Saturday, September 26, 2015

Today's U.S.-China Announcement is the Most Significant Milestone to Date for Battling Global Climate Change

Today’s joint announcement by President Obama and President Xi represents the second time in two years the leaders have met to make significant climate commitments.

Last year’s meeting focused on setting aggressive goals that reflect each country’s unique situation. This year’s meeting moved decisively to implementation commitments intended to deliver these results. The message is clear: the time for talking about climate is over. The two largest economies and emitters must lead in action.

The commitments by the countries are sweeping and perhaps the greatest cause for hope yet in international attempts to address global warming—especially looking forward to COP21 in Paris this upcoming December. Among the outcomes are the creation of the world’s largest carbon market, market reforms within China that will help support accelerated renewables development, redoubled support of the Clean Power Plan initiatives to reduce carbon intensity of the U.S. electricity grid, codes and regulations to improve energy efficiency in buildings and transportation in both countries, and a commitment by both countries to control other important greenhouse gases including methane and HFCs.

Importantly, both countries also committed to ongoing research on necessary global warming solutions, as well as the promise of more than $6 billion in financing to support developing countries in their adoption of similar solutions.

China’s strategy for delivery is an audacious combination of top-level reforms and bottom-up implementation. Specific highlights from the announcement include:

  • Creation of the world’s largest carbon market: China has committed to use a national cap-and-trade system to efficiently limit and price carbon pollution starting in 2017. The system will cover all the largest emitting sectors in China, including power generation, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals, cement, and pulp and paper. This market will build heavily upon the experiences learned from its seven city-level carbon market pilots. Given its expansive scope, this market will likely cover approximately 60 percent of China’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, which were roughly 10 billion metric tons last year. More

 

Thursday, September 17, 2015

How Demand Flexibility Can Help Rooftop Solar Beat Demand Charges in Arizona

The debate over rooftop solar has grown increasingly contentious, pitting solar PV companies against utilities in many parts of the country. But nowhere has the debate been more heated than in sunny Arizona, where many customers have flocked to rooftop solar as prices have come down in recent years. Most recently, utility Salt River Project (SRP) has introduced a demand charge for solar customers.

Already common among commercial rate structures but much less so among residential, a demand charge is a component of the overall bill based on a customer’s maximum demand (kW) each month, in addition to more-traditional charges based on total consumption (kWh).

SRP argues that it needs to recover costs from its solar customers that they impose on the grid through high demand. The utility position is that solar customers use the grid in much the same way as non-solar customers, and impose similar costs. Yet traditional rates coupled with existing net energy metering (NEM) riders mean that solar customers pay much less per month than other customers. SRP’s new rate is designed to recover the difference by imposing a charge on a customer’s peak demand each month, which generally occurs after the sun sets.

However, solar companies and others claim that this pricing structure is unfair. The largest PV developer in the U.S., SolarCity, has sued the utility, arguing that SRP is practicing anti-competitive behavior. In any case, whether the new rate is fair or unfair, it means that the PV market is growing much more slowly in SRP than it was a year ago; interconnect requests have More

 

 

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

LAC Carbon Forum Calls for Including Market Approaches in Paris Agreement

11 September 2015: The 9th Latin American and Caribbean Carbon Forum (LACCF 2015) concluded with calls for the use of market-based mechanisms and other forms of carbon pricing and climate finance to be included as mitigation and development tools in the global climate agreement expected to be adopted at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).


The Forum, which took place from 9-11 September 2015, in Santiago, Chile, was organized by the World Bank Group, the Latin American Energy Organization (OLADE), the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UNEP DTU Partnership, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the UNFCCC Secretariat, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF).


It brought together key business and government representatives and other stakeholders from across the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region to share, among other things: the most recent developments on carbon pricing, climate financing and green investments in LAC; and best practices and lessons learned from the implementation of the CDM in LAC.


The Forum provided a platform to showcase successful examples of the use of market-based approaches such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), innovative financial instruments, and carbon pricing policies in the region. Discussions at the Forum also highlighted the need to bridge the gap between public and private sector actions so as to leverage the finance needed to address climate change in the region.


The Forum concluded, inter alia, that the expected Paris agreement should not overlook any mechanism that could be used to put the LAC region and the world on a low-carbon development pathway. [UNFCCC Press Release] [UNEP DTU Press Release] [LACCF 2015 Website] More






 

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion Gets a U.S. Patent?

Sometimes our government moves very slowly. In the case of granting a patent to cold fusion technology, which just might replace fossil fuels, it took 26 years.

Andrea Rossi with his cold fusion device

The odyssey that started with a press conference at the University of Utah back in 1989 and has bumped along below the world’s radar screen ever since, seems to be coming to an end. The cold fusion phenomenon had a brief flurry of notoriety until it was “debunked” by many physicists, a couple of universities, and the U.S. Department of Energy panel. The science fell into disrepute, its discovers were disgraced and went into exile.

Fortunately for mankind, there were a handful of experimenters who were able to reproduce the original experiments which produced anomalous heat, thereby keeping the spark of cold fusion alive, but mostly in obscure laboratories out of the purview of the mainstream press. A decade or so ago some Italian physicists made a major breakthrough which led to devices producing commercial, not just test tube, amounts of heat. This effort culminated in a number of semi-public demonstrations of the technology, which were largely ignored or denounced as conventional wisdom held that “cold fusion” was impossible.

Circa two years ago the Italian cold fusion effort, led by entrepreneur Andrea Rossi, was moved to North Carolina, linked up with a venture capital firm, and well-financed developmental work began on building commercially viable cold fusion reactors. Last February the first prototype, a one-megawatt reactor system producing steam 24 hours a day, was installed for a one-year test in an undisclosed factory somewhere in the US. This device has now been successfully operating for over six months. If all goes well for the remainder of the trial period, a report is scheduled to be issued and heat producing devices will go on sale to the public.

At some point the mainstream media will cotton to the fact that we have been led badly astray as to the viability of this technology and there indeed is an alternative to producing large amounts of energy other than by burning fossil fuels, nuclear fission, hydro, solar and wind. Obviously a technology that can produce large amounts of heat continuously at low cost and without harmful emissions or hazardous waste will catch on quickly. If not in the U.S., then I am sure the Chinese will be happy to help advance the technology.

One of the reasons there has been so much skepticism about cold fusion and Rossi’s reactor in recent years was the secrecy surrounding the inner workings of the device. Much of this secrecy was due to the developer’s inability to obtain a valid international patent on his intellectual property. When the U.S. Department of Energy declared the whole technology a hoax 25 years ago and reaffirmed this decision in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary 10 years later, the U.S. Patent Office adopted the position that it would not patent any device claiming to be based on cold fusion or anything close.

In 2008, Rossi filed for a U.S. patent on his technology, only to have it finally rejected seven years later for lack of sufficient proof that he really had developed a technology that worked. Although Rossi was granted an Italian patent in 2011, nobody thought it offered much protection against copiers of a technology that could easily be worth trillions of dollars should it come to replace fossil fuels someday.

This time around Rossi, and his patent attorneys, took a new approach to gaining the first of what will likely be many patents relating to a technology which could easily turn out to be the most important of the century. Rather than claiming that the device was based on controversial nuclear reactions, the new patent is for a simple “Fluid Heater” that raises the temperature of water by subjecting a mixture of nickel, lithium, and lithium-aluminum-hydride powders to heat. The mixture warms to hundreds of degrees centigrade and begins to produce much more heat energy than is initially applied to the powder by the built-in electric heater. There is a no mention anywhere in the patent of “cold fusion,” nor any kind of nuclear reaction. The patent is silent as to what is causing the excess heat, only saying that it occurs, leaving it to the reader to conclude that so much heat is bring produced that there must be some kind of nuclear reaction taking place – known chemical reactions will not suffice.

The patent breaks new ground in our understanding of how Rossi’s reactor works for in order to obtain his patent protection, he had to reveal the inner workings of the reactor and the composition of the fuel that was inside. The revelation in the patent that there are three separate powders, the proportion of the powders, and that the nickel catalyst must be preheated to drive out any moisture and increase the porosity of the nickel should be of great help to anyone attempting to replicate Rossi’s device. Also revealed in the patent was that each fuel load should be able to run for six months before needing to be replaced. Rossi, however, recently stated that that a single fuel load may run for a year and that the reactor currently being tested can run for long periods of time without the need to turn on the heaters that are run with outside power.

In the past year, numerous replicators have attempted to produce excess heat from devices similar to Rossi’s. One the of these replicators, Alexander Parkhomov at the University of Moscow, has been successful in at least a dozen tests. Other replicators have been able to produce excess heat, but were unable to control their reactors which quickly melted down due to the massive amount of heat being generated. With this new information from the patent, we should soon be seeing many successful replications and put to rest assertions that the technology is a fraud.

For those of us who have been following this technology for over a quarter of a century, the granting of a U.S. patent marks a major milestone in the history of science for it offers the opportunity to get mankind beyond the age of carbon and nuclear fission fuels and all that they have wrought – rogue petro state governments, pollution, global warming, and dangerous radioactive wastes. For now, the major question is whether this or similar technologies can come into widespread use fast enough to slow and then halt the many adverse societal, economic and climatological trends with which we are currently beset. More

 

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

FAO, UNDP Raise Profile of Agriculture in Climate Change Adaptation Planning


1 September 2015: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) have launched a four-year 'Integrating Agriculture in National Adaptation Plans' (NAPs) programme, which aims to incorporate eight developing countries' agricultural sectors into NAPs in order to safeguard livelihoods, raise agricultural production and boost food security.


Funded by Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), the initiative targets Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, Uruguay, Viet Nam and Zambia.


Under the programme, FAO will offer policy and technical support to ensure that climate change adaptation priorities in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors are incorporated in national adaptation planning processes. UNDP will assist countries with: managing climate risk; planning and budgeting; and strengthening information systems, project formulation and coordination between government institutions.


Building on existing FAO and UNDP country activities, the programme aims to assist countries by developing tailored responses to their needs. Examples include: increasing conservation of drought-resistant crop varieties by adopting water-conserving farming practices and promoting crop diversification in Nepal; setting up an early-warning system for climate risks in Uganda; mapping vulnerability to food insecurity due to climate change and exploring ways to scale up risk-transfer mechanisms for farming communities in the Philippines; and restoring degraded pasture lands and at-risk coastal ecosystems in Uruguay. [FAO Press Release] [Integrating Agriculture in NAPs Webpage] More






 

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Millions of reasons to preserve mangroves

 

Canadian Supreme Court Rules Against Chevron and in Favor of Ecuadorians

The law has finally caught up with Chevron.

Today's unanimous decision from the Supreme Court of Canada opens the door for Ecuadorian indigenous and farmer communities to enforce their $9.5 billion USD verdict against Chevron and is a major victory for human rights and corporate accountability.

Chevron's deliberate dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic waste water and 17 million gallons of crude into the Ecuadorian Amazon created a massive health crisis and remains one of the worst oil-related environmental crimes in history. After being found guilty of its drill and dump tactics in Ecuador, Chevron has been on the run, spending billions on retaliatory legal attacks seeking to delay justice rather than fulfilling its legal obligations to carry out a full-scale environmental clean-up and provide potable water and health care to the communities it poisoned.

Chevron's $15 billion USD in Canadian assets are more than enough to satisfy the verdict, and the Canadian court's decision to allow the Ecuadorian rainforest communities to pursue action to collect their verdict is a significant step towards justice long denied. The verdict should be a major wake-up call to Chevron shareholders and senior management that despite spending billions to make this issue go away, the company faces major risk to its assets and brand in Canada and beyond. Rather than spend hundreds of millions more on legal fees in Canada to delay justice further, it's time for Chevron to finally do the right thing. More