EPA chief Lisa Jackson has resigned. Is Obama's #climate silence to blame? Secret email account use?

  

There has been no fiercer champion of our health and our environment than Lisa Jackson, and every American is better off today than when she took office nearly four years ago. For that, we are deeply grateful to Lisa for her service, and to President Obama for having appointed her to this vital position.

Lisa leaves giant shoes to fill. And her successor will inherit an unfinished agenda that begins with the issuance of new health protections against carbon pollution from existing power plants—the largest remaining driver of climate change that needs to be controlled.

       – Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke

 

Congressional Republicans, however, won't be sad to see her go. Nor will the lobbyists who thought she was a "job killer." Caught between their hostility toward regulation and the Obama administration's lack of emphasis on climate change, Jackson was unable to nix the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a planned route for bringing tar sand oil from Canada down to Texas. When confronted on the issue, Jackson simply said that holding conversations about the project is "awesome." She also wasn't able to get the EPA to take meaningful action on hydraulic fracturing, even after the agency found evidence that the practice contributes to groundwater pollution.

- The Atlantic Wire 

 

One of her biggest achievements is that she succeeded in brokering a deal with automakers to double fuel efficiency standards by 2025. That's going to save consumers $100 billion a year at the pump, it's going to cut our carbon emissions from automobiles in half, and it's going to save us 3 million barrels of oil every day.

 

– Natural Resources Defense Council Assoc Dir Bob Deans

...She was the first administrator in decades to champion wholesale reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act. As that effort stalled in Congress, she redoubled the agency's commitment to review and regulate toxic chemicals through aggressive use of existing law. She stood up to polluters time and again—whether they were fouling America's air with smog or our drinking water hexavalent chromium—and simply because she was doing her job she became a target of anti-environmental ideologues. But to the people and communities she protected across the country, Administrator Jackson was a hero..

- Environmental Working Group's Ken Cook

EPA's vehicle greenhouse gas rules, will save consumers $1.7 trillion at the pump by 2025, and eliminate six billion metric tons of GHG pollution.

- EPA

A hero to the environmental movement and a constant thorn in the sides of Republicans and the energy sector, outgoing Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson presided over one of the most controversial and dramatic periods in the agency’s history.

She made her mark by helping craft new automobile fuel standards, imposing a ban on new coal-fired power plants, and being among the loudest in calling for action to combat climate change.

But Ms. Jackson, who announced her resignation Thursday after four years at the helm of the EPA, also sustained several legal defeats and embarrassments during her tenure. Among Republicans and many in the fossil-fuels industry, she has dragged the agency’s scientific credibility to an all-time low after failed attempts to tie hydraulic fracturing to water contamination in Texas, Wyoming and Pennsylvania.

She also is departing as the EPA and two House committees investigate her use of secret email accounts.

Less than a year ago, one of Ms. Jackson’s top deputies, Al Armendariz, was forced to resign after promising to “crucify” oil and gas companies in order to set an example for the rest of the industry.

But those setbacks, as far as Ms. Jackson and President Obama are concerned, pale in comparison with the accomplishments of the past four years.

– Washington Times

 

Read more on: NPR, Mother Jones, Huffington Post Green, Fox News

California Lithium Battery increases energy density by 3 times and specific anode capacity by 4 times over existing LIBs

Battery technology is critical for our modern world of portable devices and increasing demand from trends like electric vehicles and distributed energy storage, areas which can play an important role to face our aging power infrastructure and climate change. The press release below illustrates one startup that has achieved great advancements. Just as microprocessor and computer memory advances have revolutionized our society, we hope for a similar "Moore's Law" acceleration in this arena.

Los Angeles (PRWEB) October 26, 2012

California Lithium Battery, a finalist in DOE’s 2012 Start Up America’s Next Top Energy Innovator challenge, has announced the record-setting performance of its new “GEN3” silicon graphene composite anode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Independent test results in full cell LIBs indicate the new GEN3 anode material, used with advanced cathode and electrolyte materials, increases energy density by 3 times and specific anode capacity by 4 times over existing LIBs.

For eight months CalBattery has been working with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to commercialize a novel lithium battery anode material for use with advanced cathode and electrolyte materials to achieve new levels of LIB performance. The work is showing extraordinary results. Independent full cell tests reveal unrivaled performance characteristics, with an energy density of 525WH/Kg and specific anode capacity 1,250mAh/g. In contrast, most commercial LIBs have an energy density of between 100-180WH/kg and a specific anode capacity of 325mAh/g. “This equates to more than a 300% improvement in LIB capacity and an estimated 70% reduction in lifetime cost for batteries used in consumer electronics, EVs, and grid-scale energy storage,” said CalBattery CEO Phil Roberts.

The key to this new GEN3 battery material is the use of a breakthrough Argonne silicon graphene process which stabilizes the use of silicon in a lithium battery anode. Although Silicon absorbs lithium ten times better than any other anode materials it rapidly deteriorates during charge/discharge cycles. CalBattery has worked at Argonne and other facilities over the past year to develop this new anode material to work in a full LIB cell with multiple cathode and electrolyte materials. The superior results of the development program at ANL leads the Company to believe that this advanced anode material could eventually replace conventional graphite based anode materials used in most LIBs manufactured today. This novel composite anode material is suitable for use in combination with a variety of existing and new LIB cathode and electrolyte materials that will help dramatically improve overall battery performance and lower LIB cycle cost – effectively storing electricity at a cost competitive with energy produced from fossil fuels.

CalBattery is now in the process of fast-tracking the commercialization of its GEN3 breakthrough battery anode material. Over the next two years the Company plans: (1) to produce and sell its si-graphene anode material to global battery and EV OEMs, and (2) U.S. production of a limited quantity of specialized batteries for high-end applications. “We believe that our new advanced silicon graphene anode composite material is so good in terms of specific capacity and extended cycle life that it will become a graphite anode ‘drop-in’ replacement material for anodes in most lithium ion batteries over the next 2-3 years,” said Roberts. The Company believes this transformational technology will change the way LIB power is produced, managed, and stored, especially if it can lead to LIBs being produced for under $175/kWh and directly compete with the cost of energy from fossil fueled power generation.

About CalBattery (http://www.clbattery.com)
CalBattery is a portfolio start-up company headquartered at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), which was started by The City of LA and the LA Department of Water and Power in 2011. CalBattery plans to set up silicon graphene anode material and LIB manufacturing operations in the Los Angeles area based on interest in its advanced Li-ion battery material from U.S. and international customers.

Will Water Become the Chief Commodity of the 21st Century? (SciAm)

The world faces a growing number of challenges surrounding water, from freshwater supply to flooding

By Christa Marshall and ClimateWire

South Bend, Ind., avoided $120 million in upgrades and conserved millions of gallons of water by becoming one of the first cities on the globe to use cloud computing to manage its water systems.
In Oregon, local officials cooled down water from wastewater plants by planting trees near riverbanks rather than using cooling equipment, lowering investment costs at the same time.

The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is working with governors and transmission officials in Texas and the western United States on a multi-year computer project to find the best locations for new power plants faced with growing scarcity in nearby water resources to cool down their operations.
These examples underscore the many options available to alleviate a growing global water crisis exacerbated by climate change, water experts said yesterday at forum in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Growing Blue, a group created by Veolia Water in consultation with the United Nations, Columbia University and water conservation groups.

"Water is posed to be the commodity of the 21st century," said Richard Sandor, an analyst at Environmental Products, who also founded the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Current statistics -- outlined yesterday in a new report from IBM at the event -- highlight the challenges facing the water sector on everything from drought to storm runoff.

Between 2005 and 2030, the number of people living in areas where water demand will exceed available supplies could rise 40 percent, from 2.8 billion to 3.9 billion, the company said.

A water trading system to conserve supplies
By 2070, the value of flood-exposed economic assets in 136 major ports could reach 9 percent of global gross domestic product. In global agriculture, 35 percent of annual water is wasted because of "poor resource management."

In the United States, there will be a need for 165 percent more water by 2025 above 2000 levels, the report says. Energy use -- such as use for cooling down power plants during hot summers -- accounts for 49 percent of U.S. water demand.

Tight supplies will be further squeezed by a potential shortage of workers managing stormwater, drinking water and wastewater systems, said Mary Keeling, a manager at IBM. The issue is "often overlooked," she said.

In the United States, the average water utility worker is 44.7 years old, with a retirement age of 56, Keeling said. That raises serious questions whether utilities will have the personnel they need to address problems such as drought, she said.

For Sandor, an obvious answer to future water shortages is water trading, which would allow water-stressed areas to purchase supplies from other regions. As one example, he said that it takes the same amount of water to make $250,000 worth of alfalfa as it does to run an Albuquerque, N.M.'s computer chip plant, yet farmers "can't sell their water rights" in the state, he said.

While it could take 10 to 20 years to build a water trading system in a given region, it is an idea that would boost conservation tremendously, he said.

The idea is a controversial one. A study in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association published this spring outlined the potential difficulties of setting up a water trading system in the American West, including the fact that there is not an umbrella authority over states in the 1922 Colorado compact. Some critics also are concerned about trading altering river flows and disrupting hydroelectric dams, among other things.

Alberta could lead the way
Yet Sandor said Alberta, Canada, could be a first mover. The province faces multiple pressures of growing oil extraction, business development and population growth in an arid climate, and there are preliminary discussions about the concept (ClimateWire, Aug. 3).

Source:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=will-water-become-the-chief-commodity-of-the-21st-century

#Climate Change: Biggest Human #Rights Issue of Our Time (Mary Robinson)

Mary Robinson, the first female president of Ireland and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, heads the Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice. She is a member of the Elders and the Club of Madrid and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

At Doha COP18, Robinson stated: "I believe that this is the biggest human rights issue of the 21st century, and I believe that it’s a way of addressing issues of development and issues of tackling poverty," Robinson says. "It means that we have to take into account the injustice of the fact that it’s the fossil fuel growth in the United States, Europe and other developed parts of the world, which has contributed to undermining development of very poor people, undermining their livelihoods. ... We can actually change the quality of life for both rich and poor countries in a way that doesn’t undermine happiness and good livelihoods."

Source: DemocracyNow

Dirty #Climate & Dirty Power: Global Problem with Local Solution

The latest United Nations climate conventions in Doha, Qatar and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil have served to highlight a sad truth: the world's polluting interests will continue to restrict the monumental changes and innovation that are required to have even the slightest chance of minimizing the upcoming global climate catastrophe (as avoidance appears to be now beyond reach by World Bank estimations).  This powerful lobby will continue to receive more national government investments than green research.  It is more apparent than ever that action to mitigate the worse effects will have to come from the community level worldwide and by harnessing the collective action of the Internet for alternative pathways of funding, research, education and collaborative action.

One of the largest sources of pollution is the energy generation sector and one of the greatest power consumer segments are commercial buildings.  While there is much excitement with grid modernization such as smart metering, demand response, and distribution automation, the industry does not appear to have the funding and will to move swiftly enough to meet more aggressive climate change goals.  With luckwarm leadership in the White House and its support of ramping up of national fossil fuel production despite climate science indicating the very opposite should be done; despite the political opening provided by super storm Sandy and public outcry against the Keystone XL pipeline.

A major part of addressing global warming must be leadership and cooperation among progressive communities like college campuses and entire cities around the world. They must push toward net-zero and net-positive buildings, neighborhoods, and campuses toward completely energy self-dependent cities and countries.  Rather than individual residential and commercial property owners having to wait for renewable and low-emission distributed generation and net-metering policies, a cooperative, neighborhood-wide or municipality-led approach can accelerate the virtual power plant paradigm implementation. 

To learn more, read  Alex Stephan's book (available for purchase and for free) on how cities can lead the climate fight. I also recommend Memoori's industry white paper entitled "Why Interfacing Smart Buildings Is the Perfect Union." It predicts faster, more significant, cost-effective progress (at approximately 1% of overall smart grid budgets) with clearer benefit and hence support of end-users.

Rocky Mountain Institute: "158 percent bigger United States economy in 2050

but needing no oil, coal, or nuclear energy"

Our #Climate Future and the #COP18 Doha Summit by Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan @DemocracyNow

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The annual United Nations climate summit has convened, this year in Doha, the capital of the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, on the Arabian Peninsula. Dubbed “COP 18,” an army of bureaucrats, business people and environmentalists are gathered ostensibly to limit global greenhouse-gas emissions to a level that scientists say will contain the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and perhaps stave off global climate catastrophe. If past meetings are any indication, national self-interest on the part of the world’s largest polluters, paramount among them the United States, will trump global consensus.

“We want our children to live in an America ... that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in his victory speech on Nov. 6 this year, just over a week after Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and much of New Jersey, killing more than 100 people. These are fine aspirations. The problem is, action is needed now to avert the very scenario that President Obama has said he wants to avoid. The United States, which remains the greatest polluter in world history, stands as one of the biggest impediments to a rational global program to stem global warming.

Latest findings suggest that the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius may now be beyond reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4- to 6-degree temperature increase. “The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be radical transformations in the way the global economy currently functions: rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel use or massive deployment of CCS [carbon capture and storage], removal of industrial emissions and halting deforestation.” These are not the words of some wild-eyed environmental activist, but from business advisers at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) in their November 2012 Low Carbon Economy Index.

The PwC advisers concur in many regards with a consortium of environmentalists who issued an open letter as COP 18 convened. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey and Ambassador Pablo Solon, who formerly led climate negotiations for Bolivia, said in their letter to the COP 18 negotiators: “If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground. ... That’s not ‘environmentalist math’ or some radical interpretation—that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that—without dramatic global action to change our path—the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt—absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.”

The World Meteorological Organization released preliminary findings for 2012, highlighting extremes of drought, heat waves, floods, and snow and extreme cold, as well as above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin for the third consecutive year. Also speaking at the COP 18’s opening was Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising more than 1,800 scientists from around the globe, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. In sober, scientific language, Dr. Pachauri, pointed out potential catastrophes unless action is taken, among them: “By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people [in Africa] are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. ... As global average temperature increase exceeds 3.5 (degrees) C, model projections suggest significant extinctions ranging from 40 to 70 percent of species assessed around the globe.”

President Obama loudly advocates for doing away with subsidies to the oil and gas corporations, but, as pointed out by Oil Change International, Greenpeace and other groups, he is “supporting skyrocketing export subsidies for dirty fossil fuels through the United States Export-Import Bank,” with at least $10.2 billion in public financing for fossil-fuel projects in 2012 alone, dwarfing the $2.3 billion the State Department claims it has disbursed to developing countries to combat climate change.

Outside the air-conditioned plenary halls and corridors of the UN climate summit in Doha, in the emirate of Qatar—which, ironically, is the nation with the highest per capita carbon emissions of any nation on the planet—there will be protests. The newly formed Arab Youth Climate Movement, hundreds of grassroots activists from across the region, including many involved in the Arab Spring, are marching, calling for their nations to take the lead in reducing emissions.

The Arab Spring activists toppled dictators, but can they move the fossil-fuel corporations? With a growing global movement intent on doing just that, prepare for a hot summer, in more ways than one.

© 2012 Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
Original: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/11/29/our_climate_future_and_the_doha_summit

Germany targets 100% renewables by 2050; Denmark tops 40%; U.S. lags at 6%

Germany's electric grid is already 25% powered by renewables, while the U.S. which can boast a much greater resource of wind and solar, among other renewable sources, lags at 6%. Those hoping for a decisive, post-election win, post-Sandy stance by the U.S. administration on renewables and climate change were likely disappointed at Mr. Obama's recent press conference. At the state level, Texas has gone from negligible renewables to, on good days, feeding a quarter of its load with wind power; and California has seen a rapid drive into utility-scale solar in the last few years.

Germany, on the other hand, has committed to reach 100% renewable power by 2050 like Denmark, which continues its leadership position having topped the 40% mark. Portugal and Spain have shown rapid increase in renewables, as well, but uncertainty reigns in the current economic crisis.




Thames & Kosmos 624811 Hydropower Renewable Energy Science Kit (Google Affiliate Ad)

World Bank Issues Alarming Climate Change Report

On the 333rd consecutive globally warm month, a new report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics bears the decise title "Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4 degrees C Warmer World Must be Avoided."

It focuses on the measured rise and projections of CO2 concentrations and Emissions, rising global mean temperature, increasing ocean heat storage, rising sea levels, increasing loss of ice in areas like Greenland, the Artic, and Antartica, ocean acidification, heat waves and extreme temperatures, droughts and aridity impacts on agriculture and other human welface impacts, and warns of culmination of extreme event synchronization as may have been witnessed with "superstorm" Sandy in the Northeastern U.S.

Bank President Jim Yong Kim sums up the report with this blunt headline in the UK Guardian: "The latest predictions on climate change should shock us into action. A world four degrees warmer could be too hot to handle, but the exciting prospect of low-carbon living could stop it happening."

Energy efficiency, conservation, and research to lower the costs of renewable and cleaner sources of power are important aspects of the Smarter Grid efforts of citizenry and the power, automobile, building management, industrial and large commercial and other sectors.

According the report, "we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” Can we continue the power-hungry information age without risking these massive global adverse effects? Human ingenuity can meet the challenge.

3.000 people protest Keystone XL pipeline and
demand U.S. administration live up to its campaign slogan