Cap-and-Trade Bonanza , "Fortune" has a Sustainability column authored by Marc Gunther and this week he's got a story on how we're going to divvy up the proceeds from the inevitable U.S. cap-and-trade program that will be on the books sometime in 2009. See A $3 trillion climate change battle. As Gunther writes, "The issue gets pretty wonky pretty quickly, but it's worth trying to understand because the stakes are so high." The question is who will get the money raised by the permits issued. That's the much-more-than-$64,000 question. Should it go to the taxpayers, the industries effected in the form of some rebate, to help fund renewable energy investments, and/or any of a number of other constituencies and projects? This will be a big part of the debate as this legislation wends its way through Congress, and in the early days of the next administration. (As we learned in the last post below, the next President of the United States, whomever he or she will be, will be on board for some sort of cap-and-trade regime.)
New Study Pinpoints Thousands of Climate Change Impacts , "Nature," one of the oldest, most revered, and most definitive science journals, published a paper this week, Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change, from key scientists who were involved with last year's landmark Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Nature's" superb blog, "Climate Feedback," said here that "Nearly 30,000 phenomena in the natural world – from the timing of plant flowering to the rate of ice melting – are being influenced by human-induced global warming, according to the first study to formally link trends in biological and physical systems to rising greenhouse gas emissions." Here's the story from NASA where the lead author, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science, has her day job.
Wind Power , There are two good stories at "EERE Network News," the weekly newsletter of the US Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Not incidentally, folks, if you haven't looked at the DOE's website, there is really a goldmine of great information here, from soup to nuts on energy. (How's that for a mixed metaphor? Sorry, if I've offended any particularly delicate sensibilities on these sorts of things.)
Anyway, the first compelling story here is New DOE Report Analyzes a Path to 20% Wind Power by 2030. This means the US would move from its current generating capacity of 16.8 gigawatts to 304 GW in 2030. It would also mean we'd achieve an annual reduction of 825 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2030. The report further calculates "the accelerated wind power effort would support roughly 500,000 U.S. jobs and add more than $1.5 billion in annual revenues to the coffers of local communities." Go to the "20% Wind Energy by 2030" program website for more.
The second story from DOE references a new report from the American Wind Energy Association showing a continuing boom in windpower installations. The "industry continued new installations at a breakneck pace in the first quarter of 2008, putting 1,400 megawatts or approximately $3 billion worth of new generating capacity in place," according to the report from the AWEA. The first quarter! Not bad.
However, even though it appeared as of my post from last month, Tax Breaks, Finally, for Renewables, that the deal was done and the extension of tax credits for the renewables industries was at hand, it appears to be not quite yet the case. The AWEA and her sister renewable energy industry trade groups are still pitching. See this release. We're getting close though. See this from Reuters' today: Renewable Energy Tax Bill Advances In US House.
