Obama to visit Tampa to tout smart grid?

Our colleagues at The Buzz are reporting that President Obama's upcoming visit to Tampa next Tuesday may be to highlight his vision for a revamped national energy network, the so-called smart grid.

Obama's stimulus package contains $4.5 billion in funding for a smart grids, which would tap into wind and solar and other green energy sources and transmit it to large urban areas, such as Tampa and Miami. The New York Times, in a story on Boulder, Colo., becoming the first big test area for the technology, calls smart grids "the most ambitious move the United States could make toward cutting its emissions from burning fossil fuels."

Big corporations are jumping on the bandwagon too. General Electric -- which recently started an experiment in Hawaii that saves energy by turning off household appliances when electricity is expensive and makes better use of wind and solar power -- is joining with Whirlpool and other companies to demonstrate the role of smart grid technologies in battling climate change.

--Craig Pittman

Mississippi Katrina victims get okay to sue polluters over rising sea level

A group of Mississippi landowners can pursue their lawsuit against more than 30 major oil, electric and coal companies they say have created global-warming pollutants that contributed to rising sea levels and increased Hurricane Katrina's destruction, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports.

The central question before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was whether the plaintiffs could demonstrate that their injuries were “fairly traceable” to the actions of the oil, electric and coal companies. A lower court had ruled they could not, but the Fifth Circuit disagreed.

In its ruling, the three-judge panel cited the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, since that opinion “accepted as plausible the link between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and global warming” along with the fact that “rising ocean temperatures may contribute to the ferocity of hurricanes.”

Gerald Maples, lead attorney for the landowners in the class-action lawsuit, said he filed the suit 22 days after Katrina to get the attention of energy officials about greenhouse gas emissions. The case still has a long way to go, however. 

The Wall Street Journal talked to a legal expert who predicted that the ruling will invite more climate-change litigation in the future.“With this decision,” he says, “you are now pretty well assured of seeing others file these kinds of claims.”

The ruling is the second time in recent weeks an appeals court has allowed a similar lawsuit to move forward, notes the Times-Picayune. In September, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Connecticut and other states to proceed with a suit aimed at forcing American Electric Power and other utilities to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer

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Study: Hidden health costs from energy consumption top $120 billion

The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Science, released a report today that attempts to estimate the hidden costs of energy production and the use of coal, oil and other sources, such as the impact of air pollution, on human health.

The estimate: $120 billion in 2005.

And that's just a partial estimate, the council notes. The number "reflects primarily health damages from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation," a news release on the study says. "The figure does not include damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security. ..."

Here's the breakdown:  

"Coal accounts for about half the electricity produced in the U.S.," the release notes. "In 2005 the total annual external damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation's coal-generated electricity, were about $62 billion."

And then there are all the cars and trucks on the highway spewing pollution from their tailpipes. In 2005, motor vehicles produced $56 billion in damage to human health, the study found.

The committee that wrote the report tried to figure out the hidden costs in terms of climate change impact too, but it ran into lots of problems quantifying an amount for those impacts. Nevertheless, it found that "coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., emitting on average about a ton of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. ...Climate-related monetary damages range from 0.1 cents to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour."

Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer

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Arctic to be largely ice-free in summer months within a decade, says new study

A new analysis by Cambridge University predicts that within the next decade, the Arctic will be largely ice-free during the summer months.

During a 73-day trek across the icy expanse, team leader Pen Hadow -- the first man to walk to the North Pole solo -- "took 1,500 readings, often during pitch blackness and with windchill factors down to -70 degree C," the UK Telegraph is reporting. "The team also took thousands of visual observations to give an impression of how the shape of the ice sheet is changing."

Their samples showed that, thanks to the changing climate, the area surveyed was comprised almost exclusively of first year ice, and not the thick, multi-year ice that has covered that area in the past.

"Discovering this area of younger ice provides another body of information that supports the rapidly emerging scientific consensus that it's going to be nearer 10 years from now that we will see roughly 80-85 percent free waters in the Arctic Ocean," Hadow told CNN.

Here's the UK's Independent Television Network story on it:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says Arctic sea ice covered an average 2.1 million square miles in September - the third lowest for any September since records began in 1979. The coverage was 23.8 percent below the 1979-2000 average, and the 13th consecutive September with below-average Arctic sea ice extent.

What does this all mean? “You're essentially, for the first time, creating an ocean. Which is not something you want to do as a global experiment, because you cannot take the ocean away,” Cambridge Professor Peter Wadhams told the Toronto Globe & Mail. “If it's a disaster you cannot put the lid back on again and say, ‘Oh, that didn't work out, let's try that again.' You're stuck with what you've done.”

--Craig Pittman

Rising sea temperatures spread slimy mucus-like blobs in world's oceans

As sea temperatures rise, a new study has found, "enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer," according to National Geographic.

Sheets of such "mucus" occur naturally throughout the Mediterranean, especially in the Adriatic Sea. They were first identified in 1729. Warm summer months help keep seawater more stable, allowing microscopic organic materials to bond together and form slimy mucilage blobs that can stretch for miles, clogging fishing nets and covering swimmers with a sticky gel.

But climate change is heating up the world's oceans, and now the blobs are forming in the winter too and lasting for months, the study found. Worse, it turns out that the Mediterranean mucilages harbor bacteria and viruses, including potentially deadly E. coli. And the blobs are now turning up in other oceans, from the North Sea to Australia, the study found.

"Now we see that … the release of pathogens from the mucilage can be potentially problematic" for human health," said the study's leader, Roberto Donovaro, director of the marine science department at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy. "It's a good example [of what will happen if] we don't do something to stop climate warming. There are consequences [if] we continue to deny the scientific evidence." 

[Photo of diver with Adriatic Sea slime from Scripps Institute of Oceanography]

--Craig Pittman

Island nation leader copes with rising sea level by holding cabinet meeting underwater

The tourist-friendly nation of the Republic of Maldives -- which at 7 feet above sea level is the lowest-lying nation in the world -- is expecting to have a rough time coping with rising sea levels.

President Mohamed Nasheed thas already started collecting money to buy a new homeland for his population of 350,000 people if the country's 1,192 low-lying coral islands are eventually submerged by the Indian Ocean.

Now the president has proposed holding a Cabinet meeting this month...underwater.

So now his 14 government ministers are taking scuba lessons and learning how to use sign language in preparation for the meeting Oct. 17, says the Associated Press.

At the meeting they "will ratify a pledge calling on other countries to slash greenhouse emissions ahead of a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December," CNN reports.

"The document will be in a water-proof plate pinned on to the table," a government spokesman said. No word on what kind of pen they will use.

[Photo from Maldives via AP: Government ministers take scuba training]

--Craig Pittman

China chastises U.S., Europe over greenhouse gases while Japan buys CO2 rights from...Latvia?

China's top climate envoy got into what MSNBC is calling "a rare public spat" with the U.S. and Europe Wednesday, contending that it's not fair to expect all countries to play a role in combating global warming when it's the older ones that originally caused the problem.

The spat occurred at a news conference at the U.N. climate talks in Bangkok, where delegates from 180 countries have been locked in the talks for 10 days on trying to hammer out a new climate agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The Chinese envoy's comments "laid bare what has been clear in at the negotiating tables for days — that a long-running divide between rich and poor countries shows no sign of abating despite promises by some major developing countries to cut their emissions of the gases responsible for climate change," MSNBC says.

So how do those rich countries hit their emission targets? By buying the carbon dioxide rights of less developed countries, of course.

That's what Japan has been up to this week, shopping around for someone's CO2 emission rights that it could buy. Japan is already the world's fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and expects to have trouble meeting its emission reduction goals under the Kyoto treaty.

So last week Japanese officials went shopping for emission rights in the Czech Republic and the Ukraine, and this week it has concluded a contract with Latvia to acquire rights to emit 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.This is a big business -- a recent World Bank report estimated that the value of global carbon markets jumped from $110 million in 2002 to $126 billion in 2008.

--Craig Pittman

Apple, Nike, utilities splitting with Chamber of Commerce over climate change, showing shift in political alliances

The exodus began last month, as Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear energy provider; a New Mexico utility holding company called PNM Resources,and Pacific Gas & Electric, California's biggest utility  all headed for the door. Then came Nike resigning from the board, and now, today, the almighty Apple departed as well, resigning from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its climate policy.

“We strongly object to the chamber’s recent comments opposing the EPA.’s effort to limit greenhouse gases,” wrote Catherine A. Novelli, vice-president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, in a letter  to Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber. "“Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the chamber at odds with us in this effort."

You may recall that the Chamber not only opposes the EPA's climate change rules and the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed by the House earlier this year. It also wants the EPA to hold something like the "Scopes monkey trial" to determine if global warming is real and is really being caused by people. But now it's the Chamber that's on trial, painted by its former members as "scientific obstructionists."

Democrats who support climate-change legislation are hooting about the departures from the Chamber, which according to Newsday spent $7.4 million lobbying on climate change this past spring. Jay Inslee, a House Democrat from Washington State and a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, told Forbes that the string of resignations was "an earthquake."

The Wall Street Journal notes that the growing rift amid the Chamber's members "is highlighting how the climate-change issue is straining traditional alliances in Washington, as some businesses seek to profit from overhauling the energy market and others try to cut deals to head off tougher regulation."

--Craig Pittman

EPA proposes own greenhouse gas limits -- a "warning shot" to Congress

On the same day that two prominent senators unveiled a new, slightly tougher climate-change bill, the Environmental Protection Agency popped out a surprise that lend impetus to the bill's passage.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories and oil refineries -- a move the Los Angeles Times called "a warning shot to Congress that if it does not move to curb global warming, the Obama administration will act on its own."

Jackson's proposal targets only the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, as identified by the nation's first greenhouse gas reporting system, which the EPA unveiled just last week. The new proposal would require industrial facilities that emit at least 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year to obtain construction and operating permits from the agency.

As the LAT notes, that's a departure from the Clean Air Act, which requires regulation of any source that produces more than 250 tons of a pollutant covered under the Act.

Jackson said she was trying to reduce emissions "without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy. This is a common-sense rule that is carefully tailored to apply to only the largest sources -- those from sectors responsible for nearly 70% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions sources."

Although industry lobbyists questioned whether the regulation would stand up in court, the EPA's action follows a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rebuked the Bush Administration for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

--Craig Pittman

Climate change bill to be unveiled in Senate

A major new climate change bill is due to be introduced in the Senate today by California Democrat Barbara Boxer.

The bill is the Senate's version of an energy and climate measure the House of Representatives passed last June. The bill is expected to require industrial emissions of greenhouse gases to be reduced by 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. It also calls for a "cap and trade" system of carbon credits.

The bill is likely to set off intense lobbying from special interests, as well as a push-back from Republicans who fear climate legislation will hurt the economy.

Here's an explanation of the climate debate in Congress from the Huffington Post.

David Adams, Times Staff Writer

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