Hill Heat

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is this weekend in Sydney, Australia, and President Bush will be there. APEC includes 21 countries surrounding the Pacific Ocean, including the US, Australia, China, Mexico, and Japan. A primary topic of discussion will be climate change, which the administration is highlighting.

On September 4, Bush and Prime Minister Howard released a joint announcement on climate change that “agreed today on the importance of confronting the interlinked challenges of climate change, energy security and clean development” and the goal of achieving an international agreement in Bali that “provides for effective action from all the major emitting nations toward the UNFCCC objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The upcoming APEC statement on climate change and the outcome of the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change in Washington DC on Spetember 27-28 will indicate the US negotiating position for the UN conference.

What specifics are in the agreement?

• Fighting deforestation (i.e. getting credit under international agreements for forests, Australia’s Global Intitiative on Forests and Climate)
• Increasing free trade
• Expanded nuclear power (Generation IV International Forum and Global Nuclear Energy Partnership)
• reduced pollution technology investment (Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate)
• Coal gasification (the FutureGen International Partnership)
• Other multilateral partnerships (the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, the Methane to Markets Partnership, the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, and the International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy)

On the White House website EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson will be taking questions on Friday, September 7 at 12:45 pm EDT.

AVAAZ has a international petition calling for action on global warming at the APEC summit with over 400,000 co-signers.

Hill Heat will be on vaction until after the Labor Day weekend.

Restore the balance!

Who’s spending money on Google global warming keywords?

Organizations that are advertising on Hill Heat include:

• Heartland Institute, which has moved from denying the effects of smoking to denying the effects of global warming
• Carbon Planet carbonplanet.com carbon credits
• Energy Race energyrace.com
• BP
• carbonaided.com
• healthpolitics.com
• commengineering.com

• RealTruth.org/GlobalWarming

Solar/renewable/energy efficiency

• Home Depot professional solar power system
• Vista-Films.com
• infor.com Green Maintenance
• thesolarcenter.com

Carbon market

• icfi.com/carbonfunds Carbon funds
• http://www.greenchipstocks.com/subscribe/2193 Green Chip Stocks carbon trading report
• ecobusinesslinks.com carbon offset survey
• APX.com http://www.apx.com/environmental/environmental-registries.asp carbon commodities

Peak oil/Global energy crisis

• www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com How to profit from a global crisis with water stocks
• The Center for LNG lngfacts.org

http://ithinkmining.blog.infomine.com/2007/08/14/carbon-credits-soon-to-overtake-sustainable-mining-as-the-fashionable-topic/

Sen. Reid, Senate Majority Leader from Nevada, detailed his position on America’s energy and global warming policy. He called for a moratorium on coal-fired plants and a restructuring of tax policy away from gas and oil and toward renewable energy.

At a community meeting he said:

Let us spend a few billion developing what we have a lot of. We have a lot of sun, we have a lot of wind and we are the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy. The sooner we move toward the sun, the wind, geothermal, biomass, the better off we’ll be, and we will never do it until we have a tax policy that gives people an incentive to invest in these industries because the big oil companies have controlled America.

More at Grist, It’s Getting Hot in Here, and I Think Mining.

As the U.S. Congress gears up to catch the rest of the world in devising policy solutions to anthropogenic climate change, two competing visions of the crisis are being released for popular consumption, both professing to take a clear-eyed look at the problem and possible solutions.

The first is The 11th Hour, in general release last Friday.

The second is Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg’s new book, to be released September 4.

Thomas Casten addresses the potential gains in carbon reduction by focusing on the energy distribution systems:

I’ve done a study of what would happen if the United States went all the way with power recycling. We could cut our electric fuel in half. We could drop CO2 by between 20 and 30 percent. And we could make money on the first 25 percent drop with today’s technology. In the process, the technology would improve and we would be able to go farther.

And the consequences of ignoring this sector:

In 1900, about 3.5 percent of the potential energy put into electric generation actually became delivered electricity, and about 1.5 percent of it ended up as useful work. The curve rises for the next 60 years, as these things get more efficient. By 1960, about 32.5 percent of the potential was arriving as electricity. In 2005, we’re at 33 percent. The electrical generation industry stopped improving its efficiency.

Natasha Chart addresses the question of agricultural practices and soil carbon content:

The Carbon Farmers of America assert that, “[i]f the American people were to restore the soil fertility of the Great Plains that we have destroyed in the last 150 years, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would be reduced to near pre-industrial levels.”

Both approaches offer massive opportunity for everyone from corporations to families.

They conclude, respectively, “The enemy is conventional thinking,” and “Answers could be right under our feet.”

Just before the August recess, Congressman John B. Larson (D-Conn.) introduced HR 3416, a federal carbon tax proposal that follows the basic model of Al Gore’s carbon tax recommendation.

Elements:

• Covers coal, petroleum, and natural gas
• Only regulates carbon dioxide content, not other GHG emissions (the bill calls for a proposal to cover those emissions within 6 months of enactment)
• Tax starts at $15 per ton and rises at 10% faster than the cost of living adjustment each year
• Tax refunds or credits include feedstock and any offset project other than enhanced oil recovery, and all exports
• Revenues raised go into “America’s Energy Security Trust Fund”. 1/6 up to $10 billion goes to clean energy technology R&D, 1/12 goes to industry relief (declining to zero by 2017), and the remainder goes to offset payroll taxes.

Drum Major Institute:

DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM Owning your own home, sending your children to college, feeling secure about your retirement after a lifetime of hard work—that’s the American Dream. But for the vast majority of us, it’s growing out of reach.

DMI uses the lens of today’s middle-class squeeze to call for good jobs, affordable education and health care, a strong labor movement, progressive immigration policy—things that not only strengthen the middle class, but allow low-income families to advance.

We focus on making policymakers accountable, and we explain the issues at stake in ways that make sense not just to politicians, but to those working people whose lives these issues affect.

Here’s the debate in terms of the DMI’s mission statement:

The Lieberman-Warner proposal would lock in a future that guarantees that energy entrepeneurship and job creation will happen outside of our borders. Power over power will be controlled solely by entities accountable not to citizens, but to hedge funds and foreign investors. The middle class of America will become a memory, as people lose control over how to raise their families, where to live, and how to spend the money they earn.

However, we can support legislation that puts responsibility, opportunity, and community at the core of legislation that fights global warming. By making polluters pay, investing in advanced green collar jobs, and supporting healthy communities by giving them power over the energy they use, we can rebuild the American dream to be sustainable for generations to come.

Small Business

Small businesses and entrepeneurs drive the American economy and build the American Dream. The Lieberman-Warner proposal is a step in the right direction for protecting the atmosphere, but with a Devil’s bargain of protecting polluters and hedge fund profiteers. Climate change legislation must not only address the problem of global warming emissions, but must support a future of economic opportunity. It should follow the principle of making polluters pay, and use those funds to invest in green technologies, green collar jobs, and to decentralize the power grid to unlock the potential of energy entrepeneurship.

In Resolved: Public Corporations Shall Take Us Seriously, the New York Times Magazine describes the rising tide of shareholder resolutions on climate change against ExxonMobil:

The ring tone on Sister Patricia Daly’s cellphone is the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah,” which makes every call sound as if it’s coming from God. On the particular May afternoon, however, David Henry, who handles investor relations for the ExxonMobil Corporation, was on the line. Henry wanted to know if Daly planned to attend the annual shareholder meeting later that month — a rhetorical question, really, since Daly had been at every one of them for the past 10 years. At each she posed roughly the same question: What is ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, planning to do about global warming?

The article makes reference to Citigroup’s influential climate change investment report from the beginning of the year, Climatic Consequences: Investment Implications of a Changing Climate, and the May 2007 Greenpeace report ExxonMobil’s Continued Funding of Global Warming Denial Industry.