On April 25 and 26, I had the good fortune to participate in parts of the third annual Clean Energy Ministerial (known informally as the CEM), a forum launched by U.S. Energy Secretary Steve Chu in 2010. The initiative brings together energy ministers from most G20 countries, along with a handful of others, to learn lessons from each others’ clean energy efforts, and, critically, to identify places where intergovernmental initiatives could boost the odds of success. One thing that distinguishes the forum from other international initiatives is the integral role that the private sector has played from day one. The first afternoon of the CEM was spent in a series of small public-private dialogues that brought together ministers, regulators, operators, investors, and experts in science and technology to discuss areas ranging from smart financing tools to support energy efficiency investment to integration of variable renewable sources in the grid. Read more »

Prominent climate scientist Ken Caldeira has published an impassioned plea to those who care about climate change in which he essentially says that building (and presumably continuing to operate) any fossil fuel fired power plants is “immoral”. He is particularly upset by support for natural gas as an alternative to coal: if we emit greenhouse gases half as rapidly as we do today”, he points out, “we will wind up in the same place but it will take us twice as long to get there”. Cutting emissions without ditching fossil fuels entirely thus appears to be essentially worthless in his eyes. Read more »

U.S. coal production is down but exports are up. That’s led to widespread warnings that efforts to curb U.S. coal consumption won’t do much if anything to slow climate change unless the United States bans exports too.

That conclusion strikes me as premature. Read more »

Study after study seems to be reaching the same conclusion: abundant natural gas is no solution for climate change. Indeed some scientists, having looked at the numbers, have come to an even harsher conclusion: there is so much unconventional gas in the ground that our only hope for dealing with climate change is to leave it untouched. Read more »

Hardly a month seems to go by without another study that’s touted as showing that natural gas is a dead end when it comes to climate change. First there was the International Energy Agency’s “Golden Age of Gas”, which foresaw global temperatures rising by as much as five degrees centigrade.  Then there was a paper by Tom Wigley in Climatic Change Letters that was released under the banner “Switching From Coal To Gas Would Do Little For Global Climate”. The latest entry in the genre is a paper out a couple weeks ago in Environmental Research Letters, whose abstract concludes: “Conservation, wind, solar, nuclear power, and possibly carbon capture and storage appear to be able to achieve substantial climate benefits in the second half of this century; however, natural gas cannot.” One prominent climate blogger interpreted that bluntly: “Natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere”. Read more »

Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress and Joe Nocera of the New York Times have gotten into quite the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline — and I seem to have gotten caught in the middle. Read more »

I had planned to ignore last week’s awful Wall Street Journal op-ed in which sixteen “concerned scientists”, few of whom do any climate science research, flimsily slammed basic climate science and invented some pretty specious energy economics. But a response from thirty eight climate scientists that the Journal published this week made me think twice. The climate scientists, after making it clear that they speak from relevant authority, rightly slam the “concerned scientists” for using a patina of scientific credibility to substantiate their empty arguments. Then they explain what the vast majority of those who spend their professional lives picking through the data actually believe. Read more »

I argued earlier this week that many were overreacting to the outcome from the Durban climate talks. Trevor Houser, partner at RHG and visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute, posted his own thoughtful take on the talks on the PIIE website. I’m reprinting the last part, which is in part a direct response to my earlier post, with his permission. We’re planning to follow this up with a discussion soon. Read more »

It has become a tradition after the annual United Nations climate negotiations for analysts to lament the dysfunctional nature of the process, and to argue that we’d be better off cutting the talks down to the few countries that really matter. After all, the world’s twenty top greenhouse gas emitters account for north of eighty percent of global emissions. Why bother with all the extra complexity entailed in the UN talks? Read more »