Category Archives: climate change

July 5, 2012 · 9:30 am

The Biggest Story Coming Out of Rio

You might have read about a mammoth conference held in Rio de Janeiro last month. The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20, was a gathering of world leaders, government representatives, corporations, NGOs and others to establish agreements to help “reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection.” There were tens of thousands of attendees, including 57 heads of state; hundreds of separate events; and a blizzard of press releases and punditry.

I know few people who were optimistic that the event would yield inter-governmental agreements of any significance, and fewer still who think it delivered. Globally, politics and policy these days seem not to be equal to the pressing challenges facing society.  I prefer to see this as a slump in the civic sphere rather than some political terminal illness. But just because our politics don’t always work doesn’t mean that society can’t make progress.


That’s because policy isn’t the only force that changes society. The forces that are going to lead to a sustainable future are mutually interactive: Policy influences public behavior as well as attitudes; people influence policy and set expectations for the businesses that serve them; and business, of course, influences policy and people.

The biggest story coming out of Rio was the numerous commitments, many by corporations or corporate groups, to work toward sustainable economic development. Many corporations are in the game despite the lack of an adequate policy framework. The  UN Council on Sustainable Development counts more than “$513 billion mobilized in commitments for sustainable development, including in the areas of energy, transport, green economy, disaster reduction, desertification, water, forests and agriculture and a total of 692 voluntary commitments for sustainable development registered by governments, business, civil society groups, universities and others. ” The Natural Resources Defense Council has created a searchable and interactive summary of them here.

My problem with a lot of the commitments is that they are expressed in monetary terms, when the real challenges are better expressed in terms of carbon, joules, tons, or lives. Nonetheless, it is heartening to see all of this activity.

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January 18, 2012 · 11:39 am

Is Clean Water Vs. Dirty Air a Good Trade-Off?

Do you need to put 5,000 more cars to the road to get clean drinking water?

I find the trade-offs that arise in energy development, environmental protection and human health fascinating. Over the years I’ve written on this topic a few times:

Energy Technologies and Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences, Part II: Air vs. Water

Unintended Consequences, Part III: Electricity vs. Water

Today I want to talk about a 160,000 square-foot new water treatment facility in New York that will be going online this year, and how it’s giving us safer water at the cost of a hefty increase in greenhouse gas emissions. I’m referring to the Catskill/Delaware Ultraviolet Light Disinfection Facility, which is in the final stages of construction just north of New York City. The facility will use ultraviolet light to disinfect an average of 1.3 billion gallons of water per day. It’s also going to use a lot of electricity and, as a result, increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection

The consequences of this project are neither unintended nor unforeseen. The project was required by Federal and State regulations to maintain the safety of New York City’s water supply, which is one of only a handful of major water supplies in the U.S. that remain unfiltered, according to civil engineer Robert Osborne, who is very into water. Having an unfiltered water supply is a kind of badge of honor. It means your water is exceptionally pure. But Federal and state regulations require water supplies to be protected by other means if filtration is not used. (The New York Times reported that a filtration system for this water supply would have cost up to $8 billion to build millions of dollars a year to operate.)

A project of this magnitude, whose costs are estimated at $1.6 billion, undergoes detailed analysis and planning, including an the creation of an environmental impact statement. The environmental impact statement says that the plant will draw an average of 4.45 megawatts of electric power. By my calculations (4.45MW X 24 hours X 365.25 days X 1000), that will equal about 39 million KWh of electricity annually.

You can calculate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted to provide 39M KWh of electricity in New York using EPA’s eGRID methodology (available via a cool tool on amee.com). Using my assumption, it comes to over 25,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Taking the EPA’s estimate of the average annual greenhouse gas emissions of an average automobile (5.1 metric tons of CO2E per year) you find that these emissions are the equivalent of putting about 5,000 more cars on the road.

I have no doubt that this particular trade-off (cleaner water for dirtier air) is worth it. The project protects over 8 million people who depend on this water supply from the risk of water-borne contaminants that could cause a significant public health crisis. I point it out not to criticize this project but rather to illustrate the kinds of trade-offs policy makers face all the time.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Filed under climate change, emissions, grid, transportation, utilities, water

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January 10, 2012 · 8:30 am

Do Americans Believe in Global Warming Anymore?

By Lakis Polycarpou

In the last couple of years, it became conventional wisdom that most Americans no longer believe in global warming—a dramatic shift from only a few years ago. In fact, according to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, the change is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history,” dropping from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.

To see the effects of this supposed change on the political climate, one has to look no farther than the current presidential campaign, in which a number of candidates–most notably Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney–have shifted their positions starkly away from their prior belief in human-caused climate change.

The reasons given for this dramatic shift in public opinion depend on who’s presenting the information; conservative think tanks point to supposed controversies that have arisen in climate science (controversies the scientific community insists do not exist). Climate activists, on the other hand, blame the change on a well-funded and orchestrated campaign by right-wing vested interests to change public opinion.

But is the supposed change as dramatic as it seems? Not according to a recent poll by Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis of Stanford University. In fact, the poll suggests that the number of Americans who believe the Earth has been warming has increased from 75 percent in 2010 to 83 percent now, with 72 percent believing that warming is either partly or mostly human caused. Nearly 42 percent described the issue as either extremely or very important to them personally.

So why the great discrepancy in poll results? After interviewing two public opinion experts, Joe Romm of Climate Progress suggests that the apparent drop is “almost certainly due to the combination of the collapse in media coverage of global warming and pollsters asking a deeply flawed question . . . instead of asking people what they believe or think, Pew asks them what they’ve read or heard,” which “fatally taints the whole question.”

What has changed, according to the Center for Science Policy and Public Research, is media coverage of climate change, which–excepting a brief spike in 2009–all but fell off a cliff since 2007, which makes sense given the somewhat ambiguous wording of the Pew question.

What’s more, if Krosnick is right, global warming was actually a winning issue for politicians in the most recent elections. Democrats who took “green” position, he writes, won much more often than Democrats who did not, while Republicans who took “non-green” positions won less often than those who remained silent.

Has president Obama gotten the memo? After effectively dodging climate issues for the last couple of years, the President seemed to respond to a sudden surge of popular opposition by postponing and possibly killing State Department approval of the Keystone pipeline that was slated to bring synthetic crude from Canada’s massive tar sands to refiners on the Gulf Coast. Noted NASA climate change expert James Hanson has said that exploiting the tar sands would be essentially game over” for efforts to stabilize the climate.

Finally, much to everyone’s surprise, the recent outcome of last months’ Durban was the first time participating nations agreed in principle to a legally binding treaty to curb emissions.

All of this suggests that companies who have committed themselves to lowering their carbon footprint should probably take heart and remain committed to their long-term greening efforts, especially if they have a global presence. Neither the issue nor the reality of global warming is going away any time soon.

Lakis Polycarpou writes extensively about climate, energy, urban planning, supply chain risks and other sustainability topics. Most recently his work has addressed issues of global water scarcity and climate-related water risks for the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

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Filed under climate change