I spotted a rare critter on the streets of San Franciscothis week—a smiling, optimistic businessperson.

Then again, Ron Kenedi is in the solar panel business. 

“The big news as I see it is the demand—demand keepsgrowing everywhere,” says Kenedi, vice president of Sharp Solar, the renewableenergy arm of the Japanese conglomerate. “What really amazes me every day ishow much demand has grown throughout the world.”

Kenedi is not one for Pollyannaish optimism—he started inthe business around the time Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solarpanels from the White House roof.

“I used to have to go out there with a sandwich board on toget people interested in solar,” he says. “Now I can’t even walk down thestreet without people talking to me about solar and wanting it on their homeand businesses.”

That’s because there’s a boom in so-called distributedgeneration under way—placing solar panels and pint-sized photovoltaic farms ator near where electricity is consumed.

Until very recently, distributed generation just couldn’tcompete on cost with Big Solar—massive megawatt solar thermal power plantsusually located in the desert.

Big Solar has had the edge by the dint of the gigawatt-sizedeals utilities have struck with developers like BrightSource Energy, eSolar,and Solar Millennium. Large solar thermal power plants—which use mirrors toheat liquids to create steam that drives a generator—could make electricitycheaper than photovoltaic panels, which produce electrons when the sun strikessemiconducting materials.

Now that’s all changing. Over the past year, a number of BigSolar thermal projects have become mired in disputes over their impact onfragile desert ecosystems and the lack of transmission lines to connect them tocities. In December, California’s powerful Democratic senator, DianneFeinstein, introducedlegislation to ban renewable energy development on more than a millionacres of the Mojave Desert she wants to protect as national monument.

Photovoltaic module prices, meanwhile, have plummeted by about30 percent over the past year thanks to an oversupply of modules and the riseof low-cost Chinese manufacturers. Thin-film solar companies, which make solarcells that use little or no expensive polysilicon and which layer or print themon glass or metal, began to produce solar modules for less than a one dollar awatt—long considered a key milestone for making solar competitive with fossilfuels. Though less efficient than conventional crystalline solar modules,thin-film solar cells can be manufactured more cheaply, making it particularlysuited for use by photovoltaic power plants.

Distributed solar’s new competitiveness can be seen in aspate of deals and initiatives over the past few weeks as utilities turn tosmall-scale solar to help meet mandates to obtain a growing percentage of theirelectricity from renewable sources. As of today, 1,300 megawatts’ worth of distributed solarwill be installed over the next five years—at peak output those arrays willgenerate as much electricity as a big nuclear power plant.

California regulators two weeks ago approved SouthernCalifornia Edison’s five-year program to install 500 megawatts of solar arrayson commercial rooftops. They also recommended that PG&E, the big NorthernCalifornia utility, be given the go-ahead for its own 500-megawatt distributedsolar program to place small solar farms near substations and cities that canplug directly into the grid.

And both utilities revealed additional distributed solardeals this week. Southern California Edison agreed to buy 50 megawatts fromthree small-scale solar farms to be built by San Francisco’s Recurrent Energyin Kern and San Bernardino Counties in the eastern part of the state.

On Monday, PG&E filed a request that regulators approvea contract with Eurus Energy America, ajoint venture between Tokyo Electric Power and Toyota Tsusho, for 50 megawattsof solar electricity from three power plants to be constructed near Fresno.

“We’re seeing the rest of the industry cotton on to whatwe’ve been saying, distributed solar done at the right size can scale,” saysArno Harris, Recurrent’s chief executive. “Distributed solar is faster onpermitting, on environmental issues, and interconnection to the grid.”

For Sharp Solar, the biggest demand for its thin-film panelscomes from utilities. “That’s what’s opening up the utility sector for Sharp—it’s a very robust market,” says Kenedi.

(And lest you think this is just a California phenomenon,the New York Power Authority last week announced a program toinstall 100 megawatts of photovoltaic panels on rooftops and at ground stationsover the next four years.)

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District showed, just lastmonth, how fast the distributed generation market is growing when it put up 100megawatts of photovoltaic projects up for bid and sold out the allotment in oneweek.

But the shocker of the SMUD deal is that the utility is notpaying a premium for solar electricity, according to Adam Browning, executive directorof Vote Solar, a San Franciscononprofit that promotes renewable energy (and an occasional Grist contributor).

I’ll spare you the utility industry calculus of “timedifferential avoided costs,” but Browning has run the numbers and believes thatSMUD will pay essentially the same price for solar electricity as it would forfossil fuel-generated power when demand peaks. (Solar farms typically supplypeak power as their output coincides with the time of day when demand spikes.)

“The point here is that this is an entirely revenue neutralinvestment for SMUD,” Browning says. “They got solar electricity for what theywould have paid for fossil, which is a significant milestone.”

SMUD officials did not return requests for comment so Icould not verify those numbers with the utility, but given that solardevelopers must put down a deposit of $20 a kilowatt for winning bids—that’s$100,000 for a five-megawatt project—it seems unlikely there were manyspeculators in the bunch willing to walk away from a six-figure commitment.

Truth be told, we’re going to need every kilowatt of greenelectricity we can wring from Big Solar, distributed solar, wind, waves andgeothermal. But the rise of distributed solar generation will help ease theload as well as the environmental pressures from developing other forms ofgreen energy.

Related Links:

Large-scale distributed energy is here: Recurrent Energy signs 50MW power purchase agreement

How innovative financing is changing energy in America

Let the era of solar wholesale distributed generation begin

Yes, the mid-Atlantic region appears headed toward an epic snow storm as “amazing moisture feeds into what is already a gigantic system,” according to the Capital Weather Gang.

But while the anti-science crowd will no doubt tout that as evidencewe aren’t warming — just as they did with the “cold snap” in earlyJanuary — in fact, climate science predicts we will see more extremeprecipitation events year-round as warming puts more moisture into theatmosphere [see Wasthe “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — oran opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?].

Indeed, the January “cold snap” not only didn’t prove the case for(nonexistent) global cooling — it turns out that January was uber-hotaround the globe!  As leading anti-science guy Roy Spencer posted Thursday (including the figure above):

The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010.  This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record….

Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998.

Of course, right now we’re only in a moderate El Nino.  In 97-98, wehad a monster El Nino.  And Spencer doesn’t mention that this record isespecially impressive because we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”

The point is, notwithstanding the all-too-effective disinformationcampaign of the anti-science crowd, it’s getting hotter — thanksprimarily to human emissions.

The satellite record itself clearly shows the long-term warming trend, especially when you remove the stratospheric cooling influences.

You can plot the UAH temperature data yourself:

I’ll blow up relevant part:

Even the supposed record “cold snap” in early January was solocalized that the Earth as a whole was relatively quite hot that firstweek.

While the El Niño has started to weaken, it is still “expected to continue at least into the Northern Hemisphere spring 2010,” according to NOAA.  Barring a major volcano, 2010 remains likely to be the hottest year on record.

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Limbaugh, Fox News suckered by Bin Laden into repeating his disinformation and message of hatred

I don’t normally agree with the uber-conservative American Spectator — and vice versa (see here).   But there is, as they say, a first time for everything.

In a piece titled, “Norm Coleman’s Right-Wing CAP,” their assistant managing editor writes about the Center for American Progress (CAP), where I work:

Another feature that sets CAP apart from the right-wingorganizations is its messaging operation. It was a leader in sendingout a daily briefing and using blogs to disseminate research, which areboth now common practices among think tanks. But it also took theunusual step of hiring professional bloggers to spread its ideas. Joseph Romm, a giant among environmental   experts, blogs for their climateprogess.org. And CAP   hired Matt Yglesias, a prominent young liberal blogger, away from   the Atlantic to blog under their umbrella.

Thanks.  Let me tell you this kind of thing is very helpful around performance evaluation time.

I do, of course, have to correct one mistake here, which long-time readers may spot….

I was not a professional blogger before CAP.  Indeed, I had never blogged before.

It was CAP’s idea for me to blog, and I started very part-time,posting once a day, if you can believe it.  Needless to say, I amrather grateful that they came up with the notion.

If you want to know more about CAP and its competition, I do recommend the Spectator piece and the piece it draws on, the NY Times “G.O.P. Group to Promote Conservative Ideas,” which begins:

A group of prominent Republicans is forming anorganization to develop and market conservative ideas, copying asuccessful Democratic model and hoping to capitalize on thefund-raising and electioneering possibilities opened up by a recentSupreme Court ruling.

The organizers, including former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesotaand Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the senior policy adviser to Senator JohnMcCain’s presidential campaign, describe their emerging American ActionNetwork as a center-right version of the Center for American Progress,the six-year-old group for progressive policies that was founded byJohn Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and aninformal adviser to President Obama….

The conservatives’ policy shop will be headed by Mr. Holtz-Eakin, aformer director of the Congressional Budget Office. In an interviewlast May, he said the Republican Party needed to be “more welcoming ofdifferent ideas.”

Holtz-Eakin is no John Podesta, that’s for sure — although at onetime he agreed with CAP on cap-and-trade back in the good-old-days whenhis boss did (see McCain “might take [new CAFE standards] off the books”):

Cap and trade, Holtz-Eakin said, is the ideal solution by itself…. Asked if this position meant McCain would block implementation of new corporate average fuel economy requirements that President Bush signed into law last December, Holtz-Eakin replied,“He’s not proposing to eliminate those. He simply wants to check astime goes on if they become completely irrelevant. You might want to take them off the books [!!!], but we’re not there yet.”

Seriously.  Well, that qualifies as “different ideas,” though it might take some explaining to the anti-science idealogues.

Steve Benen of Washington Journal explains what is truly bizarre about the rationale offered for this new think tank:

When the idea for the Center for American Progress wasfirst coming together, it was widely apparent to progressive leadersthat the left lacked the intellectual infrastructure of the right.Conservatives already had plenty of think tanks — Heritage Foundation,AEI, Cato, and to a lesser extent, the Family Research Council —churning out right-wing ideas and serving as something of a farm teamfor Republican administrations and congressional leaders. The leftdecided it needed to keep up and create some parallel entities.And nowthe right looks at CAP and thinks, “Hey, we need one of those.”

The creation of this new think tank would seem to be a major slap inthe face of Heritage, AEI, Cato, CEI, and so on — basically saying, youguys just aren’t cutting it in the internet era.

Ho.  Ho.  Ho.

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Anacademic inquiry into the so-called “climategate” email scandal hasconcluded that a well-known U.S. scientist did not directly orindirectly falsify data in his research.

The review, by a panel of senior administrators at PennsylvaniaState University, found no evidence that climatologist Michael Mann hadmanipulated research that indicates humans are causing global warming.

This finding is a big setback for the anti-science crowd, who havebeen going after Mann full throttle, trying to find imaginarywhistleblowers to accuse him and others at Penn State of fraud (see “Anti-science disinformers step up efforts to intimidate and harass climate scientists.”

The anti-scientists hate Mann, one of the country’s leadingclimatologists, for his role in creating the Hockey Stick graph, whichthey still maintain is fraudulent, when in fact it was essentiallyvindicated in a thorough examination by a panel of the National Academyof Sciences (see NAS Report and here).

Even more important than the fact that the original analysis wasdefensibly correct, is that the conclusions were correct [which couldbe true even if the analysis had flaws in it].   Is the planet now ashot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium?  Try two millennia —see “Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years,“ which discusses the PNAS study that is the source of the above graph.

Note that the myth pushed by the anti-science disinformers — thatsomehow the recent warming is merely a rebound from the so-called“little ice age” — has no basis in the data.  We have blown past thetemperatures of the past two millenia.  That’s why climatologist andone-time darling of the contrarians Ken Caldeira said last year, “Totalk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planethas experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

Another study vindicating this conclusion is “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, ’seminal’ study finds,” with this terrific graph I used in my talk yesterday:

There simply is no data to support the notion that the so-called Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon.

The PNAS study found that the Southern Hemisphere also does notappear to show much of a Medieval warm period, based on admittedly muchless data that we have for the NH.  The figures below are from thesupplemental material, comparing the NH reconstruction (top) with theSH reconstruction (middle) — and a total planetary reconstruction isalso thrown in (bottom).

Kevin Grandia at DesmogBlog has more on what the Penn State panel found:

Penn State University has concluded that there is noevidence to substantiate the claims made against climate scientist Dr.Michael Mann surrounding the emails stolen from the Climate ResearchUnit at East Anglia University.

An inquiry panel was set up earlier this year to look atallegations made by right-wing bloggers and media outlets against PennState University climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann, relating to thecontents of emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in London.

On all 4 of the allegations made against Dr. Mann the panel has concluded that there is no evidence to substantiate the claims.

However, the panel has recommended that the allegation that Dr. Mann“engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriouslydeviated from accepted practices within the academic community forproposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarlyactivities,” be further investigated.

Dr. Mann issued a statement today on the findings, saying that:

“I am very pleased that, after a thorough review, theindependent Penn State committee found no evidence to substantiate theallegations against me.

Three of the four allegations have been dismissed completely.Even though no evidence to substantiate the fourth allegation wasfound, the University administrators thought it best to convene aseparate committee of distinguished scientists to resolve any remainingquestions about academic procedures.

This is very much the vindication I expected since I am confident I have done nothing wrong.

I fully support the additional inquiry which may be the best wayto remove any lingering doubts. I intend to cooperate fully in thismatter – as I have since the beginning of the process.”

The full report of the inquiry panel can be found here: Concerning the Allegations of Research Misconduct Against Dr. Michael E. Mann

Mann’s work has been scrutinized by other scientists more than most — and vindicated every time.

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Today, in an extended set of remarks at a town hall meeting in Nashua New Hampshire, the President onceagain strongly endorsed a comprehensive bill that combines energy andclimate policy — and sets a price on carbon:

The concept of incentivizing clean energy so that it’sthe cheaper, more effective kind of energy is one that is proven towork and is actually a market-based approach.

In fact, he went on and on extolling the virtues of putting a price on sulfur trading in the Clean Air Act:

By the way, remember acid rain?  That’s how that gotsolved, was basically what happened — the Clean Air Act slapped a priceon sulfur emissions.  And what ended up happening was all thesecompanies who were saying this was going to be a jobs killer, etcetera, they figured it out.  They figured it out a lot cheaper thananybody expected.  And it turns out now that our trees are okay up herein New Hampshire.  That’s a good thing.  So we should take a lessonfrom the past and not be afraid of the future.

Duh.

While in his professorial mode he did opine as to how some folks onthe Hill want to split out the pricing mechanism and just do the energy:

And it’s conceivable that that’s where the Senate ends up.

Double duh.

But since the media very much wants to declare all of Obama’s majorinitiatives to be dead, dead, dead, that word “conceivable” morphedinto this headline from TalkingPointsMemo of all places:

Obama Acknowledges Senate Unlikely To Adopt Pollution Limits

and that 3:39 pm headline morphed into their 3:42 pm front-page story as

Yes, “conceivable” becomes “likely” because drop-dead certainty.

Interestingly, the URL for TPM’s main story is http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/obama-hints-senate-unlikely-to-adopt-pollution-limits.php— so some TPM editor apparently felt the original overhyped headlinedidn’t do enough  overselling to interest folks zinging around theInternet looking for the most sensational thing to read.

I guess a more accurate headline like

Obama hints Senate might not adopt pollution limits

wouldn’t actually qualify as news, let alone a fully accurate headline like:

Obama restates his strong support for pricing carbon, says it’s ‘conceivable’ that might not happen

It gets better, which is to say worse.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the same remarks — claiming the president said “We may be able to separate these things out. And it’s possible that that’s where the Senate ends up,” whereas the WH transcript says “conceivable.”

In any case, the WSJ had the benefit of the inevitable clarification of the President’s slightly ambiguous remarks:

A White House spokesman downplayed the president’scomments, saying Mr. Obama still favored a bill that would combinemeasures to encourage jobs in green-energy fields with theestablishment of a trading mechanism for emissions.

But the WSJ still ran with the headline:

Obama Retreats From Goal of Cap-Trade Bill

Sad, really.

We saw the same morbidly over-eager over-reaction last week to someambiguous remarks by Sen. Lindsey Graham, which he immediatelycorrected (see Is there going to be a bipartisan climate, energy security, clean air and clean energy jobs bill this year? and LindseyGraham: “The idea of not pricing carbon, in my view, means you’re notserious about energy independence. The odd thing is you’ll never haveenergy independence until you clean up the air, and you’ll never cleanup the air until you price carbon”).

It may well be that the conventional wisdom is correct about thechances for getting a comprehensive bill that prices carbon and cutspollution.  Indeed, such media stories have a way of becomeself-fulfilling.  But there is no excuse for this kind of headlinewriting.

Here are the President’s full remarks.  I think you’ll agree that they are pretty much a lengthy endorsement of pricing carbon:

Well, let me respond by talking more broadly aboutenergy.  First of all, those are such good ideas I’ve already adoptedthem, although I didn’t know they came from you.  (Laughter.)

Number one, we have to invest in innovation and new technologies. There’s no doubt about it.  And by the way, we’ve got to upgrade someold technologies.  I know it’s controversial in some quarters, but ifyou’re serious about dealing with climate change then you’ve got totake a serious look at the nuclear industry.  If you are serious aboutclimate change, you’ve got to figure out is there technology that canallow us to sequester coal and the emissions that are set out.

The reason for that is not just for the United States.  China isbuilding a coal-fired plant once a week, just about –India is doing thesame — because coal is cheap.  And unless we can come up with someenergy alternatives that allow us to franchise that technology so thatthey are equipped to burn that coal cleanly, we’re going to haveproblems no matter what we do in this country when it comes to theenvironment.  So technology is key.  And, by the way, we can makesignificant profits and create huge jobs just upgrading traditionaltechnologies.  Then you’ve got the whole clean energy sector, which isready to take off if we provide the kind of seed capital, the kind ofR&D credits that are necessary.

This past recession almost killed a lot of our homegrown cleanenergy sectors.  And the industry will tell you.  You talk to the windindustry or the solar industry, if we hadn’t passed the Recovery Actand all the support for clean energy, a lot of them would havecompletely gone under and we would have been ceding leadership as wealready have, unfortunately, to a lot of countries like Spain andGermany and Japan that are doing a lot more work on it.  So this is ahuge engine for job creation, and we’ve got to make those investments.

The third thing you said, energy efficiency.  We are one of theleast efficient advanced economies when it comes to energy usage.  Andit’s estimated that we could probably lop off 30 percent of our energyconsumption just on efficiency without changing our lifestylessignificantly.  I say “significantly” because you’d have to startbuying LED batteries or LED light bulbs.  But it’s still a light bulb. You don’t have to sit in the dark.  You don’t have to use gaslanterns.  You just have to make the investment.  And one of the thingsthat a company like ARC Energy is doing is trying to bring down theunit cost for each of those light bulbs.

A school building like this, guarantee you that we could make thisschool probably 10-15-20 percent more energy efficient.  But theproblem is school budgets a lot of times don’t have the money to putthe capital up front to make it more energy efficient.  So are thereways we can help universities and schools and other institutions — moreefficient?  We could retrofit every building in this country that wasbuilt over the last 50 years and get huge increases in energy, hugedecreases in greenhouse gas emissions.  But it requires some seedmoney.  It requires some work.  And that’s why part of our jobs packageis actually — it’s a very simple concept:  Hire people to weatherizehomes that will save those homeowners’ heating bills, or cooling bills,and at the same time put people back to work and train them in thingslike insulation and heating systems.  So there’s a lot of opportunitythere.

Now, here’s the only thing I would say.  The mostcontroversial aspects of the energy debate that we’ve been having — theHouse passed an energy bill and people complained about, well, there’sthis cap and trade thing.  And you just mentioned, let’s do the funstuff before we do the hard stuff.  The only thing I would say about itis this:  We may be able to separate these things out.  And it’sconceivable that that’s where the Senate ends up.  But the concept ofincentivizing clean energy so that it’s the cheaper, more effectivekind of energy is one that is proven to work and is actually amarket-based approach.  A lot of times, people just respond toincentives.  And no matter how good the technology is, the fact of thematter is if you’re not factoring in the soot that’s being put in theatmosphere, coal is going to be cheaper for a very long time.  For theaverage industry, the average company, we can make huge progress onsolar, we can make huge progress on wind, but the unit costs — energycosts that you get from those technologies relative to coal are stillgoing to be pretty substantial.  They’re going to get better, but itmight take 20-30-40 years of technology to get better.

And so the question then is:  Does it make sense for us tostart pricing in the fact that this thing is really bad for theenvironment?  And if we do, then can we do it in a way that doesn’tinvolve some big bureaucracy in a control and command system, but justsays, look, we’re just going to — there’s going to be a price topollution.  And then everybody can adapt and decide which are the —which are the best energies.  And that’s — that’s, by the way, rememberacid rain?  That’s how that got solved, was basically what happened —the Clean Air Act slapped a price on sulfur emissions.  And what endedup happening was all these companies who were saying this was going tobe a jobs killer, et cetera, they figured it out.  They figured it outa lot cheaper than anybody expected.  And it turns out now that ourtrees are okay up here in New Hampshire.  That’s a good thing.  So weshould take a lesson from the past and not be afraid of the future. (Applause.)

Triple duh.

The desperate desire to retain readers through sensational headlinesthat simply don’t match up with the content of their stories — coupledwith a morbid desire to declare dead all things Obama — is yet anothersign of the actual, certified,attending-physician-called-it-so-get-out-of-the-ER-please death of thetraditional media.  Stick a friggin’ fork in it, already!

Memo to TPM:  Please don’t fall prey to this old media syndrome and thereby risk becoming like the pigs at the end of Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” indistinguishable from the humans they once overthrew….

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0

Somewhere on a Hollywood movie set for Groundhog Day, Part 2: BillMurray wakes up to find he’s just lived through the hottest decade onrecord, just as he did in the 1990s, just as he did in the 1980s.  Andhe keeps waking up in the hottest decade on record, until he gains thekind of maturity and wisdom that can only come from doing the same damnthing over and over and over again with no change in the result.  Ah,if only life were like a movie.

Somewhere in PA:  Punxsutawney Phil saw the shadow of unrestricted fossil-fuel pollution from Homo “sapiens” sapiens today.  That means global warming for another six thousand weeks — and then some (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

If we keep listening to the siren song of delay, delay, delay fromthe anti-science crowd, then eventually people aren’t going to gothrough this elaborate charade of wondering whether some large rodent in Pennsylvania can predict the weather — the forecast will always be the same, “bloody hot”:

And, as noted, those scientific projections are simply business-as-usual warming.

Under the plausible worst-case scenario of high emissions, high carbon-cycle feedbacks, marmota monax and homo “sapiens” experience much worse by mid-century (see UKMet Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time tostop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon”):

If we get anywhere near that outcome, I seriously doubt anybody isgoing to care about what Punxsutawney Phil thinks about whether it’sgoing to be an early spring or not.

[And yes, I thought the original Groundhog Day was a great movie, but then, it had a happy ending….]

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I’ve been hospitalized many times with asthma attacks. It’s scary when you can’t catch your breath. When I was young, going to the hospital with asthma was a monthly thing. Now I’m on an adult dose of asthma medicine and the only other way to manage the asthma is to limit my outdoor activities. That’s hard to do at 14. My doctor’s even talking to me about moving away from Houston’s pollution when I go to college.

Those are the words of 14-year-old asthma patient Aaron Smith, who attended the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hearing on its proposed ozone rule in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday with his mother Rosa Smith. The Smith family lives near the Houston refineries.

If those statements by Aaron aren’t enough to make you think about what kind of pollution we’re putting into our air, that’s a shame. Smog, one of the most dangerous forms of air pollution, comes mostly from coal-fired power plants and automobiles and is harmful to human health even at very low levels. Scientists have compared exposure to smog pollution as getting sunburn on the lungs. Smog also blocks the views and harms forests and wildlife in some of our nation’s most special places, like the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains.

During the Bush administration, the EPA convened a group of scientists who recommended stronger national ozone limits, but then they ignored the recommendations of those scientists. Now President Obama’s EPA is back on the job, using on the best scientific information to make sure the Clean Air Act continues to protect public health.

EPA’s proposed National Ambient Air Quality Standard follows the recommendation of its scientists and numerous health groups, setting the limit between 60 and 70 parts per billion of ozone (one of the key ingredients in smog)—and we support the strongest limits of 60 ppb. EPA also has a proposal for a secondary limit to protect the environment. That limit should be set at the lower level of 7 ppm-hours to help ensure that our natural places and the economies that rely on them are protected.

EPA held three public hearings this week on the rule, in Arlington, Va., Houston, Texas, and Sacramento, Calif. There was a fantastic turn-out at each hearing from those who want stronger smog standards, with the overwhelming majority of speakers at all the hearings supporting EPA’s proposed ozone standards.

We teamed up with the American Lung Association and many other excellent health and environmental organizations to turn out the crowds to these hearings. I spoke at our pre-hearing press conference in Arlington on Tuesday, pointing out that burning coal is one of the biggest contributors to smog in the U.S.

We had doctors, scientists, concerned citizens and many parents testifying on behalf of the stronger standard. At the California hearing, environmental justice advocates from the Oakland area spoke out about the pollution and high levels of asthma rates that disproportionately affect the African American communities there, where people are more likely to die—10 years too soon—because of ozone related illnesses. 

And young Aaron Smith in Houston was not alone in the worries about his future. We saw many parents testifying on behalf of their children. High school students and teachers testified at the Sacramento hearing [video].

Check out my post on the Sierra Club Climate Crossroads blog for some great video and photos of the hearings.

Unfortunately, we also saw many from the coal and oil industries testifying against the proposed rule. Yet while the dirty industry spokespeople continued trying to create more roadblocks for clean air, our families and organizers remain positive about cleaning up our air.

“In Texas, we’ve been cleaning up the air for forty years, so we can do this. We’ve done it before,” said Neil Carman, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter Clean Air Program Director, chemist and former Texas state air regulator. “Science tells us that the current smog standards fail to protect the health of millions of Americans. We are very happy to see EPA proposing much-needed protections against ground level ozone.”

Have you submitted your comments yet on this stronger ozone rule? Do it now!

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)On On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill aimed at getting 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar hot water heating systems installed in the U.S. in the next 10 years.

Cleverly titled the “10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act” (PDF), it would provide rebates that cover up to half the cost of new systems, along the lines of incentive programs in California and New Jersey (not coincidentally, Nos. 1 and 2 in installed solar in the U.S.). It also includes measures to insure that those who receive assistance get information on how to make their buildings more energy efficient.

Sanders currently has nine co-sponsors: Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.),  Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).

The bill would accelerate what is already a fairly rapid pace of growth for distributed solar power. Distributed energy has a number of advantages over its central-plant competitors (both clean and dirty): it’s faster to build, avoids the need for expensive transmission lines, can use already developed land, and enhances community resilience and self-reliance. It’s also labor-intensive, creating more jobs per dollar of investment than its competitors—a feature that may make it more attractive during a recession, when Democrats are turning their attention to unemployment.

I chatted with Sen. Sanders about the bill, the growth of solar, and his colleagues’ peculiar fixation on nuclear power:

Q. How much would your program cost?

A. We think this will cost between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year, and at the end of a 10-year period we are going to be producing 30,000 new megawatts of energy—the equivalent of what 30 nuclear power plants produce. This is a very cost effective way of producing that energy.

Q. Even if you take half the price off a solar system, it still has relatively high upfront capital costs. Are you looking into ways for people to find financing?

A. Remember that there are already a lot of tax credits, federal and in many states.  The federal tax credit would be up to 30 percent off the cost of a project. That’s a lot.  Let’s say hypothetically you wanted to spend $40,000 on solar. If you take 30 percent off that, you’re down to $28,000. If you get state help you’re down to $25,000. Then the federal government would pay half of that.

That’s a pretty good deal! It could be a major incentive for people to use photovoltaics. And the more photovoltaics we use, the more will be built; the more that are built, the cheaper it becomes.

Q. What about the objection that it’s a subsidy that advantages some states (the sunny ones) over others?

A. The fact is that every state in this country can produce at least 10 percent of its electricity from solar. [Sanders’ press release cites ISLR’s report on Energy Self-Reliant States.] In Vermont, we’re moving on solar. New Jersey is one of the leading producers of solar energy in America.  It’ll obviously work better in Florida and California—that’s true, and that’s great—but this is for all 50 states.

For people who are complaining about subsidies to energy, well, they’ve got to take a deep breath: huge amounts of money into nuclear, huge amounts of money into coal, huge amounts of money into oil.  It is time that we begin to subsidize those technologies that are cutting greenhouse gas emissions and in the long run will be more cost-effective.

Q. Do you get the sense that your Senate colleagues appreciate the power of renewable energy, particularly distributed renewables?

A. No, they don’t. I’m a member of both the Environment Committee and the Energy Committee, and it just astounds me how little discussion there has been about the potential of sustainable energy in general and solar in particular.  If you go to an Energy Committee meeting, it’s about nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. The general assumption is that nuclear is time-tested, it’s cheap, it’s reliable; solar is experimental, it’s fringe, maybe someday.

Roughly speaking, a new nuclear power plant will cost you about $10 billion. Then at some point you’ve got to decommission it and get rid of the waste—a great expense. The average nuclear power plant will produce about 1,000 megawatts for that $10 billion dollars. We can produce 30,000 megawatts for $30 billion and they’re going to produce it for $300 billion.

Now, theirs is baseload ours is intermittent, that is true. But having said that, our form of production is far more cost effective than nuclear. Have you ever heard anybody talk about that outside of the environmental community? You have not heard that discussion on the floor of the House or the Senate. And the reason you’re not hearing about this is the solar industry doesn’t quite have the clout that the coal industry, the oil industry, or the nuclear industry has.

Now, you asked me [about distributed energy].  We need to push solar, in all of its forms, as aggressively as we can.  I’m not very sympathetic to people who tell us, “If we don’t move aggressively to cut greenhouse gas emissions the world will collapse, but I don’t like wind because a bird got killed.” According to the secretary of the interior, we can produce almost 30 percent of the electricity for homes in this country through solar thermal in the Southwest.  That is extraordinary. We should begin building those things tomorrow.

It’s not a question of either/or. It’s both. It’s those, wind, geothermal, biomass versus coal and oil and nuclear. Our main job is to cut back greenhouse gas emissions in a fundamental way, and to transform our energy system. So people should be putting their shoulders to the wheel.

Q. Is anyone in Congress talking about the barriers to distributed energy posed by America’s complex regime of utility regulations?

A. Yeah, they are. Many of us like what Germany has done—feed-in tariffs. In Vermont, without state regulations, one of our major utilities has unilaterally instituted those with good results. A lot of the utilities are tied into coal and to gas, and they will be resistant. There’s always resistance to change. But I think we have the wind at our backs, or the sun in our faces, or whatever. We are making progress.

Q. What’s the road forward for the bill? Any chance it will be part of the upcoming jobs bill?

A. It’s certainly something I would like to see. In any vehicle, any venue we can get, we’re going to push it.

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Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

In a series of hard-hitting television ads, a liberal veteransadvocacy organization challenges Republican lawmakers for blockingclean energy legislation that would cut oil funds to terrorists. Aspart of a $2 million television ad campaign,VoteVets has released a national spot as well as ones targeting SenateMinority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), and Sen.John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) for their opposition to climate and clean energylegislation. Other ads challenge representatives in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and South Dakota.As the spots point out, each member has taken thousands of dollars fromoil companies that have operations in nations like Iran, Libya, SaudiArabia, Iraq, Nigeria, and Algeria. The national ad explains the connection between our dependence on oil and terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab:

Terrorists. They’re trying to kill Americans at home andour troops abroad. And who’s footing the bill for the attacks againstus? Oil money. Filtered through secret organizations in the Middle Eastand countries like Iran. When oil money hands up in the hands of our enemies, Americans pay the ultimate price.We’ve got to protect ourselves and end our dependence on foreign oil.Tell Congress: Pass the Clean Energy and American Power Act now.

Watch it:

The local spots are unflinching, featuring local veterans of theIraq War. Veteran Benjamin Cossel, of Pine Bluffs, Wy. tells Sen.Barrasso to “decide whose side he’s on”—the terrorist-enabling oilcompanies that have given him $50,500, or the American people:

For thirty years, we’ve been warned about the danger ofspending billions of dollars oil. The United States military calls it amajor threat to our security. And on Christmas Day over Detroit, wewere reminded again how oil money can support terrorism against us. Buteven today, Sen. John Barrasso won’t break our addiction. And he won’tbreak his own. Call Sen. Barrasso. It’s time for him to decide whose side he’s on.

Veteran James Sander of Columbia, Mo. challenges Rep. Blunt for taking$151,000 in oil money and voting against the Waxman-Markey AmericanClean Energy and Security Act:

When a terrorist tried to attack us on Christmas Day, Iwas reminded why I’m willing to risk my life for America’s security andwhy we need to stop sending billions in oil money to countries withties to terrorism. But Congressman Blunt voted against the bipartisanclean energy bill that could cut our dependence in half. And he’s takenthousands from oil companies that do business in countries with ties toterrorism. Congressman: it’s time to put America’s security ahead ofyour own politics.

George Zubaty, of Louisville, KY takes on the minority leader for taking $150,800 in dirty oil cash:

When a terrorist tried to attack us on Christmas Day, Iwas reminded why I’m willing to risk my life for America’s security andwhy we need to stop sending billions in oil money to countries withties to terrorism. But Sen. Mitch McConnell is against against thebipartisan clean energy bill that could cut our dependence in half. Andhe’s taken thousands from oil companies that do business in countrieswith ties to terrorism. Sen. McConnell: it’s time to put America’ssecurity ahead of your own politics.

As the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review noted, “climate change,energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.” Andthe number one link is our deadly dependence on petroleum.

Related Links:

Pentagon: ‘Climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked’

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First things first: President Barack Obamadefended a market-based system to limit the pollution of heat-trappinggases, a core part of his legislative agenda, even as he acknowledgedthe Senate may pursue an energy bill without one. He spoke to a “townhall” meeting in Nashua, N.H., about the potential of Senators removingtechnology-and-jobs legislation from the context of a larger climatebill: “We may be able to separate these things out. And it’s conceivable that that’s where the Senate ends up.”

Unlike last year, the White House’s proposed 2011 budget,which came out Monday, assumes no revenue from a “cap-and-trade”program. In a footnote, the administration says that in the eventrevenues materialize, they should be used in “climate-related purposes”for industry and consumers. The budget eliminates fossil-fuelsubsidies, boosts EPA funding to implement its greenhouse gasregulations, and triples loan guarantees to the nuclear industry, to$54 billion, an olive branch to the GOP that is likely to rankle theleft.

The key Republican in the Senate climate debate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, pushed back at his colleagues who favored an energy-only bill, saying, “If theapproach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that’smoving the ball down the road, forget it with me.”

Washington beyond politics: The DefenseDepartment includes a dense, serious four pages on climate change andenergy security in its 128-page Quadrennial Defense Review [pp 84-88]. Planners write that global warming will challenge the kindsof missions the military will carry out. The authors rely on officialU.S. scientific reports, including the U.S. Global Change ResearchProgram’s 2009 overview,and intelligence sources. The QDR observes that “climate-relatedchanges are already being observed in every region of the world,including the United States and its coastal waters.” Climate change, toDefense planners is “an accelerant of instability or conflict.” Themilitary will also have to adapt to changes along with everyone else: “In 2008, the National Intelligence Council judged that more than 30U.S. military installations were already facing elevated levels of riskfrom rising sea levels.”

Politics beyond Washington: The Quadrennial Defense Review provides a sobering dose of reality tothe political arena, where the driving motivation for strong policy isemployment. And that message faces strong headwinds.

In California, fiscal woe is undermining public support forleadership in climate and environmental policy. A bill to repeal thestate’s climate solutions law, known as A.B. 32, has failed in thelegislature. It would have suspended the law’s implementation, due in2012, until California’s state employment rate falls to 5.5 percent,from the current 12.4 percent. Opponents are pressing for a November public referendum to repeal. Separately, the oil, chemical, and trucking industries are suing California over its low-carbon fuels regulations, which took effectlast month. The suit charges that the state rules violate theconstitution by interfering with interstate trade. The rules, theyargue, discriminate against out-of-state fuel companies.

Internationally, the Guardian concludes from chats with international climate specialists that “a global dealto tackle climate change is all but impossible in 2010,” leaving anuneasy trajectory.  Jan. 31 was the “soft” deadline for nations tosubmit to the UNFCC their emissions reduction commitments or nationalmitigation actions. Fifty-countries complied with the deadline set outin the Copenhagen Accord, including the European Union members. TopU.N. officials who assessed the pledges have expressed concern that the numbers are very unlikelyto meet the political aspiration of keeping global warming limited totwo degrees. The U.S. submitted language similar to what Obama promisedat Copenhagen, a 17 percent emissions cut below 2005 levels in 2020.Europe would reduce 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. China andIndia have pledged reductions in the carbon-intensity of their fuels.

Intergovernmental Panel for Corrections and Clarifications: Twenty-six percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. This unremarkable fact surfaced this week after a Dutch magazine discovered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put 55 percent ofthe land below the threshold in its 2007 report (55 percent of the landis vulnerable to flooding). Finger-pointing ensued. Perhaps the IPCCwas thinking not of the modern Netherlands, but the Batavian Republicof the late 18th century, which was smaller and more concentrated bythe sea?

How can such mistakes be avoided in the future? If you askcryptographers how to reduce the potential for mistakes, they’ll tellyou to publish everything about a cryptographic system publicly. Ifthere are security flaws, some enterprising hacker will find them. Thesame idea applies to Wikipedia, whose quality control is only as goodas its volunteer community gardeners. It’s not a new idea. Attending alivestock exhibition a century ago, the scientist Francis Galton wassurprised to discover that in a contest, no individual accuratelyguessed the weight of an ox, yet the average of more than 800 guesseshit the mark.

If so many of us are interested in helping scrutinize the secondreview draft of the fifth IPCC report, perhaps there is a way to makeit easier for good Samaritan fact-checkers to root out what turn out tobe dumb mistakes. The IPCC is already an openly collaborativework—scientific peer review is the original “crowdsourced” enterprise. And the organization is up front about the process by which it produces its comprehensive reports [pdf]. How can public readers of Web-published drafts strengthen the next final report?

Concerns about a lack of crowdsourcing go to the heart ofaccusations over what, if anything, was wrong or distasteful about thetranche of more than 1,000 e-mail messages hacked out of University ofEast Anglia servers late last year. Yesterday, an ad hoc committee ofPennsylvania State University administrators cleared paleoclimatologistMichael Mann on three of four concerns arising from the UEA e-mails [pdf]:that he made up or falsified data; disregarded protections on otherresearchers; and failed to disclose financial conflicts of interests. Afourth inquiry—“failure to comply with other applicable legalrequirements governing research or other scholarly activities”—will belooked at by a group of faculty members, because the administrativecommittee wasn’t in a proper position to evaluate.

Question of the week: If you’ve read this far down, and do every week, you officially are a friend of the Climate Post. Thank you. Lunch with a couple friends of Climate Post turned on a—perhaps the—centralquestion in talking about this stuff: How (on Earth) can we tellexperiential, photo-friendly stories about a phenomena experienced most confidentlyonly by satellites, digitized ocean buoys, and air-sipping,laser-blasting, carbon-dioxide-molecule counting machines? In the post-Copenhagen world of Waxman-Markey purgatory, what do we talk about when we talk about climate change?

Have you personally experienced global warming? And how do you knowthat, exactly? Let’s hear about it. We can crowdsource the big story embedded inthem.

IPCC, brown-paper cover edition: In a move no one could have foreseen, embattled IPCC chief Rejendra Pachauri last month published a lascivious romance novel, Return to Almora, which he wrote during recent years traveling the world as a celebrity scientist. Full stop.

Related Links:

A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Anti-jobs ‘California Jobs Initiative’ crew threatens suit over name change

Digging into Obama’s 2011 budget on energy and the environment