If you eat, particularly if you eat fruit or nuts, you might be interested in seeing this scientific paper on how global warming and related climate change will have on the trees that are the sources of the fruits and nuts we eat.  Spoiler alert – it isn’t good for them.  Specifically, the paper (to quote the summary) says:

Temperate fruit and nut trees require adequate winter chill to produce economically viable yields. Global warming has the potential to reduce available winter chill and greatly impact crop yields.

One of the co-authors of the paper is on the staff of The Nature Conservancy and they explain the paper in a press release and a detailed blog post.

The story is clear: fighting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not nuts (or a fruitless activity) – it is a deadly serious business that must be undertaken if we are going to save the world as we know it from vanishing.  The many people who depend on these most basic of foods, not to mention the animals and other plant species who depend on them, deserve protection and moving rapidly away from fossil fuels as the foundation of our energy and transportation systems is the only path open before us.

A very smart man once told me to never spread criticism and attacks accidentally in the name of rebutting them.  But sometimes you just have to do it.

An odd item popped up in the tubes of the interwebs recently - an anonymous essay attributed only to the financial website called “TheStreet.com” that (apparently) was never actually distributed on TheStreet.com but rather was posted and distributed through the MSN Money personal finance and investing website.

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CLF is a proud founding member of Renewable Energy New England (RENEW) – a group that brings together renewable energy developers and technology companies with environmental advocates.

In a major milestone in the life of RENEW (a relatively new organization) ISO New England (ISO-NE), the operator of the region’s “bulk” power system and wholesale electricity markets, has elected to perform a regional economic study requested by RENEW.

The RENEW economic study will evaluate how much of the approximately 4,000 megawatts of wind energy projects that have applied to connect to the New England system (the technical phrase is, “in the interconnection queue”) could be developed over the next five years without significant transmission upgrades (that is, building new power lines or supporting hardware) and what the economic impact of making those upgrades would be in order to develop the remaining wind power projects.

ISO-NE performs annual economic studies drawing from requests submitted by stakeholders.  In recent years ISO-NE has undertaken studies at the request of the Governors of the New England states that looked at long-term scenarios for building wind energy resources and transmission for supporting such resources. In the past two years ISO-NE has studied high penetration renewable resource scenarios for the year 2030 in the course of doing a New England Wind Integration Study (NEWIS). RENEW hopes the 2011 study will inform development and transmission upgrade decisions over the next few years as the states work to meet their renewable portfolio standard requirements, address the climate imperative to reduce emissions from the power sector and work to build a new clean economy.

More information on NEWIS and the economy study can be found at the ISO-NE section on the RENEW website.

Special mention and recognition is due to Abigail Krich, the President of Boreas Renewables, transmission consultant to RENEW who was the primary representative of RENEW in the NEWIS process and in the development of the economic study request (and whose material I have shamelessly borrowed from in crafting this blog post).

Throughout human history one overarching story has been that as our society became wealthier we traveled more. The reality that our ancestors generally were born, lived and died in the same place with rare opportunities to “see the world” is hard to deny – so is the reality of our world where it is not unusual to find people walking the streets of our cities who woke up that morning on a different continent and rubbing elbows with masses of people who have lived, gone to school and worked in a wide and complex array of places.

But new academic research is suggesting that the upward surge in travel that has become such a feature of our world may have come to an end.

This could be very similar to well documented phenomena of air pollution rising as a society becomes more wealthy but then reaching a point where the relationship between economic activity (or income) flips -   air pollution increasingly declines as wealth/income rises.  This is know as an “inverted U-Shaped Kuznets curve” by economists (who are almost as poetic when they name things as lawyers).  This analysis suggests that as income rises people collectively take action to reduce pollution.  There is some controversy about applying this principle to pollution that is not as visible and obvious – like the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) that is a major cause of global warming, but some scholars believe that as income and wealth rises that emissions of CO2 drop very suddenly after a critical break point under some conditions.

But the possibility that we may have passed a critical “break point” where travel stops growing would be very good news in terms of slowing and reversing global warming given the critical role of the transportation sector in the emissions of these greenhouse gases – and the major role that travel growth plays in driving (pun intended) such emissions.

These trends are not handed down from above though – whenever we choose to build communities where people can walk, bike or even drive short distances to their offices, schools, stores, friends and families who move our world in a positive direction.  And when we build good transit systems that allow us to move around those communities quickly and cleanly everyone benefits.

Major voices in the New England Fishing community speak up in support of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in this letter to SeafoodSource (a fishing industry website):

The oceans provide food for the world. As fishermen, growers, employers, and participants in the seafood industry, we are gravely concerned about the silent toll that ocean acidification has begun to take on marine resources. Seafood supplies, and our jobs and businesses, depend on healthy oceans.

That’s why we support continuation of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). RGGI helps to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from large power plants in the 10 states from Maryland to Maine.

These emissions don’t just foul the air. They mix into the oceans and increase the acidity of seawater. More than 30 billion tons of CO2 poured from the world’s tailpipes, smokestacks and cleared lands in 2009, mostly from burning coal, oil, and gas. In seawater the CO2 forms carbonic acid. The acid depletes the ocean’s rich soup of nutrients that support shellfish, corals, many plankton species and the marine food webs that underpin the world’s seafood supply.

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Photo credit: puuikibeach, flickr

You know what they say: There’s no such thing as a free refill. This morning, the Boston Globe presented a front-page article about how coffee prices are at an all-time high and will increase further as supplies of what is a vital substance (for me and so many others) continues to decline.

The article comes exactly two months after a March 9 article in the New York Times reported on the scientific evidence that global warming is damaging global coffee production, noting that leading voices in the coffee industry describe the potential for the virtual extinction of Arabica, the bean behind most high-quality coffee.  But the Globe article makes no mention of global warming.

Until the media presents and connects these kind of dots, we will not be able to take the action needed to face this fundamental challenge. Global warming is changing everything – from the coastal communities facing rising sea levels to our farms and forests where fundamental changes are underway.  Until we wake up and smell the coffee (if any is still available) we will not be able to make the move to a cleaner, more efficient society and economy.

When someone offers you a simple answer to a complicated and big problem be very suspicious.

Global warming, the ultimate in complicated and big problems, can only be addressed by deploying a wide array of tools aggressively and with honest awareness of what each tool can and can not do.

Some measures, like reducing energy use through efficiency and conservation or generating electricity from the wind or from sunlight, have a clear pollution reduction effect although measuring that effect and managing those resources to ensure they are as clean, affordable and effective as possible is not simple.

Other resources can best be thought of as being a choice between “less bad options” – a powerful example of this is the discussion of the relative greenhouse gas emissions (when you look at the full life cycle of the fuel and its uses) from coal and natural gas.

A paper by Cornell University Professor Robert Howarth has started a valuable dialogue about this important topic.  For a good discussion of that paper and the responses to it take a look at the New York Times blog post and news story about it as well as coverage in The Hill (a political publication in Washington) – and you can even read the paper for yourself.  MIT’s Technology Review also offers a perspective on this study.

The paper also figured in the Senate Committee hearing about hydraulic fracturing and natural gas held this morning.  If you really have nothing better to do check out the archived webcast.

Is natural gas only half as bad as coal?  Are they comparable? Is in fact gas worse under some circumstances?  These are all important questions but overlay the critical reality that both of these fossil fuels are simply not something we can rely upon in the long term to power our societies and our economies.

The Obama Administration has issued a clear statement opposing the bill that would roll back the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Air Act.  It really speaks for itself so I am just pasting it in below as well as providing a link.

The question for our Senators and Representatives is: will they reject this attack on the public health and the environment? They should stand firm against this bill and underhanded attempts to slip the  same provisions into other legislation, like the budget.

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY

H.R. 910 – Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011

(Rep. Upton, R-MI, and 95 cosponsors)

The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 910, which would halt the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) common-sense steps under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to protect Americans from harmful air pollution.  H.R. 910 would also increase the Nation’s dependence on oil and other fossil fuels as well as contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.

The CAA gives EPA the necessary tools to protect our families from a wide variety of harmful pollutants that cause asthma and lung disease – especially in children.  Weakening these standards would allow more pollution in the air we breathe and threaten the health of Americans across the country.  A recent report by EPA shows how important this landmark law has been in protecting public health.  In 2010 alone, just one part of the CAA prevented:

• 160,000 premature deaths;

• 130,000 heart attacks;

• More than 100,000 hospital visits by preventing millions of cases of respiratory problems, including bronchitis and asthma.  It enhanced productivity by preventing millions of lost workdays, and kept kids healthy and in school, avoiding millions of lost school days due to respiratory illness and other diseases caused or exacerbated by air pollution.

Since 1970, the CAA has reduced key air pollutants that cause smog and particulate pollution by more than 60 percent.  At the same time the economy has more than tripled.  And since the CAA Amendments in 1990, electricity production is up and prices are stable.  In 2009, electric utilities delivered 33 percent more electricity to U.S. households and businesses than in 1990, while nationwide electricity prices remained essentially unchanged.

Over its 40-year span, the benefits of the CAA – in the form of longer lives, healthier kids, greater workforce productivity, and ecosystem protections – outweigh the costs by more than 30 to one.

Passage of H.R. 910 would also block important policy measures that enable the CAA to achieve additional societal benefits related to carbon pollution.  For example, the bill would block EPA’s involvement in the historic, bipartisan Federal program to promote vehicle fuel economy standards for Model Years 2017-2025.  This program will reduce oil consumption, provide significant savings to American consumers at the pump, and limit pollution from tailpipe emissions.  Further, H.R. 910 would second guess the widely-accepted scientific consensus that carbon pollution is at increasingly dangerous concentrations and is contributing to the threat of climate change.  This could create uncertainty around the requirements which are currently in effect for the Model Year 2012-2016 vehicle standards.  Finally, H.R. 910 would contradict public health experts and scientists and strip EPA of its authority to develop sensible standards for currently unchecked carbon pollution, and thus prevent EPA from following its statutory obligations as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

If the President is presented with this legislation, which would seriously roll back the CAA authority, harm Americans’ health by taking away our ability to decrease carbon pollution, and undercut fuel efficiency standards that will save Americans money at the pump while decreasing our dependence on oil, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.

In a tearful April 1st press conference at the Medford, Massachusetts Office of Rep. Ed Markey, House Speaker John Boehner announced that he had changed his mind about climate science and was now in favor of dramatic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“I was listening to NPR the other day, as you know I am a big fan, and I heard this terrifying show about the long term effects of our greenhouse gas emissions and I realized that I have been dead wrong about how to protect my nation, my constituents and my family.” The Speaker then broke down in tears.

More to come . . .