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Jubilant environmentalists trade high fives, carbon permits
We tend to see a lot of handwringing over the fact that Europe has a carbon cap in place, yet they’re still adding coal to the mix. But stories like this never seem to get reported the other way. Did you hear the good news? Dynergy scuttled six coal plants because of the U.S. carbon cap:
“The development landscape has changed significantly since we agreed to enter into the development joint venture with LS Power in the fall of 2006,” said Bruce A. Williamson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dynegy Inc. “Today, the development of new generation is increasingly marked by barriers to entry including external credit and regulatory factors that make development much more uncertain. In light of these market circumstances, Dynegy has elected to focus development activities and investments around our own portfolio where we control the option to develop and can manage the costs being incurred more closely.”
“Regulatory factors” refer to a host of potential legal obstacles, but the chief among them is the anticipated passage of a federal cap-and-trade bill sometime in the next several years. Unlike some market observers, energy developers aren’t watching for the price of carbon to pass the magical point at which clean coal or solar or whatever becomes cost-competitive. Rather, they’re looking ahead many years, performing scenario analysis, comparing cash flows, and making investments accordingly.
by Jay Walljasper
During the holidays, people gather together with their families (parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends) for food and kinship. These gatherings, especially in the United States, can be a rare chance to witness domesticity expand beyond the narrow circle of the nuclear family: mom, dad and the kids.
It’s interesting to note that this familiar nuclear family has been the organizing principle of Western society only since the Industrial Revolution, and that in many parts of the world today a broader network of extended family and fellow villagers are still the primary social glue. I remember a Brazilian friend, who grew up middle-class in cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, telling me that he was a teenager before he was completely sure which people living in his house were blood relatives.
Margaret Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th Century, once commented that, “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.”
The evolution of society into these smaller family units offers a freedom and flexibility unknown to our ancestors. Few of us today would want the details of our lives (from the time we awake in the morning to the person we marry) to be managed by a chief, priest or patriarch. Even the extended families that dominated the world of our grandparents or great-grandparents would seem stultifying.
By Andrew Dessler
A friend of mine from college emailed me the other day and expressed some skepticism about the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. It occurred to me that it would make a good topic for my next post.
So here is the reasoning that has led me to conclude that business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions will lead to temperature increases over the next century of around 3 degrees C.
First, it has been known for over 150 years that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the planet. In fact, the very small number of credible skeptics out there, such as Dick Lindzen and Pat Michaels, are on record agreeing that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will warm the planet. What they argue is that the warming will be very small. More on that later.
The conclusion that emitting greenhouse gases will result in warming does not rest on the output of climate models, but is a simple physical argument that predates the invention of the computer. And if you don't believe in physics, take a look at Venus. That planet features a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and consequently a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.
So we know that adding carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. This leads us to the real question: How much warming are we going to get?
Carbon dioxide by itself will only provide somewhere around 1 degree C warming over the next century. In order to get really large warnings over the 21st century, there needs to be strong positive feedbacks to amplify the initial warming from carbon dioxide.
