The Political Clout of the Renewable Energy Industry

Grist is reporting on a new article in Science, "Winning Coalitions for Climate Policy." Unfortunately, Science requires paid access so I won't be able to read it until I get down to the library, but Grist's writeup makes it sound interesting.

The main point is that measures which build up the renewable energy industry, such as subsidies for rooftop solar and requiring utilities to get a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources, build up a constituency for renewable energy which will then provide the political muscle for measures such as carbon pricing. In other words, if you offer the carrot first, you are much more likely to get to the stick later.

This has certainly been the case in Germany, where generous prices paid for renewable energy has built an enormous body of support for anti-carbon policies.

You can find the Grist article here.

Fight for SB 350

Speaking very loosely, California Senate Bill 350 will reduce California's carbon pollution by 50% by the time we reach 2030.

These are exactly the kinds of measures we need to be taking now. Governor Brown and the California Democratic leadership have pushed the bill through the Senate, but there is trouble in the Assembly. The culprits are the usual assortment of conservative Republican nutjobs and Democratic crooks trying to hold the bill for ransom in order to extract perks and goodies for their own constitutents.

We need to push to get this bill passed. Below is a link to information about SB 350, and below that is a link to a Sierra Club page that will let you contact your Assembly representative in support of the bill.

http://focus.senate.ca.gov/sites/focus.senate.ca.gov/files/climate/505050.html

https://secure.sierraclub.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=15189

Carly Fiorina and the "Moderate" Republican Position on Climate Change

Another home run from Dave Roberts, reviewing Carly Fiorina's recent comments on the futility of trying to fight climate change. Roberts looks at the ten points that Fiorina tried to make recently, and in so doing he provides a nice little summary of how the transition to renewable energy is going.

I particularly liked point number 2, where Fiorina claims that California's push for renewable energy is hurting the California economy. Roberts points out that home electricity prices have fallen during the push, and that California's economy is growing and that California leads the nation in job creation.

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/21/9186313/carly-fiorina-climate-wrong

Renewable Energy Moves Ahead of Natural Gas

This is good.

http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2015/august/renewable-electricity-generation-climbs-to-second-place-after-coal.html

A Battery the Size of Norway

This is great thinking. In order to get off of carbon we need power storage on this level. I hope someone gets this done.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/08/04/norway-sees-its-lakes-europe-green-battery-pack?cmpid=tp-san

Urban Solar for California

Grist has a report about a new Stanford University study on the potential for putting "utility-scale solar development" into already-developed areas, even urban areas, rather than in open countryside. The advantage, environmentally, is that we wouldn't be sacrificing our wild areas in order to develop our solar capacity.

I can't access the study itself, published in Nature Climate Change. But Grist's summary contains one great number: according to the study, the solar capacity that we could potentially install in our developed areas would produce 20,000 terawatt-hours of power, which is more than three times California's electrical demand. How cool is that?

That extra capacity is particularly exciting for people, like me, who still dream of bringing manufacturing back to California.

Photo: Gabriel Millos, Creative Commons 2.0 BY-SA

More Studies Showing California is Doomed

The New York Times has done a story summarizing various studies about the effects of climate change on the livability of different parts of the US.

Alaska and the Pacific Northwest are big winners, no surprise there. But one study points out that northern midwest cities like Minneapolis and Detroit will also be climate winners, relatively speaking.

Most of California is a loser, of course. East of the coastal mountains and south of the Bay Area, California's livability will be seriously impacted by drought, heat and wildfires. California's coastal strip, from the Bay Area north, looks to be a relative winner here, but again, we're only speaking relatively.

My own town of Santa Cruz is on the lower edge of the Bay Area, so compared to people in LA we're going to be okay. Hurray for us.
The studies seem to agree that serious changes to local climates, where current extremes become the new normal, will be occurring by the middle of the century, well within the lifetime of millenials.

I can't believe that we're seriously having this discussion but still don't have a national carbon tax in place.