September 27th, 2012 · Comments Off on Office Waste is now on the FBI’s Most Wanted list
Talk about a catchy conference title:
Recycling lands on FBI’s most-wanted list
While it might not go as far as Don’t Mess With Texas, this does allow one one to imagine a crumpled aluminum can on a Post Office poster alongside a mass murderer.
This was the title for the first presentation in the GreenGov panel discussion on “Managing Waste & Recycling Programs”.With presentations from the FBI, Department of the Army, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, this session provided windows on the opportunities, challenges, and results of recycling efforts across multiple federal agencies.
After the fold, notes from the session along with some thoughts:
Arev Yom Kippur … The eve of the Day of Atonement. After the period of reflection and engagement with others between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, this is a moment to turn to internal considerations and the relationship between the individual and G-d.
As part of the prayers for the Day of Atonement, the Vidui, the Al Cheyt or recital of sins, is perhaps the most important. (Modern Judaism being what it is, there are a myriad of translations and modern variations on the Vidui/Al Chet.) A key word: Ashamnu … “we have sinned” is a recognition of individual and communal failures. The Al Cheyt is a recognition and statement about sins by ourselves (and our community) against others, against oneself, against G-d through action … and inaction.
It is clear: one can do wrong through action and words … and one can do wrong through inaction and silence.
And, there is a silence that bears heavily on the heart at this time: the silence in our political leadership and among too many of us on the damage we are doing to the planetary system, the risks of climate change, and the urgent necessity for meaningful change to change our path toward something that enables sustainable prosperity for humanity.
This is Yom Kippur. This is a night for confession. So let us be honest. If ever there was a time for candor, this is it. We humans are not good with limits. We are pushing the planet and its animal resources to the limit. We want what we want when we want it. We pretty much take, hunt, fish, and consume until someone or something stops us or until there is no more to be taken.
Do you remember the Viddui we will be reciting in a few minutes? It’s the Confession prayer that lists our sins alphabetically.
a…b…c…
We abuse. We besmirch. We consume. We destroy. We excuse ourselves. We forget the consequences of our actions. We are greedy.
I could continue through the alphabet, and I should go on because, as the saying goes, although religion ought to comfort the afflicted, religion also needs to afflict the comfortable. And we truly do need to be uncomfortable tonight. Remember an alternate name for Yom Kippur is Yom Ha-Din…the Day of Judgment. This night is meant to be a time for severity.
“a time of severity”. We are living in a time of consequences, a time where humanity’s future (and our own, unless you are on your deathbed, futures) require confronting Inconvenient Truth, and acting in this regard.
The individual matters and we need, for Yom Kippur, to judge ourselves with “severity” — to push our own comfortable ways as to whether we ‘sin’ and damage and harm unknowingly or knowingly.
We, however, live within a society. And, while each of us has a voice and role in that society, there are leaders. And, we expect leaders to show leadership. Truthfully, there is no such thing as that perfect person (take a look and reflect on the Al Cheyt) nor is there such a thing as a perfect leader. But, we should recognize our own faults and seek to change our patterns. And, we should look to our leaders’ faults and seek to help them change for the better.
Most of all, we cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now.
Who said this? Senator Barack Obama in 2007.
Where, however, is President Barack Obama and Presidential-candidate Barack Obama in 2012?
There is no question that President Barack Obama is better on environmental and climate issues than a tea-party ruled Mitt Romney conceivably could be. However, this is an incredibly low bar of judgment.
Even though climate change is an arena of incredibly stark differentiation between the parties (and candidates); even though President Obama’s one-liner about climate change was one of the best received lines during his DNC speech; even though “the future of our planet is at stake”, the silence about climate change from Presidential candidate Barack Obama and Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden is simply deafening.
We sin … we do wrong through action and words. We sin, we do wrong through inaction and silence.
September 25th, 2012 · Comments Off on Exelon exec asserts PTC irrelevant to wind industry prospects
Last week, at the Maryland Clean Energy Center (MCEC)’s annual “summit, Exelon had a major presence. This shouldn’t surprise anyone as with Exelon’s acquisition of Constellation Energy, Exelon became a major player in the Maryland economy and Marylanders’ energy use become a significant portion of the Exelon business portfolio.
With Exelon sponsorship came various visible roles, including a luncheon speech by Bill von Hoene, Exelon’s Chief Strategy Officer.
In his talk, Hoene laid out how Exelon has the “cleanest” and least expensive electricity generating fleet of any major electricity producer selling into the market (due, primarily, to Exelon’s nuclear power comprising 55% of its electricity generation). He spoke about how Exelon is committed to Exelon 2020 (its sustainability program), talked about Exelon’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs in Maryland, and stated that Exelon is committed to “actively shape the national conversation about clean energy”.
With that in mind, it wasn’t surprising that he took on the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) recent expulsion of Exelon from the organization as Exelon has taken a stance against the Production Tax Credit (PTC) being renewed. Hoene laid out his case for how conditions have changed since the PTC was created — with states having renewable portfolio standards, wind technology having advanced, and other changed factors. While perhaps not agreeing with these as strong enough to justify ending the PTC, the points were interesting. Interesting, however, turned to jaw dropping with this sentence.
Let us be clear, the end of the PTC will not impact the development of wind energy.
“Let us be clear”: this statement does not stand up to even the barest of scrutiny.
Rather than a detailed analysis, with 100s of citations to back up the discussion, the graphic below provides the simplest way to understand this:
In other words, every single time the PTC has ended, wind projects have nose-dived with disruption to wind industry supply chains and other impacts.
Simply put, “let’s be clear”, the Exelon executive team might find it in its business interests to oppose the Production Tax Credit. In explaining (and defending) that decision, however, Exelon doesn’t do anyone any good by statements that fly in the face of common sense.
Comments Off on Exelon exec asserts PTC irrelevant to wind industry prospectsTags:Energy · wind power
Over the next several days, what might be the most important Federal government conference on energy and climate issues this year (with the sad GAO last-minute cancellation of GovEnergy) will occur in Washington, DC. The GreenGov conference, co-sponsored by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Association of Climate Change Officers (ACCO), provides ten conference tracks for understanding the challenges and opportunities across the Federal government in developing climate mitigation and adaptation strategies and programs, along with a range of other environmental and clean-energy related discussions.
The 2012 GreenGov Symposium aims to bring together leaders from government, the private sector, non-profits and academia to identify opportunities to create jobs, grow clean energy industries, and curb pollution by incorporating sustainable practices into the Federal Government’s operations.
President Obama signed Executive Order 13514 in October 2009, directing Federal agencies to meet aggressive energy, water, and waste reduction targets, reduce their greenhouse gas pollution, and leverage Federal purchasing power to curb waste, save taxpayer dollars, and support the growth of a 21st century clean energy economy.
During this educational event, participants will share sustainability challenges and best practices, and discuss cutting-edge approaches to achieving the Federal performance goals set by President Obama. Topics covered will include clean energy, energy and water efficiency, fleet management, getting to zero waste, green buildings, and greening the supply chain.
In the hyper-partisan political atmosphere and (too often) dishonest political attacks disjointed from truthful discourse, “green” has become a four-letter word for too many Americans and thus the conference’s very name prevents many from any honest engagement with GreenGov’s substance. GreenGov provides a rich window on the professionalism, competence, and passion across the Federal government as these civil servants seek to help address climate change (and other environmental) challenges while seizing opportunities to save taxpayers money and create jobs.
While it is unlikely that you could chose to join GreenGov if you weren’t already planning to show up Monday morning, CEQ/ACCO have added a webstream (webstream schedule) for the plenary sessions and some of the panel discussions.
Since diving into the deep end when it comes to energy issues, almost every day sees new fascinating concepts, approaches, and technologies. Fascinating … exciting … even hope inspiring at times. And, as well, as the passion builds, so many of these are truly Energy COOL. One pleasure of attending energy-related conferences is the chance to wander the trade show and talk to (and learn from) a range of innovators and experts from a diversity of firms. Today, spending hours in the Maryland Clean Energy Center (MCEC)’s annual “summit”‘s trade show provided multiple interesting conversations and learning opportunities whether discussions with a Siemens employee about how Siemens works with school systems that have Energy Performance Service Contracts (EPSCs) to develop educational curricula associated with school building performance or discussions with EnergyPoints staff about their path toward providing businesses a single-resource (energy, water, waste) measure to support investment to support improved sustainability and returns on investment. Both of these — and other trade show floor conversations — were Energy COOL meriting further investigation.
The MCEC event represented a first in my conference experience. Sitting at the luncheon awards event, a typical ‘let us tell how wonderful our community’ video began … and, in a few minutes, the moderate inattention while sipping coffee turned to note taking. Highlighted company after company tweaked my interest in Energy COOL ways.
Fiberight removes biomass from the trash stream and processes it into biofuels.This extends landfill life, provides a non-food path toward meeting biofuel mandates, and their process also can generate electricity. While better to ‘reduce’ rather than trash, Fiberight offers a path toward recycling/reuse of materials that otherwise would fill up landfills to create a methane challenge for decades to come.
Hy-tek Bio captures exhaust from burning fossil fuels uses this as food for algae growing in tubes. Their system has multiple innovations that look to create viable paths toward cost-effective CCR rather than the overhyped CCS (carbon capture and reutilization vs carbon capture and sequestration).
Savenia Labs fills in where Energy Star dares not go by providing an independent lab assessment of non-Energy Star rated commercial devices and providing an easily understood rating system for consumers.
FlexEl makes flexible batteries that can be incorporated into, for example, clothing. As described in the video, these are non-toxic batteries which provide a path for reducing the injuries for U.S. soldiers who can be contaminated by shattered batteries which exacerbate the risks and seriousness of battlefield injuries.
It is rare (perhaps even unique) where a conference luncheon video makes me want to learn more about every highlighted company … kudos to MCEC (and Maryland’s focus on developing energy efficiency and renewable energy) for packaging so many eye-catching Energy COOL firms in this video.
Others have and will dissect this story more fully.
Rather than delving into the slime of the story, solely two points indicating how problematic this story is and why it merits serious attention from the PBS Ombudsmen with guidance for future actual science-based reporting on climate change.
First is a very small but, imo, rather pointed indication of the situation. If you actually go to the story, which has the title “Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message” , take a moment to note the web page address: “Why the global warming crowd oversells its message”. Anthony Watts, who has been shown to be removed from honest scientific engagement is taken at face value by PBS’ reporter to the extent that the, evidently, initial title for this post was fully supportive of Watts’ assertions.
More seriously, this question provides a good context as to the Newshour’s framing of the interview:
let’s start out with the basic idea that there’s this debate in this country over global warming. There’s some people who call it a complete hoax and there are some people who completely embrace it and so forth. Where do you stand in that spectrum?
He doesn’t claim to be a scientist; he attended Purdue. He’s the author of a blog,
Perhaps an actual journalist, choosing to interview someone so at odds with the scientific community, might not have started off with ‘he says, she says’ balance framing but perhaps with questions like:
Essentially every scientific institution with relevant expertise is in consensus that humanity is driving climate change. Why should anyone trust you over the Royal Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and thousands of scientists working on the world on this?
Some might say that your innovative claim to fame was challenging weather station data due to urbanization and other shifts that might have skewed data. However, the scientific analysis of this issue have shown that there is not any traceable impact of ‘sites of concern’ on the data that shows a warming planet. Again, with radically lowering Arctic Ice cover, massive imbalance of temperature records to hot records vs cold records, and other real-world impacts that align with a warming planet as climate scientists have long said could and would occur, why should Americans reject the scientific community and real world events and believe you?
Much easier, of course, to ask milquetoast questions and foster deception on PBS viewers and readers of PBS websites.
Thank you, PBS News Hour, for making it quite simple how much money to donate the next time I receive a request …
The News Hour should look hard at what it is doing here and remember the golden rule of climate science journalism: If you want to write a golden story on climate science, spend your time talking to actual climate scientists.
Time for the Ombudsman to step up to the plate and stress the need for standards when it comes to science-related reporting. (You can write the PBS ombudsman here.)
Comments Off on PBS News Hour’s public service: demonstrating the shallowness of mainstream modern American journalismTags:climate delayers · journalism
Many struggle to find ways to effectively communicate the changes occurring with climate change through images and visualizations. Vice President Gore, in Inconvenient Truth, has images of trucks stuck in mud in the Arctic where there had been ice roads, babies in floods, storms, melting ice, and other powerful photos. There are also many graphs. There are cartoons. And …
In the past week, a number of high-quality paths to visualizing climate change came out. Here are three worth watching and sharing (feel free to suggest others in the comments).
One of the surest signs that the planet is getting warmer is the fact that record high temperatures are outpacing record lows. As of early August, for example we were able to report that with the year a little more than half over, 2012 had already surpassed all of 2011 in terms of record highs in the U.S.
So if you think summers are getting hotter, you’re absolutely right. It’s just one more reminder that the globe really is warming, thanks in large part to the heat-trapping greenhouse gases we keep pumping into the atmosphere.
This NASA graphic impressively provides 131 years of temperature data in 26 seconds.
The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000. … The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.
Global temperatures have warmed significantly since 1880, the beginning of what scientists call the “modern record.” At this time, the coverage provided by weather stations allowed for essentially global temperature data. As greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, industry and vehicles have increased, temperatures have climbed, most notably since the late 1970s. In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average. (Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Visualization credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)
“We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting,” said GISS Director James E. Hansen. “So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.”
Since 1979, the volume of Summer Arctic Sea Ice has declined by 75% and accelerating. The first summer with an ice-free Arctic Ocean for at least a day is expected to happen within a decade. This video by Andy Lee Robinson illustrates the dramatic decline since 1979 until 2nd September 2012 (day 246).
The important point about this — it is about “volume” of ice rather than the more typically shown “ice coverage”. While there is less ice cover, as (if not more) ominously, the ice is getting ‘younger’ and thinner year-to-year. And, thus, we have seen (well, scientific measurements have seen since so few humans set eyes on it) a 75 percent reduction in the volume of summer Arctic sea ice over the past 43 years. Hmmm … hide your lying eyes because there is no evidence of a warming climate to be seen there.
Here is a remarkable timeline summary of 2012: the warmest, and probably the most severe year in U.S. history, but an unusual number of extremes were witnessed worldwide.
Last night, in his speech at Charlotte, the President spoke directly to climate issues. With a direct slap at Mitt Romney’s sad climate joking to anti-science cheering, the President said:
And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet – because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it.
While the Democratic Party platform had strong words on climate issues (although quite toned down from 2008), commentators were noticing a dearth of climate mentions during the convention. As we played “climate spotting”, the references to climate or climate-related issues were few and far between. This changed yesterday, with comments by Barney Frank and John Kerry. And, then, the clincher: the President’s emphasis that “climate change is not a hoax” and that climate disruption / extreme weather event implications “are not a joke.”
An item of note: those at the convention gave the climate change paragraph among the most positive reaction given to any part of the speech.
And, even more astounding, the “Village” seems to have noticed.
Climate Solutions for a Stronger America is a communications “guide for engaging and winning on climate change & clean energy” intended for politicians and others regularly engaged on debate. This guide, driven by the work of Betsy Taylor, lays out an effective communications path for politicians who want — amid all the other issues of the day — to include climate change issues within their discussions but might find it challenging amid the cacophony of deception coming from the RWSM and other fossil-foolish outlets.
Based on recent (and targeted) polling, “Climate Solutions” lays down a three pillar argument stream resting on core American values. As put in the document,
Voters are seeing the effects of climate disruption in their daily lives, are concerned about the impacts, and are hungry for leadership and solutions. A large body of recent research shows a solid majority of voters respond favorably to confident, pro-clean energy, climate lead- ership messages grounded in three core American values
The values:
Responsibility: We have a responsibility — to ourselves, each other, our children — to act to reduce climate disruption impacts.
Patriotic Pride: “America can rise to the challenge.” How dare anyone say Americans can’t achieve a cleaner energy future.
Accountability: “The billionaire Koch Brothers and Big Oil … rig the system” and it is time to put an end to it.
These value streams link together to create a powerful narrative structure which hits classic literary and political rhetoric advice:
A quest for a clean energy future and confronting climate change. This quest will enable creation of new industries and jobs via practical and cost-effective solutions.
A menacing threat that threatens America and all Americans from mounting climate disruption as exemplified with wildfires, droughts alternated with floods, record temperatures. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
A clear set of villains exists as “Big Oil, the Billionaire Koch Brothers, and fossil fuel Super-PACs are rigging the system and blocking clean energy solutions. They are trying to buy the election and keep fossil fuel interests in control.”
True heroes exist as well as people “are standing up for clean energy” and are “trying to do your part. … And all of us are fighting back against the billionaire Koch Brothers who have a stranglehold on our political system and energy future. These climate heroes and many others get up every day and work hard, play fair and invest in America’s future.”
And, at the core of the guide and fundamental to this narrative:
There is no need to do anything but speak the truth.
In a previous article on The Conversation, Stephan Lewandowsky asked, why do people reject science? I’m going to take a slightly different angle and consider how people are able to reject climate science in the face of strong evidence.
A growing body of research has found that when a person’s worldview is threatened by scientific evidence, they interpret the science in a biased manner. One issue where this influence is strongest is climate change.
The mechanism by which ideology such as this influences our scientific views is confirmation bias. We place greater weight on evidence that confirms our beliefs, while ignoring or resisting conflicting evidence. This can be a challenge when confronted with a convergence of evidence and a scientific consensus, but confirmation bias is up to the task. Let’s look at some examples.
