical KBR/non competitive-bid business plan.

Converting co2 into hydrogen-based synthetic fuel is a fact.

the total net US release of CO2 could be halved, even factoring in the release of CO2 from the ongoing combustion of hydrocarbon.

Apparently this isn't "pie in the sky" technology yet it is so "new" that I haven't seen any polititians promoting the developement of it.

There is going to be a legacy to the present times that our children will have to bear, and I’m not just talking about the many new debts that the Bush administration is leaving them to pay.  There is a good chance that our children, when traveling or doing business abroad, will be treated like pariahs.  They will be blamed for the way the boomer generation ignored our pollution and turned our backs on developing countries in their time of need.  Others will point out that we did it all knowingly, that we knew exactly what we were doing when we decided to turn our backs on them.

Thanks to our weakening of the mileage standards, the miles per gallon declined for 25 years – and there are now twice as many cars on the road because of inadequate investment in public transport.  

Because we elected to burn coal and oil for electricity rather than build safer nuclear power plants, we have fueled greenhouse warming, leading to exactly the climate change that our own scientists warned us about, starting in 1956.  

Back in 1968, when I first heard a talk about global warming while visiting the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, almost everyone thought that serious problems were several centuries in the future. That's because no one realized how ravenous the world's appetite for coal and oil would become during a mere 40 years. They also thought that problems would develop slowly. Wrong again.

I tuned into abrupt climate change about 1984, when the Greenland ice cores showed big jumps in temperature and snowfall, stepping up and down in a mere decade but lasting centuries. I worried about global warming setting off another flip but I still didn't revise my notions about a slow time scale for the present greenhouse warming.

Greenland changed my mind. About 2004, the speedup of the Greenland glaciers made a lot of climate scientists revise their notions about how fast things were changing. When the summer earthquakes associated with glacial movement doubled and then redoubled in a mere ten years, it made me feel as if I was standing on shaky ground, that bigger things could happen at any time.

Coral Reefs are the tropical rain forests of the ocean, the most biologically diverse and spectacular biological features on earth. 20% of them are already dead because of warming, acidifying oceans, pollution and directly destructive human activities.

In the geological record, ocean acidification is the most destructive problem of all because it takes nature hundreds of thousands to millions of years to restore balance. The greatest of all extinctions in the oceans was the Permian extinction where 80% of species went extinct. This extinction happened when CO2 levels rose so quickly that the ocean became too acidic to support coral reefs and carbonate shelled organisms dissolved into oblivion.  Coral polyps survived extinction by living as free floating unshelled organisms. We are beginning to recreate the conditions of the  great Permian extinction.

Australia is a metaphor for the planet, and the lessons we must learn in a very short time if we are to survive as a species.  A few chilling anecdotes from my latest trip Down Under, taken together, drives this point home for me.

While there, I had some beers with an American expat who owns and operates a deep-water research vessel.  As even I have noticed the changes in my trips to the Great Barrier Reef over the last decade, I picked his brain on the effects of CO2 pollution, and learned to my dismay that things are worse than I had feared.  Most popular media coverage focuses on more dramatic changes (e.g., loss of polar bear habitat), but in the final analysis, these may become almost superfluous.  

One of the most under-reported effects of CO2 pollution is that it alters the ocean pH, thereby placing considerable strain on the ecosystem.  By way of example, certain crustaceans in the Arctic have soft shells during the juvenile phase of their lives, which harden when the attain adulthood. The changing pH (increased acidity) is now preventing their shells from hardening.

Now, think about where our rain comes from.  Mostly, from the sea.

Big Bali Agreement on global warming....maybe...maybe not

President Bush's administration conceded for the first time yesterday that the pollution that causes global warming will have to be cut in half around the globe by the middle of the century if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.
.
Dr Paula Dobriansky, the leader of its delegation, made the concession in a speech from the floor, the first time that the Bush administration has ever committed itself to a shared global goal in combating climate change.

The move was all the more surprising because the US had spent the previous two weeks at the conference successfully blocking attempts to include the target, or any other numerical goals, in the final agreements.