Looking Back At Looking Forward in Space

In 2007 I published a piece in The Space Review. I looked at emerging societal structural shifts, and how these might play in the space budgeting game. Did I get it right? You decide.





New markets and new technologies are enabling the creation of a new class of space advocates. (credit: iStockphoto)

Deepening democracy and space policy 2.0
by Kathleen M. Connell, M.A.

Monday, December 31, 2007
NASA, for all of its visibility and iconic meaning to society, does not possess a large structural constituency base in the American population. It is unlike other well-known and well-funded government and quasi-government programs and agencies, such as HUD, VA, SBA, Medicare, the Department of Education, the US Postal Service, or the Defense Department. Each and every year—sometimes each month—these and other federal entities provide direct checks, subsidies, loans, or services to individual Americans, their families, and communities. These Americans are, in turn, political constituents of the elected Administration and Congress, which decide the funding level of these agencies and NASA. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that agencies that deliver direct “bread and butter” support and benefits to watchful constituents and enterprises will usually be a larger budget priority for elected officials, unless a local constituency has a significant, sustained stake in NASA.

Thus, for better or worse, NASA is generally also not a priority for the massive membership lobbies which are engaged in the business of preserving benefits via legislation for their members. These associations, along with the many clients of K Street lobbyists, hold the leverage of well-funded constituent mobilization, votes, and campaign contributions that elected officials require.

A case in point is the AARP, with a membership enrollment of 38,000,000 members, and corresponding legislative power in Washington, DC. For purposes of comparison, the well-respected AIAA, the largest aerospace professional society in the US, claims 31,000 enrolled members, or less than 1% of the AARP membership.

From this perspective, it is easy to understand why structural issues in our representative democracy continue to constrain the extremely small budget wedge of NASA, and are likely to do so in the future. NASA’s tiny fraction of the US GDP is also managed by a small group of powerful space policy actors. Many of these officials have significant space centers or institutes in their states.

Civil space is now on the cusp of a tipping point where at many structural shifts are occurring simultaneously.
Further, if perception is often reality in politics, not since the technological and knowledge-based competition at the core of the Cold War have individual Americans perceived or held a direct economic stake in the fortunes of NASA. This was not always so, for at mid-century NASA commanded a significant percentage of GDP, and a large percentage of new jobs being created in the technological battle known as the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have been either structurally excluded from impacting space policy choices, or have no overriding incentive to attempt to do so.

How then, will the public space sector investment grow to meet its needs in competition with other domestic and foreign priorities, and emerging international competitors? A related question is how can NASA accomplish the development of a new crewed spacecraft capable of lunar exploration, explore Mars, provide seed grants to new space firms through the COTS program, and also maintain a portfolio of space science within the current budget wedge of less than 1%? The past seven years have demonstrated that no internal need of NASA, including the need for a new space access system, can drive the budget up to break the 1% level. NASA cannot accomplish all of these things on a sustainable basis, and there is no relief in sight, under the current status quo.

To resolve these questions means to grow the NASA slice of the budget pie, but how?

From a structural perspective a “perfect storm” of new trends must converge into a tipping point in order to increase the civil space wedge. One view is that civil space is now on the cusp of a tipping point where at many structural shifts are occurring simultaneously. This essay will touch on three of these emerging trends and how they might intersect to help create a consensus for more funds for innovative civil space initiatives.

Structural shift #1: From localized space constituent to global space consumers
“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”
– Milton Friedman, economist
NASA policies are proposed by each Administration, and disposed of by Congressional legislation. Beneath this constitutional architecture for decision-making is a traditional set of intermediaries with direct interest in the policy and budget outcomes at NASA. These intermediaries are generally understood to align in the categories of civil service unions, contractors, industry, academia, trade unions, technical and industry associations, NGOs, and the military. Last but not least are the powerful traditional space states. The states are the only intermediary group with elected officials in the decision-making loop of civil space. The local space worker/constituents, and their power in the traditional space states of Texas, Florida, Alabama, Maryland, and California, have an extraordinary interest in, and impact on, the NASA budget. Joining this circle are a second ring states like West Virginia and Colorado who also have a strong interest in space public affairs. A third ring of states has entered the circle of the interested, via spaceports, and includes states like New Mexico and Oklahoma.

These space influentials will soon have to move over to make room for those who do not live next door to a NASA center or space port, for space commerce is about to produce a new vested sector, in a newly empowered space consumer.



The rise of the consumer and consumer movements in America is well established in every market segment, but only recently can the notion of space consumer be thought about in relation to the space sector. With consumption comes choice. Space consumers may soon be “voting” with their discretionary income. Choices will abound on space services and goods. Consumers are known to register stockholder initiatives (and protests). With consumer political clout they will be poised to apply pressure on firms via government regulation. And occasionally consumers use the power of the boycott to impact the marketplace.

Individual customer/consumers and consumer blocks are now poised to spring into being, and they will change the face of civil and private space forever.
Space consumer choice is a public benefit of private markets, however, it should not be confused with uncritical and wholesale privatization of all government functions. Government has a role to play in the creation of markets, and a role in consumer protection to play after the markets are created. The “withering away of the state” in space, as some wish for, is an extreme aspiration, when what is required is a public interest commitment to more effectively reform and revitalize NASA, not eliminate it. The state will also be needed as a watchdog for space consumers, and in turn watchers to keep and eye on the watchdog.

Savvy space consumers can have a broad agenda of their choosing which can include matters at NASA as well. As interested but independent players, they can also introduce a change loop back into NASA choices, in addition to impacting the space marketplace. Space consumers and the companies that serve them will likely see a long-term benefit in receiving support from government, and the NASA budget in particular, in the form of contracts, grants, loans, prizes, and research that support commercial space and consumer interests. Space consumers can legally press the Administration and Congress for these and other programs, just as the AARP impacts budgets for health and Medicare funds. It is conceivable that “silver collar” space consumers may choose to seek to increase the NASA budget—or not. NASA’s behavior will likely determine whether space consumers come to view the agency as friend or foe, or something that is a shade of grey between these two poles.

Structural shift #2: The rise of proactive citizen space hives
A digital plank has been thrown across the distance that once separated the wiki community from the rocket community.

Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, captured this phenomenon in the notion of “hives”, where independent agents spontaneously form to meet group objectives. Kelly viewed this trend as a neo-biological social and economic development. Both led and leaderless hives of concerned parties are now mobilizing fast to make major impacts on space budgets and provide highly competent input into the space policy process.

Web 2.0 is also dramatically influencing 21st century space policy in a direct manner. IT tools now enable viral marketing, web fundraising, blogging, video posting, advocacy, conferencing, user-created content, instant information, texting, meet-ups, friend sites, community building and much more.

These web-empowered, HTML-fluent agents have been dubbed an “Army of Davids” by leading blogger Glenn Reynolds. That virtual crowds could help make space choices for the nation is still a bit inconceivable to those accustomed to the institutional Goliath language of space discourse, where senior experts were the only voices heard just a few years ago. What is equally interesting is not only the quantity of space opinion and direct policy action on the web, but the quality of the information publicly available. “Billions and billions” (to borrow a well known quote from Carl Sagan), no longer refers just to the firmament of stars, but to the number of global citizens now space-hip, and online 24/7.

Savvy activists and organizers are using tech tools, and more sophisticated advocacy IT platforms, to create communities that mobilize new publics, interest groups, space “prosumers” , beleaguered space scientists with dwindling budgets, and others space constituents. Several thousand of these interest organizations have been cataloged in informal databases. The list of active space networks represent official organizations, industry lobbies, professional societies, informal societies, bloggers, affinitive networks, state-based organizations, consultants, researchers, and media. What it does not fully capture is a profusion of sub-niche players with enormous reach, or those with a “long tail” of impact.

Added to this is the evolution of gaming and simulation, as Second Life and other virtual environments allow for a simulated high-definition space experience for anyone with an adequate computer system. These tools are both evolvable and, most importantly, free or very low cost. In economic terms, some simulated space expertise is looking less like an elite preoccupation, and more like an information commodity.

That virtual crowds could help make space choices for the nation is still a bit inconceivable to those accustomed to the institutional Goliath language of space discourse, where senior experts were the only voices heard just a few years ago.
In political terms, interested persons can now “opt-in” to the space policy debate, click-and-send opinions and requests to elected officials and the media, and host meet-ups in Congressional offices with their representatives. Many more are choosing to do so in increasing, influential numbers and ad hoc crowds. As theorists and practitioners in space policy and political campaigns know, the impact on official legislation and Administration policy from closed to more open, is already happening.

As a result, independent and hive space actors no longer are willing to accept marginal status in decision-making around space exploration and utilization of space assets. Where the space hives want the nation’s taxpayer-funded space investment to go, and whether it should grow, will become increasingly clear in the next few years. What is clear now is that space hives are in the space game to stay.

Structural shift #3: The crisis factor: from civil space as a luxury, to space assets as a necessity in global warming mitigation
By now you would have heard that NASA intends to go to the Moon again in 2018 but why should that interest you? You already have enough concerns here in your life on earth with things like terrorism, hurricanes, wars and your own employment prospects keeping you up at night... The list is practically endless. I'm not going to sweep all these things aside and tell you that space is more important when you say, “Why is space so important to me?” or “What has space got to do with my life here and now?”
– Fred Stratford, blogger
Some in space circles have advanced a theory that the NASA budget is small because space is a luxury item compared to other budget priorities. As we have suggested, space budgeting choice is better understood as a case of structural inequality in the political and policy context. Whatever truth there is to the luxury argument, global warming has moved civil space to a position of necessity in global warming observation, and possibly, mitigation.

Global warming has become the most compelling new societal issue of the era. Space assets can now be plotted directly on the critical path of halting global warming and the potential mass extinctions and economic chaos it can bring. Both NASA and NOAA budgets contain a significant percentage of the world’s budgets dealing with climate change research and assets. Both agencies advance the state of knowledge regarding global warming, and provide crucial satellite data streams that assist during larger and longer weather crisis, such as hurricane strikes.

On the political front, almost overnight, a passionate advocate, Al Gore, and the world’s top scientists persuaded many Americans and others across the globe of the existence of global warming. As of this writing, the momentum of voter towards climate as an issue is gaining adherents, and will be felt in the 2008 Presidential election cycle.

Green opinion has already found its way to Washington, in many forms and appropriation initiatives. In space, it is also arriving in the form of NASA budget proposals by some Presidential candidates. The net effect will be to heighten the climate-related focus on the already very visible NASA. This time the issue, and the resulting demands on the civil space sector, are almost science fiction made science fact. Will NASA be expected to play a leading role in the drama of saving the planet, and us, from extinction? It is hard for this writer to imagine that NASA will not be called upon, and this surely has budget implications.

The structural walls of the old citadel that contain space policy decisions are still in place, but cracks are appearing thanks to new waves of participatory players and societal challenges.
Space is also plotted on the other points on the critical path for preservation of the planet and humanity. One opportunity is in global warming mitigation via energy delivery from solar power satellites. Another one is in the now real question of spacecraft-as-lifeboat. Will climate degradation force us to explore space? These and other topics now require more space community engagement and focus in order to fully comprehend both the issues and opportunities in space affairs. It will also be critical that space exploration advocates not be seen as ones who are willing to forsake the home planet. This will discredit space advocates in the eyes of the terrestrially attached, which is most folks. Indeed, the redirection of a significant share of the NASA portfolio towards the home planet is highly likely.

Meanwhile, the structural walls of the old citadel that contain space policy decisions are still in place, but cracks are appearing thanks to new waves of participatory players and societal challenges. These trends are pushing towards both openings and transparency in democratic institutions and entities, including in the entity called NASA. Those would-be space leaders who understand the dynamic intersection of empowered public will, interactive technology, space consumption, and global warming will best be able to guide NASA into the second decade of the 21st century. Should they also embrace these facets of the future, a future that has already arrived, they will find themselves with the credibility to also make the case for increasing budgets and increasingly robust space exploration initiatives as well.

Kathleen M. Connell is a Principal of The Connell Whittaker Group LLC, and a former Policy Director of the Aerospace States Association. She is an advocate for space solutions of benefit to humanity. She lives in San Diego, California.



- Posted using BlogPress mobile by Kathleen Connell

New Study: World Without Marine Life Could Be Climate Consequence

At Risk: Marine life extinction

Source: climateprogress.org

Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred
Unrestricted burning of fossil fuels threatens a new wave of die-offs
February 18, 2010
Marine life face some of the worst impacts. We now know that global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

The acidification of the ocean in particular is a grave threat — for links to primary sources and recent studies, see “Imagine a World without Fish: Deadly ocean acidification — hard to deny, harder to geo-engineer, but not hard to stop” (and below).

A new Nature Geoscience study, “Past constraints on the vulnerability of marine calcifiers to massive carbon dioxide release” (subs. req’d) provides a truly ominous warning. The release from the researchers at the University of Bristol is “Rate of ocean acidification the fastest in 65 million years.”

I am reprinting below a piece by award-winning science journalist Carl Zimmer published this week by Yale environment360, which explains ocean acidification and what this important study says:

The JOIDES Resolution looks like a bizarre hybrid of an oil rig and a cargo ship. It is, in fact, a research vessel that ocean scientists use to dig up sediment from the sea floor. In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul.

They had drilled down into sediment that had formed on the sea floor over the course of millions of years. The oldest sediment in the drill was white. It had been formed by the calcium carbonate shells of single-celled organisms — the same kind of material that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. But when the scientists examined the sediment that had formed 55 million years ago, the color changed in a geological blink of an eye.

“In the middle of this white sediment, there’s this big plug of red clay,” says Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol.

In other words, the vast clouds of shelled creatures in the deep oceans had virtually disappeared. Many scientists now agree that this change was caused by a drastic drop of the ocean’s pH level. The seawater became so corrosive that it ate away at the shells, along with other species with calcium carbonate in their bodies. It took hundreds of thousands of years for the oceans to recover from this crisis, and for the sea floor to turn from red back to white.

The clay that the crew of the JOIDES Resolution dredged up may be an ominous warning of what the future has in store. By spewing carbon dioxide into the air, we are now once again making the oceans more acidic.

Today, Ridgwell and Daniela Schmidt, also of the University of Bristol, are publishing a study in the journal Nature Geoscience, comparing what happened in the oceans 55 million years ago to what the oceans are

experiencing today. Their research supports what other researchers have long suspected: The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimate that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean.

“This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” says Ridgwell.

When we humans burn fossil fuels, we pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where the gas traps heat. But much of that carbon dioxide does not stay in the air. Instead, it gets sucked into the oceans. If not for the oceans, climate scientists believe that the planet would be much warmer than it is today. Even with the oceans’ massive uptake of CO2, the past decade was still the warmest since modern record-keeping began. But storing carbon dioxide in the oceans may come at a steep cost: It changes the chemistry of seawater.

At the ocean’s surface, seawater typically has a pH of about 8 to 8.3 pH units. For comparison, the pH of pure water is 7, and stomach acid is around 2. The pH level of a liquid is determined by how many positively charged hydrogen atoms are floating around in it. The more hydrogen ions, the lower the pH. When carbon dioxide enters the ocean, it lowers the pH by reacting with water.

The carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has lowered the ocean pH level by .1. That may seem tiny, but it’s not. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning that there are 10 times more hydrogen ions in a pH 5 liquid than one at pH 6, and 100 times more than pH 7. As a result, a drop of just .1 pH units means that the concentration of hydrogen ions in the ocean has gone up by about 30 percent in the past two centuries.

To see how ocean acidification is going to affect life in the ocean, scientists have run laboratory experiments in which they rear organisms at different pH levels. The results have been worrying — particularly for species that build skeletons out of calcium carbonate, such as corals and amoeba-like organisms called foraminifera. The extra hydrogen in low-pH seawater reacts with calcium carbonate, turning it into other compounds that animals can’t use to build their shells.

These results are worrisome, not just for the particular species the scientists study, but for the ecosystems in which they live. Some of these vulnerable species are crucial for entire ecosystems in the ocean. Small shell-building organisms are food for invertebrates, such as mollusks and small fish, which in turn are food for larger predators. Coral reefs create an underwater rain forest, cradling a quarter of the ocean’s biodiversity.

But on their own, lab experiments lasting for a few days or weeks may not tell scientists how ocean acidification will affect the entire planet. “It’s not obvious what these mean in the real world,” says Ridgwell.

One way to get more information is to look at the history of the oceans themselves, which is what Ridgwell and Schmidt have done in their new study. At first glance, that history might suggest we have nothing to worry about. A hundred million years ago, there was over five times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean was .8 pH units lower. Yet there was plenty of calcium carbonate for foraminifera and other species. It was during this period, in fact, that shell-building marine organisms produced the limestone formations that would eventually become the White Cliffs of Dover.

But there’s a crucial difference between the Earth 100 million years ago and today. Back then, carbon dioxide concentrations changed very slowly over millions of years. Those slow changes triggered other slow changes in the Earth’s chemistry. For example, as the planet warmed from more carbon dioxide, the increased rainfall carried more minerals from the mountains into the ocean, where they could alter the chemistry of the sea water. Even at low pH, the ocean contains enough dissolved calcium carbonate for corals and other species to survive.

Today, however, we are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a rate rarely seen in the history of our planet. The planet’s weathering feedbacks won’t be able to compensate for the sudden drop in pH for hundreds of thousands of years.

Scientists have been scouring the fossil record for periods of history that might offer clues to how the planet will respond to the current carbon jolt. They’ve found that 55 million years ago, the Earth went through a similar change. Lee Kump of Penn State and his colleagues have estimated that roughly 6.8 trillion tons of carbon entered the Earth’s atmosphere over about 10,000 years.

Nobody can say for sure what unleashed all that carbon, but it appeared to have had a drastic effect on the climate. Temperatures rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius (9 to 16 Fahrenheit). Many deep-water species became extinct, possibly as the pH of the deep ocean became too low for them to survive.

But this ancient catastrophe (known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM) was not a perfect prequel to what’s happening on Earth today. The temperature was warmer before the carbon bomb went off, and the pH of the oceans was lower. The arrangement of the continents was also different. The winds blew in different patterns as a result, driving the oceans in different directions. All these factors make a big difference on the effect of ocean acidification. For example, the effect that low pH has on skeleton-building organisms depends on the pressure and temperature of the ocean. Below a certain depth in the ocean, the water becomes so cold and the pressure so high that there’s no calcium carbonate left for shell-building organisms. That threshold is known as the saturation horizon.

To make a meaningful comparison between the PETM and today, Ridgwell and Schmidt built large-scale simulations of the ocean at both points of time. They created a virtual version of the Earth 55 million years ago and let the simulation run until it reached a stable state. The pH level of their simulated ocean fell within the range of estimates of the pH of the actual ocean 55 millions years ago. They then built a version of the modern Earth, with today’s arrangements of continents, average temperature, and other variables. They let the modern world reach a stable state and then checked the pH of the ocean. Once again, it matched the real pH found in the oceans today.

Ridgwell and Schmidt then jolted both of these simulated oceans with massive injections of carbon dioxide. They added 6.8 trillion tons of carbon over 10,000 years to their PETM world. Using conservative projections of future carbon emissions, they added 2.1 trillion tons of carbon over just a few centuries to their modern world. Ridgwell and Schmidt then used the model to estimate how easily carbonate would dissolve at different depths of the ocean.

The results were strikingly different. Ridgwell and Schmidt found that ocean acidification is happening about ten times faster today than it did 55 million years ago. And while the saturation horizon rose to 1,500 meters 55 million years ago, it will lurch up to 550 meters on average by 2150, according to the model.

The PETM was powerful enough to trigger widespread extinctions in the deep oceans. Today’s faster, bigger changes to the ocean may well bring a new wave of extinctions. Paleontologists haven’t found signs of major extinctions of corals or other carbonate-based species in surface waters around PETM. But since today’s ocean acidification is so much stronger, it may affect life in shallow water as well. “We can’t say things for sure about impacts on ecosystems, but there is a lot of cause for concern,” says Ridgwell.

Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University, says that the new paper “is highly significant to our ideas on ocean acidification.” But she points out that life in the ocean was buffeted by more than just a falling pH. “I’m not convinced it’s the whole answer,” she says. The ocean’s temperature rose and oxygen levels dropped. Together, all these changes had complex effects on the ocean’s biology 55 million years ago. Scientists now have to determine what sort of combined effect they will have on the ocean in the future.

Our carbon-fueled civilization is affecting life everywhere on Earth, according to the work of scientists like Ridgwell — even life that dwells thousands of feet underwater. “The reach of our actions can really be quite global,” says Ridgwell. It’s entirely possible that the ocean sediments that form in the next few centuries will change from the white of calcium carbonate back to red clay, as ocean acidification wipes out deep-sea ecosystems.

“It will give people hundreds of millions of years from now something to identify our civilization by,” says Ridgwell.

And for completeness’ sake, here’s more background on ocean acidification (which regular CP readers can skip). You can watch NOAA administrator Lubchenco give a demonstration of the science of ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification must be a core climate message, since it is hard to deny and impervious to the delusion that geoengineering is the silver bullet. Indeed, a major 2009 study GRL study, “Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization” (subs. req’d), concluded:

The results of this paper support the view that climate engineering will not resolve the problem of ocean acidification, and that therefore deep and rapid cuts in CO2 emissions are likely to be the most effective strategy to avoid environmental damage from future ocean acidification.

If you want to understand ocean acidification better, see this BBC story, which explains:


Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says.

Or see this Science magazine study, “Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive “Acidified” Water onto the Continental Shelf” (subs. req’), which found

Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification. Other continental shelf regions may also be impacted where anthropogenic CO2-enriched water is being upwelled onto the shelf.

Or listen to the Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, which warns:


The world’s oceans are becoming more acid, with potentially devastating consequences for corals and the marine organisms that build reefs and provide much of the Earth’s breathable oxygen.

The acidity is caused by the gradual buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, dissolving into the oceans. Scientists fear it could be lethal for animals with chalky skeletons which make up more than a third of the planet’s marine life….

Corals and plankton with chalky skeletons are at the base of the marine food web. They rely on sea water saturated with calcium carbonate to form their skeletons. However, as acidity intensifies, the saturation declines, making it harder for the animals to form their skeletal structures (calcify).

“Analysis of coral cores shows a steady drop in calcification over the last 20 years,” says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of CoECRS and the University of Queensland. “There’s not much debate about how it happens: put more CO2 into the air above and it dissolves into the oceans.

“When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” (Atmospheric CO2 levels are presently 385 ppm, up from 305 in 1960.)

I’d like to see an analysis of what happens when you get to 850 to 1000+ ppm because that is where we’re headed (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

In June, dozens of Academies of Science, including ours and China’s, issued a joint statement on ocean acidification, warned “Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions dependent on fish protein, and human health and wellbeing” and “Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years.” They conclude:

Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. To avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems, deep and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions by at least 50% by 2050, and much more thereafter are needed.

We, the academies of science working through the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), call on world leaders to:

• Acknowledge that ocean acidification is a direct and real consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is already having an effect at current concentrations, and is likely to cause grave harm to important marine ecosystems as CO2 concentrations reach 450 ppm and above;

• Recognise that reducing the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere is the only practicable solution to mitigating ocean acidification;

• Within the context of the UNFCCC negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen 2009, recognise the direct threats posed by increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions to the oceans and therefore society, and take action to mitigate this threat;

• Implement action to reduce global CO2 emissions by at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 and continue to reduce them thereafter.

If we want to save life in the oceans — and save ourselves, since we depend on that life — the time to start slashing carbon dioxide emissions is now."

NAS: Near Term Emissions Could Lock In Climate Change for Centuries or Longer

From the National Research Council, a new and important report. Click above for the entire document.

"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEAR-TERM EMISSIONS CHOICES COULD LOCK IN CLIMATE CHANGES FOR CENTURIES TO MILLENNIA ; REPORT ESTIMATES IMPACTS FROM VARIOUS LEVELS OF WARMING WASHINGTON - Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia, says a new report from the National Research Council. Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe. Policy choices about emissions can be informed by recent advances in climate research that quantify the relationships between atmospheric CO2 and warming levels, and between warming levels and future impacts. Drawing upon this research, the report estimates changes in precipitation, streamflow, wildfires, crop yields, and sea level rise that can be expected with different degrees of warming. It also estimates the average temperature increases that would be likely if CO2 were stabilized in the atmosphere at various target levels. However, the report does not recommend any particular stabilization target, noting that choosing among different targets is a policy choice rather than strictly a scientific one because of questions of values regarding how much risk or damage to people or to nature might be considered too much.

Increased Confidence About Future Impacts
Although some important future effects of climate change are difficult to quantify, there is now increased confidence in how global warming of various levels would relate to several key impacts, says the report. It lists some of these impacts per degree Celsius (or per 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming, for example (these apply for 1 C to 4 C of warming):

* 5 percent to 10 percent less total rain in southwest North America, the Mediterranean, and southern Africa per degree Celsius of warming.
* 5 percent to 10 percent less streamflow in some river basins, including the Arkansas and Rio Grande, per degree Celsius of warming.
* 5 percent to 15 percent lower yields of some crops, including U.S. and African corn and Indian wheat, per degree Celsius of warming.

While total rain is expected to decrease in some areas, more of the rain that does occur is expected to occur in heavy falls in most land areas (3 percent to 10 percent more heavy rain per degree Celsius). In addition, warming of 1C to 2 C (1.8 F to 3.6 F) could be expected to lead to a twofold to fourfold increase per degree in the area burned by wildfire in parts of western North America, the report says. Warming of 3 C (5.4 F) would put many millions more people at risk of coastal flooding and lead to the loss of about 250,000 square km of wetlands and drylands. And warming of 4 C (7.2 F) would lead to far warmer summers; about nine out of 10 summers would be warmer than the warmest ever experienced during the last decades of the 20th century over nearly all land areas.

Stabilizing Atmospheric CO2 Requires Deep Emissions Cuts
Currently the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 390 parts per million volume (ppmv), the highest level in at least 800,000 years. Depending on emissions rates, that level could double or nearly triple by the end of the century, greatly amplifying future human impacts on climate, the report says.

Because the amount of human-caused CO2 emissions already far exceeds the amount that can be removed through natural carbon "sinks" such as oceans, keeping emissions rates the same will not stabilize the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if emissions held steady, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would increase, much like the water level in a bathtub when water is coming in faster than it is draining. Emissions reductions larger than about 80 percent, relative to whatever peak global emissions rate may be reached, would be required to approximately stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations for a century or so at any chosen target level.

Further, stabilizing atmospheric concentrations does not mean that temperatures will stabilize immediately. Warming that occurs in response to a given increase in the CO2 concentration is only about half the total warming that will ultimately occur. For example, if the CO2 concentration stabilizes at 550 ppmv, the Earth would warm about 1.6 C on the way to that level; but even after the CO2 level stabilizes, the warming would continue to grow in the following decades and centuries, reaching a best-estimate global "equilibrium" warming of about 3 C (5.4 F). Waiting to observe impacts before choosing a stabilization target would therefore imply a lock-in to about twice as much eventual crop loss, rainfall changes, and other impacts that increase with warming.

The report offers likely ranges and best estimates of the equilibrium warming that can be expected from various levels of CO2 in the atmosphere: Table 1: Relationship of Atmospheric Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide to Temperature

The report was sponsored by the Energy Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are independent, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under an 1863 congressional charter. Committee members, who serve pro bono as volunteers, are chosen by the Academies for each study based on their expertise and experience and must satisfy the Academies' conflict-of-interest standards. The resulting consensus reports undergo external peer review before completion. For more information, visit http://national-academies.org/studycommitteprocess.pdf.

A committee roster follows.

Copies of Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia are available from the National Academies Press; tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at http://www.nap.edu . Reporters may obtain a copy from the Office of News and Public Information (contacts listed above). # # # [ This news release and report are available at http://national-academies.org ]

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL Division on Earth and Life Studies
Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate
Committee on Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations Susan Solomon* (chair)
Senior Scientist
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Boulder, Colo. David S. Battisti
Tamaki Endowed Chair
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
University of Washington
Seattle Scott C. Doney
Senior Scientist
Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole, Mass. Katharine Hayhoe
Research Associate Professor
Department of Geosciences
Texas Tech University
Lubbock Isaac M. Held*
Senior Scientist
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Princeton, N.J. Dennis P. Lettenmaier
Robert and Irene Sylvester Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle David Lobell
Assistant Professor
Program on Food Security and Environment
Stanford University
Stanford, Calif. Damon Matthews
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography, Planning and Environment
Concordia University
Montreal Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
Professor
Department of Geophysical Sciences
Hinds Geological Laboratory
University of Chicago
Chicago Marilyn Raphael
Professor
Department of Geography
University of California
Los Angeles Richard Richels
Senior Technical Executive
Electric Power Research Institute Inc.
Washington, D.C. Terry L. Root
Professor
Center for Environmental Science and Policy
Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Stanford, Calif. Konrad Steffen
Professor
Cooperative Institute for Environmental Research
University of Colorado
Boulder Claudia Tebaldi
Research Scientist
Adjunct Professor
University of British Columbia-Vancouver
British Columbia, Canada Gary W. Yohe
Woodhouse/Sysco Professor
Department of Economics
Wesleyan University
Middletown, Conn.
STAFF
Toby M. Warden
Study Director

* Member, National Academy of Sciences"
 

The One Machine...Kevin Kelly

The One Machine has arrived, and "The One is us."  Kelly talked about this at TED awhile back, and it merits a review. Key concepts herein include:
-The convergence of the atomic and the digital.
-Embodiment within the Cloud.
-Exceeding the capacity and power of the human brain by many times.
-Total personalization requires total transparency.
See the vid for Kelly's view of the next 5,000 days of the web, which will not just be the current web, "only better."
My question for Kelly...beyond modeling and social sharing of information, how can the One Machine preserve the natural world, and move us away from global warming?

Ernst & Young Says Smart Money Moving To Cut Carbon

 So what is smart money doing these days? Getting on the new carbon reduction train, a new study shows. Some industrial wave companies, however, are investing their dollars to the contrary.  Examples include Valero and other oil companies, which are spending investment dollars trying to kill California's future-oriented and  carbon-capping AB 32.

Source: Fast Company.com
A new survey from the Big Four accounting firm shows that more than two thirds of major corporations globally plan to spend up to 5% of their revenues on carbon cutting initiatives over the next two years. For a company with $1 billion a year in revenues (the minimum sized company in the survey) is that just a $50 million charitable donation? Hardly -- the shrewd executives surveyed plan to make a lot of money from those investments.
Many report they will invest in energy efficiency measures that also cut carbon, which are quickly repaid from savings on energy bills and generate handsome ROIs thereafter. Others, especially in the auto, consumer products, and technology sectors, report a significant competitive advantage with customers by lowering carbon footprints. Think of how Ford, Walmart, and Apple are already proving that thesis in the marketplace, for example.

The survey also uncovered that analysts are now often linking a company’s approach to cutting carbon and it’s valuation. That inspires execs to push for carbon reductions within their supply chain too, in part because the reduction of waste means lower costs in finished goods and higher margins for those Wall Street analysts to admire. This data suggests a tipping point - - the majority of companies and consumers are now cutting carbon (well ahead of government regulation, by the way). 

So if smart money is moving to reduce carbon, what spending is taking companies in the opposite direction?  Full Story

NASA Launches Earth Venture Missions

I am glad to see NASA is engaging in new airborne earth studies. Disaster assessment, such as the impact of the Gulf BP oil gusher on the coast, would also be a worthy area of study.

Source: ScienceDaily.com

"Hurricanes, air quality and Arctic ecosystems are among the research areas to be investigated during the next five years by new NASA airborne science missions announced recently.

---

The five competitively-selected proposals, including one from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are the first investigations in the new Venture-class series of low-to-moderate-cost projects established last year.
The Earth Venture missions are part of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program. The small, targeted science investigations complement NASA's larger research missions. In 2007, the National Research Council recommended that NASA undertake these types of regularly solicited, quick-turnaround projects.
This year's selections are all airborne investigations. Future Venture proposals may include small, dedicated spacecraft and instruments flown on other spacecraft.
"I'm thrilled to be able to welcome these new principal investigators into NASA's Earth Venture series," said Edward Weiler, associate administrator of the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington."

Historic: Venter Creates First Synthetic Cell

                              Colonies of the transformed Mycoplasma mycoides bacterium. 
Image Credit: J. Craig Venter Institute.


Once verified this claim changes everything in both Green fuels and biology!



Source: Connect.org San Diego, California


J. Craig Venter Institute scientists create first synthetic cell
CONNECT was notified last evening by Dr. Venter that his research team has created the first living cell from synthetic materials. Said CONNECT CEO, Duane Roth after receiving the call, "This is a staggering scientific accomplishment and offers great potential for addressing major environmental and health issues. This research was carefully carried out under independent ethical review over the last decade, and will appear in an upcoming print issue of Science. You will read and hear more on this in the weeks and years ahead, but congratulations to Craig and his team. It is wonderful to have them in our community."

J. Craig Venter Institute press release
Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization, published results today describing the successful construction of the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. The team synthesized the 1.08 million base pair chromosome of a modified Mycoplasma mycoides genome. The synthetic cell is called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 and is the proof of principle that genomes can be designed in the computer, chemically made in the laboratory and transplanted into a recipient cell to produce a new self-replicating cell controlled only by the synthetic genome. This research will be published by Daniel Gibson et al in the May 20th edition of Science Express and will appear in an upcoming print issue of Science.

Friendly Fire: Redford, Gore, Boxer Press White House, BP: BREAKING...Friedman Speaks in NYT

Note: Earlier today MTH published the post below about White House friends becoming a chorus, calling on Obama to do more in response to the Gulf disaster around clean energy in the country. Now Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, has chimed in, calling the Gulf "Obama's 9/11." With friends like these...Says Friedman:


I say that not because I endorse the dishonest conservative critique that the gulf oil spill is somehow Obama’s Katrina and that he is displaying the same kind of incompetence that George W. Bush did after that hurricane. To the contrary, Obama’s team has done a good job coordinating the cleanup so far. The president has been on top of it from the start.
No, the gulf oil spill is not Obama’s Katrina. It’s his 9/11 — and it is disappointing to see him making the same mistake George W. Bush made with his 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.  More...


Potent allies of President Obama are now speaking up and taking action on the Gulf disaster and clean energy leadership. Legendary environmentalist Robert Redford  has forcefully called on Obama to lead on clean energy, in the wake of the Gulf oil disaster. Redford is articulating what many DC watchers and Green thought leaders are feeling angst about. There is a perception and reality around  deflection and lack of White House and Congressional action in both the Gulf response and in clean, safe energy leadership.  MTH wonders why a large Navy flotilla has not been called on to speed to the area with scientists and other deep sea capabilities to address and assess the issues, and lend BP a hand. Letting BP run the show, with only the Coast Guard and NOAA as government on-site managers, is not a full government press to stop the damage of what external scientists estimated with NPR is an enormous gusher. A gusher perhaps ten times larger than what NOAA estimated.

Other Green leaders are stepping up with synergistic messages, such as Al Gore's I Demand To Know How Much Oil Is Being Spilled campaign, launched on Face Book yesterday.  Pressure from Obama friendlies is also coming from the Senate, where Barbara Boxer and other Senators have called for criminal investigations and charges against BP.

The criminal act? Boxer, (AP and Christian Science Monitor)...who chairs the environment panel, said that operators of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig did not appear to have required equipment and technology needed to respond to the spill, which has dumped millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico.

Our question at MTH: how can a company  under criminal investigation oversee the oil gusher mitigation and clean-up? Assuming a clean-up is possible...

Source:  www.nrdc.org
Robert Redford's Public Statement:
Thursday, May 20, 2010, marks one month since BP's oil rig exploded off the Gulf Coast, killing 11 people and unleashing one of the worst environmental disasters our nation has ever seen.
Since then, millions of gallons of oil have gushed into the ocean, poisoning marine life and threatening hundreds of miles of coastal waters, beaches and estuaries from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Florida Keys.
This is the clearest picture we could have of our failed national energy policy, which extends over many decades and administrations. Yet, shockingly, our elected officials in the Senate continue to drag their feet on enacting the policies that would bring the real change we need to shift our country from dirty to clean energy sources, while creating jobs and cutting our dependence on oil.
This oil disaster is threatening marine life and habitat in a region that accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. production of shrimp and oysters, as well as millions of pounds each year of red snapper, grouper, bluefin tuna, and other fish. Fishing has been shut down from the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle -- an area of 46,000 square miles, or roughly the size of the state of Pennsylvania. These closures are devastating to thousands of Gulf Coast families who depend on this bounty for their livelihood. Many of these people are still reeling from the trauma of Hurricane Katrina five years ago.
I am glad that President Obama announced that he would appoint an independent commission to look at the causes of the blowout and determine what we must do to prevent this from ever happening again. This is an important first step in addressing the national tragedy and coming up with real solutions to prevent future drilling disasters.
But it is not enough.
Right now, the Senate has legislation on the table that would help move us in a new direction and put America back in control of its energy future. The American Power Act, drafted by Senators Kerry and Lieberman, is not perfect -- but it is a significant step toward cutting our dependence on fossil fuels, limiting carbon pollution, and encouraging businesses to shift to clean energy sources.
Unfortunately, the full Senate continues to stall -- weighed down by too much infighting and too many special interests. That's why we need the president to assert his voice and leadership by letting the Senate -- and the American people -- know that he is serious about getting clean energy and climate legislation passed this year.
Americans want action. It is time for President Obama to use the power of his office to make sure we clean up this mess, and get America on a path to cleaner, safer energy.
In order to help get this message out, I've just recorded a new hard-hitting television commercial, produced by my colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calling on President Obama to lead us to a clean energy future.

Saving AB 32 and California's Clean Tech Industry: SASC To Deliberate May 18

Event: May 18th, 6PM. SASC is holding a event on saving AB 32, and the implications of the ballot initiative that strives to roll back this leading emissions legislation in CA. Details below. Join us at CCSE in San Diego. 8690 Balboa Ave, San Diego, CA.

Worst Case May Spill Into Economy

Unless the Gulf gusher is capped soon, the impact on the national economy could result in a double dip recession. Of particular enviro concern is the expected heavy hurricane season, which could stir up the massive muck and push it around the region. The concern is that the Gulf may be dead for a decade or more, and clean up can take that long, or longer. I hope the housing being prepared to cap the seabed leak works, for all of our sake.

http://www.businessinsider.com/david-kotok-125-billion-is-just-the-start-of-the-oil-cleanup-costs-and-a-double-dip-is-now-way-more-likely-2010-5

- Posted using BlogPress mobile by Kathleen

No Place Like Home: Obama's Earth Day Gift to Earth

There is a lot of turmoil over at NASA these days, most of it focused on jobs and rockets, and which state or aerospace company, gets the biggest slice of the NASA human space flight money pie. The retirement of the shuttle, a risky ride to space, is ushering in a new space transportation era, with controversy and dislocation of workers at the traditional big, southern space centers. Space policy is always tumultuous, in my experience in the field, but the last year it has been particularly frothy.

Lost in the noise following the Obama April 15th space speech in Florida, is the most significant and positive change that Obama has wrought at the agency. He has given the agency a massive multi-billion dollar increase in earth sciences research and assets. It appears that Obama's NASA will be prioritizing the study of climate change, and the only intelligent life-bearing planet we  know of.

Just in time, as global warming remains the most important issue on the planetary agenda. Houston, are you listening?

Without NASA and NOAA funded research we probably would not know that we have a problem on the climate front. Oddly NASA, absorbed in rocketry and exploration destinations as it tends to be, does not take the credit that it deserves for sounding the global warming alarm. No doubt new space research will yield new findings that we need to understand the status of climate change around the globe.

Like Dorthy in Oz, NASA may soon discover that when it comes to appropriate exploration priorities, at the moment, there is no place like home.

Source: NPR.com

"NASA, the agency known for exploring space, will be spending a lot more time studying Earth in the next few years.
The Obama administration has proposed a budget for NASA that includes billions of dollars for satellites and other tools to help scientists investigate Earth-bound problems, especially climate change.
That represents a major turnaround for NASA's Earth Science Division, which had been allowed to languish during much of the 2000s.
Back then, the division had so little money it wasn't able to replace aging satellites that monitor things such as polar ice, coastal wetlands, ocean temperatures and chemicals in the atmosphere.
New Administration, New Priorities
But things have changed dramatically since the arrival of the Obama administration, says Edward Weiler, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
"This administration has a clear priority for science in general and Earth science in specific," he says.
And now the White House has unveiled plans to give NASA's Earth science programs $2.4 billion in new money over the next five years. That's an increase of more than 60 percent.
Much of the new money will be spent trying to reinvigorate efforts to determine how fast the Earth's climate is changing, Weiler says.
"We've got to measure how fast the ice is being depleted, how fast carbon dioxide is being added to the atmosphere as opposed to being taken out of it," he says." More...

Green IPO Investments Heat Up

Great Earth Day news for the Green Sector, and a measurable indication that the sustainable economy might be about to take off.


Source: Climate Progress

"Green businesses have responded to a turnaround in stock prices over the past year by planning initial public offerings worth more than three times the amount raised in 2009.

Among them are California-based electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc., Massachusetts-based renewable energy producer Ameresco Inc. and Spanish photovoltaics manufacturer T-Solar Global SA, which have all filed to go public.

Nineteen green businesses plan to raise $9.6 billion through IPOs this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Twelve of them are solar and wind companies.

“There’s renewed appetite for green IPOs,” said Luigi Ferraris, chief financial officer of Enel SpA. The Italian utility hopes to sell a minority stake in Enel Green Power this year for $5.4 billion, which would be Europe’s largest offering since 2007.

Analysts say the surge in IPOs has resulted from higher stock prices. The MSCI World Index, which tracks equities in developed countries, has risen by 80 percent since March 2009.

“Investment bankers are out there soliciting business,” said Nigel Meir, a fund manager at London-based Ludgate Environmental Fund. “The green sector has a lot of forward propulsion”.


- Posted using BlogPress mobile by Kathleen Connell

Will John Kerry, Senate Climate Bill Fuel More Green Jobs?

John Kerry and his Senate collaborators will unveil the Senate Climate bill shortly, after the spring congressional recess, which ends April 12th. While the new jobs created last month are green shoots in a barren economic landscape, the fact remains that by all accounts the US shed 8 million jobs during the long recession. How to add millions of jobs back to the US economy? Kerry claims he can do just that. According to his website:

The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S.1733) will get tough on corporate pollution and put American ingenuity to work to dramatically improve every facet of the way America generates and uses energy. It will create millions of new, good-paying jobs, protect our air and water from dangerous pollution, and secure our children's future by making America more energy independent. And it does not raise the federal deficit by one single dime.

The bill summary also claims this jobs will not be exportable.  (Seek link above for entire case sheet for the bill, and a link to the bill itself). From the case sheet:

"REASSERTING AMERICAN ECONOMIC LEADERSHIP AND COMPETITIVENESS
Fifteen million Americans are out of work today, and the American people are demanding the next great
engine of economic growth.  The solution exists: the clean energy economy.   China and other nations
have put millions of their people to work by investing in their clean energy sectors. This bill is a
superhighway to American prosperity that runs far into this century.   It protects consumers and
businesses large and small, and creates jobs that can’t be shipped overseas."

Consider this simple fact: Every dollar spent on clean energy creates nearly four times as many jobs as
an equal investment in oil and gas.  And the jobs it creates are good‐paying, regionally diverse, and
available to Americans of all educational backgrounds.  By investing in the solar, wind and other
renewable energy sources that will help save the planet, we will also save the economy by developing a
workforce trained for the future. From researchers to roofers, the economic benefits will be broad and
widespread.  
No worker should be left behind. This bill includes targeted protection and robust border measures for
our manufacturing sector to ensure that American companies remain competitive and jobs remain here
at home.  New programs will train workers to succeed in the new energy economy.    Agriculture and
rural America will see a boom in investments in biofuels and alternative energy sources. Low‐ and
moderate‐income families will be protected from price increases through rebates on their electricity
bills, and a market stability fund will limit price volatility."
 
The questions of how these jobs will be created and when they will appear remains to be answered. Any legislation passed should be expedited to address the national economic emergency in progress. Passage and implementation can't be soon enough for the nation's unemployed. Likewise for small and medium cap small business, that actually create jobs, unlike the large cap Fortune 500.

Should Kerry succeed, his failed Presidential race will be forgotten, and his legacy as the Senator who turned America around- to face the future- will be assured.

UnCLEAR: Cap and Trade, CLEAR Share Climate Bill?

What amounts to an obituary for Cap And Trade/The Waxman Markey Bill has appeared in The New York Times, below.  Fred Krupp, of the Environmental Defense Fund and the seminal cap and trade proponent, acknowledges the bill is dead. Senator John Kerry says he does not know what "cap and trade means." Even President Obama calls the Senator Cantwell/Collins alternative bill based around cap and dividend "very elegant." Well, that sounds very much like game over to me. So long Cap And Trade, America hardly knew ye. Or not? It is unclear.

The new, favored and intentionally bipartisan approach is captured in a short 37 page bill, the Carbon Limits And Energy for Renewal bill/the CLEAR Act.  It's based on targeted carbon emissions reductions over time, an auction of carbon credits, and a cash rebate of the auction proceeds back to consumers. AARP, a big lobbying voice that likes to seen as bipartisan, has signed on to CLEAR.

But wait! How does this notice of the demise of Cap and Trade square with a Clean Skies report that John Kerry previewed a Senate bill to industry that contains both concepts? "The bill will include a cap-and-trade system, like the House version, and a cap-and-dividend plan laid out by Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, in the bipartisan Senate CLEAR Act." 


Is the report of the  death of Cap and Trade greatly exaggerated? Stay tuned.
-------------------
‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice

Source: The New York Times

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: March 25, 2010
WASHINGTON — Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change.
Related
·         Times Topic: Cap and Trade
Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it. President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it.
Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it “cap and tax,” and Tea Party followers using it as a symbol of much of what they say is wrong with Washington.
Mr. Obama dropped all mention of cap and trade from his current budget. And the sponsors of a Senate climate bill likely to be introduced in April, now that Congress is moving past health care, dare not speak its name.
“I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means,” Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said last fall in introducing his original climate change plan.
Mr. Kerry’s partner in promoting global warming legislation, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pronounced economywide cap and trade dead last month and has since been working with Mr. Kerry to try to patch together a bill that satisfies the diverse economic, regional and ideological interests of the Senate.
That plan, still being written, will include a cap on greenhouse gas emissions only for utilities, at least at first, with other industries phased in perhaps years later. It is also said to include a modest tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel, accompanied by new incentives for oil and gas drilling, nuclear power plant construction, carbon capture and storage, and renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Why did cap and trade die? The short answer is that it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.
The idea began as a middle-of-the-road Republican plan to unleash the market to reduce power plant pollution and spur innovation. But when lawmakers tried to apply the concept to the far more pervasive problem of carbon dioxide emissions, it ran into gale-force opposition from the oil industry, conservative groups that portrayed it as an economy-killing tax and lawmakers terrified that it would become a bonanza for Wall Street traders and Enron-style manipulators.
“Economywide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who has been promoting the idea for more than two decades. “The term itself became too polarizing and too paralyzing in the effort to win over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans to try to do something about climate change and our oil dependency.”
Cap and trade was first tried on a significant scale 20 years ago under the first Bush administration as a way to address the problem of airborne sulfur dioxide pollution — widely known as acid rain — from coal-burning power plants in the Eastern United States. A limit was imposed on emissions from the plants, and utilities were allowed to buy and sell permits to comply. Today it is considered one of the most effective environmental initiatives.
Environmentalists and industries resurrected the idea in recent years as a centerpiece of measures to address global warming and growing oil imports. Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, built their climate change bill last year in large measure around it.
But in trying to assemble a majority to pass it, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Markey dished out a cornucopia of concessions and exemptions to coal companies, utilities, refiners, heavy industry and agribusinesses. The original simplicity was lost, replaced by a bazaar in which those with the most muscle got the best deals.
Opponents labeled it a tax-and-redistribution scheme.
“We turned it into ‘cap and tax,’ and we turned that into an epithet,” said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization supported by conservative individuals and corporations. “We also did a good job of showing that a bunch of big companies — Goldman Sachs, the oil companies, the big utilities — would get windfall profits because they’d been given free ration coupons.”
C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and a strong advocate of the acid rain cap-and-trade program, said that opponents were largely correct in labeling the Waxman-Markey plan a tax, because so many of the pollution allowances were given away to industry rather than allocated based on past emissions.
“This is potentially a $3 trillion tax,” Mr. Gray said, “which is pretty steep in the best of times, and poison in the worst of times.”
The House narrowly passed the bill last June, but the Senate has moved slowly to take it up. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Graham, along with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, have been trying to find support for a comprehensive measure.
They, too, have been forced to seek compromise, offering incentives to oil drillers, nuclear power advocates, antitax groups, coal companies and utilities.
Two senators, Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, have proposed an alternative that they call cap and dividend, under which licenses to pollute would be auctioned to producers and wholesalers of fossil fuels, with three-quarters of the revenue returned to consumers in monthly checks to cover their higher energy costs.
Ms. Cantwell said that cap and trade had been discredited by the Wall Street crisis, the Enron scandal and the rocky start to a carbon credits trading system in Europe that has been subject to dizzying price fluctuations and widespread fraud.
She said her bill would require every pollution permit to be auctioned rather than given away and was 39 pages long, compared with Waxman-Markey, which weighs in at some 1,400 pages.
The Cantwell-Collins plan is almost exactly what Mr. Obama proposed in the campaign and after first taking office — a 100 percent auction of permits and a large tax rebate to the public.
“He called our bill ‘very elegant,’ ” Ms. Cantwell said. “Simplicity and having something people can understand is important.”

Green Rush Needed: Can Doerr Find Us All A Netscape Moment?

                                            Image: Greentech Media. John Doerr

One of my  favorite Venture Capitalists, John Doerr, is  looking for that  clean tech killer app that startles and then sends the thundering herds of start-ups across the wetland plains of Silicon Valley-that bullish scent, that feverish Valley buzz, the gridlock on highway 101-and  those returns! These signals will be the hallmarks of the coming Green Rush, as it will become known, at least by me, when the clean tech sector really, really arrives in Silicon Valley and in other clean tech clusters in places like San Diego. The race will really be on then, one that creates prosperity again and truly saves civilization and our co-habitating species and oceans. And creates jobs in an American economy that is pushing more and more Americans under.
Greentech Media reports that John is looking for that clean tech "Netscape  moment" that Valley folk remember well as an upstart browser that changed everything in the mid-90's. More after the jump...

American Concern About Global Warming Dips

Source: ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2010) — Public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008, according to the results of a national survey released January 27 by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.

---

The survey found:

• Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease.
• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent.
• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.

In line with these shifting beliefs, there has been an increase in the number of Americans who think global warming will never harm people in the United States or elsewhere or other species.
"Despite growing scientific evidence that global warming will have serious impacts worldwide, public opinion is moving in the opposite direction," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. "Over the past year the United States has experienced rising unemployment, public frustration with Washington and a divisive health care debate, largely pushing climate change out of the news. Meanwhile, a set of emails stolen from climate scientists and used by critics to allege scientific misconduct may have contributed to an erosion of public trust in climate science."
The survey also found lower public trust in a variety of institutions and leaders, including scientists. For example, Americans' trust in the mainstream news media as a reliable source of information about global warming declined by 11 percentage points, television weather reporters by 10 points and scientists by 8 points. They also distrust leaders on both sides of the political fence. Sixty-five percent distrust Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sarah Palin as sources of information, while 53 percent distrust former Democratic Vice President Al Gore and 49 percent distrust President Barack Obama.

Hot Under The Collar In Copenhagen

Image: Irish Times. Rising Sea Level Tempertures On Balloon

Long simmering disparities between developed and lesser developed countries boiled over during the Copenhagen Climate talks this week. I think this shows real issues are being discussed, and a healthy if frank dialog has begun in Denmark.


Source: PBS.org

Tension between rich and poor countries hovered over climate negotiations in Copenhagen Wednesday, as developing nations fumed over the leak of a climate document drafted by Denmark.  The 13-page document, known as the Danish text, was drawn up outside the United Nations framework but the U.N. leader of the summit, Yvo de Boer, downplayed it Wednesday, describing it as an informal paper that circulated as a "basis for discussion."  The Danish text does not detail emissions pledges, but does indicate setting a timeline by which developing countries would peak their emissions, while positioning developed countries to have substantial power over billions of dollars for developing countries to make climate change adaptations and reduce emissions.  The text was called a "serious violation" by the Sudanese ambassador to the Group of 77 developing countries, Lumumba Stanislaus Dia Ping. He told a news conference Wednesday the document was aimed at "preserving and advancing developed countries' economic dominance and supremacy."  "The Empire has always relentlessly and ruthlessly grabbed natural resources," he said, arguing the proposed agreement

White House Plans Job Creation Forum

Video: SanDiegoEarthWeek.com Green Jobs Speaker Paul Hannam Talks About The Green Jobs Sector. Will Green Jobs Be a Focus of the White House Job Forum?

The White House continues to roll out efforts focused on a middle class economic recovery, and announced a Jobs Forum this week. Welcome aboard the Jobs Events movement, Mr. President!
Many folks have been offering Jobs events, and we appreciate the use of the bully pulpit to heighten awareness of the Jobs movement, in particular, the creation of Green Jobs.

For example, last April, Dawn Parker-Waites of SanDiegoLovesGreen.com and I offered one of the first Green Jobs seminars as a part of our SanDiegoEarthWeek.com events-at an affordable $35 per seat-and we were sold out in days. SDNN did a fabulous video piece on the event at the time, embedded above.

Lately, I have been teaching a class on renewable energy at San Diego State University/College of Extended Studies, and many of the adult learners there are in the job hunt/re-career mode. A flood of Green jobs would be a very welcome development. Green jobs offer meaningful employment over and above the paycheck, and combines passion with a purpose united with prosperity creation.

I hope the White House makes jobs, especially Green ones, a top priority for the next 12 months. Unemployment in this Great Recession crosses all income levels, demographics, gender, age, race, sexual orientation and other slices of the population pie. Certainly the White House also understands that small business creates the vast majority of jobs in the U.S.

7 months after our Green Jobs seminar, there are even more job hunters looking for any employment opportunity. A Green Job Stimulus effort is what is needed to now for them, and all of us, in order to pump up an economy showing some signs of life.

Source: CQPolitics.com

"President Obama will host a jobs forum at the White House next month to address concerns that the economic recovery is not putting enough people back to work. The unemployment rate now stands at 10.2 percent, the highest since 1983. Though the economy grew 3.5 percent in the last quarter, economists say it could take many months to whittle down the jobless rate." Full Story at Headline.

White House Ties Middle Class Recovery to Green Retrofit

Image Credit: brianrhitch.blogspot.com/ 2008/03/going-green.html

Vice President Biden rolled out a report and plan connecting Green building retrofit and middle class job creation. Of particular interest is the migration of an Energy Star® type rating to homes which have undergone energy retrofits. This should enable retrofit products in the housing market to stand out, and fetch a better price that those that are not energy efficient. In theory, this should function as a market transformation tactic. The problem of course, is that all of the above requires the financial means, and confidence, of Americans, many of whom are unemployed. Still, the connectivity between home energy performance retrofit and job creation is a valid one, and an industry that is fundamentally domestic, as a retrofit job can not be exported. This notion should also give a boost to the housing industry, which is still in the deep doldrums.

"Develop Energy Performance Label for Homes

When consumers see the ENERGY STAR® label on a dishwasher or a refrigerator, they know they are

getting an energy efficient product and they can take the savings into account as they decide what to

purchase. New homes can qualify for an ENERGY STAR® label but there is no similar label for

existing homes that have undergone retrofits. The Federal Government will develop a home

performance label for existing homes. The label will be based on the national home energy performance

measure described below, and it will be developed in partnership with industry leaders, realtors, and

efficiency advocates to promote widespread adoption. The end result will be an easily recognizable

benchmark that auditors, retrofitters, lenders, realtors, and consumers can use to compare home energy

performance and identify the most efficient homes.

The new home performance label should be accompanied by a national marketing campaign to increase

consumer awareness and expand the demand for home energy retrofits. This campaign should build on

the marketing that Federal Government already does in conjunction with the ENERGY STAR® label on

products and the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® program for whole-home retrofits. The

national marketing campaign will help homeowners find reliable sources of information on how to

improve their homes and quality, skilled contractors to do the work. "

New NASA Research May Show "Runaway" Ice Melt Has Begun

Image Credit: The Antarctic Sun (NSF).
Antarctic "moulin" and melt channel

The most optimistic view about Greenland and Antarctica ice melt is now off the table, and the worst case scenario about accelerating, self-perpetuating ice melt is front and center in climate science, according to science experts, reacting to news about fresh NASA-funded research being published in Nature this week. What does this mean for renewable energy start-ups? Start more companies and faster, would be the logical implication for the sector. This grim piece of science news also argues for serious coastal planning in communities which have not begun the process.

Certainly, all eyes should also turn to enlightened investors and entrepreneurs to field many Green "killer app" innovations, that can accelerate global warming mitigation now. None of this displaces the personal power everyone has to brace for impact and help each other and their communities adapt, adopt renewable energy immediately, get off of carbon based fuels, and embrace personal energy conservation measures.

Existing solutions can not be pushed to the back burner either, and a fast track first step is establishing roof top solar installation on homes and businesses as a top national, state and local priority, regardless of what happens with this sluggish congressional climate bill in the Senate this Fall.

Source: AP

WASHINGTON — New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.

British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That's where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online Thursday in the journal Nature.

Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they've still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 is 50 percent higher than it was from 1995 to 2003.

These new measurements, based on 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, confirm what some of the more pessimistic scientists thought: The melting along the crucial edges of the two major ice sheets is accelerating and is in a self-feeding loop. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.

"To some extent it's a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?" said the study's lead author, Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. "It's more widespread than we previously thought."

The study doesn't answer the crucial question of how much this worsening melt will add to projections of sea level rise from man-made global warming. Some scientists have previously estimated that steady melting of the two ice sheets will add about 3 feet, maybe more, to sea levels by the end of the century. But the ice sheets are so big it would probably take hundreds of years for them to completely disappear.

As scientists watch ice shelves retreat or just plain collapse, some thought the problem could slow or be temporary. The latest measurements eliminate "the most optimistic view," said Penn State University professor Richard Alley, who wasn't part of the study.

The research found that 81 of the 111 Greenland glaciers surveyed are thinning at an accelerating, self-feeding pace...full story at Headline.