Top Stories

Shifting the world to 100 percent clean, renewable energy as early as 2030 -- here are the numbers.—reliability high.
Press release on Jacobson and Delucchi's Scientific American article where "they present new research mapping out and evaluating a quantitative plan for powering the entire world on wind, water and solar energy, including an assessment of the materials needed and costs. And it will ultimately be cheaper than sticking with fossil fuel or going nuclear, they say." From EurekAlert. Related SolveClimate blog post here. PDF of technical article here. Summary of Scientific American article here. [Would we rather have 13,000 coal-fired power plants and their year-after-year emissions of CO2, or power from technologies such as solar and wind that don't release much CO2? Why is this such a difficult question to answer?]


Statisticians don't see global cooling in data.—reliability high.
Associated Press did some checking to see if the suggestion that there is something that might be called "global cooling" going on is valid. They sent datasets to four independent statisticians and asked them to analyze them to identify any trends. They didn't tell the statisticians what the numbers represented. The data included NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880." More about the concept of recent "global cooling". At Yahoo News from AP. [This is in "dog bites man" department, but "global cooling" has gotten a lot of ink and air lately. This analysis just shows that to find a global cooling trend in existing data you have to be very selective about your datasets, or just cheat.]

Companies, Industries, Markets and Supply Chains

StormFisher Biogas and Loblaw Companies Limited to Create Electricity From Organic Trimmings.—reliability high.
StormFisher and Loblaw have an agreement that will see all the food scraps and trimmings produced at Loblaw corporate grocery stores in southwestern Ontario sent to StormFisher's new renewable energy facility in London, Ontario, which uses anaerobic digestion to make biogas then used to generate electricity to sell under Ontario's generous feed-in tariff. At SYS-CON Media from Marketwire. [This can compete with composting because there is money to be made at it. Would it be more efficient if natural gas had a feed-in tariff?]

Fisker to Make Plug-In Hybrids at Former G.M. Plant.—reliability high.
More rustbelt to greenbelt conversion. "Fisker Automotive, a small California-based manufacturer of luxury vehicles, is expected to reveal on Tuesday its plans to build plug-in hybrid electric cars at a former General Motors plant in Delaware." From Reuters.

U.S. households could cut emissions sharply: study.—reliability high.
"A research team led by Michigan State University estimated that 7.4 percent of current U.S. emissions -- slightly more than the total emissions of France -- could be eliminated in 10 years if U.S. households became energy-efficient by adopting available forms of technology, including more fuel-efficient cars and home heating systems." The reductions would require no new laws or regulations and would entail no reductions in standards of living. See Reuters. Summary at EurekAlert. PDF of report at PNAS.

FedEx: We are greener than UPS.—reliability medium.
"Mitch Jackson, who is staff director of  environmental affairs and sustainability at FedEx, met with me recently to make the case on behalf of FedEx." "I can't say that he persuaded me that FedEx is greener than UPS. You can make arguments on behalf of either firm, particularly because there’s lots of disagreement between them about what metrics to use. Newsweek’s very flawed rankings put UPS slightly ahead of FedEx. By contrast, a nonprofit called Climate Counts ranked shipping companies and gave FedEx the edge over UPS and the U.S. Post Office." From GreenBiz blog.

The WiMAX Smart Grid Is Here, says Grid Net.—reliability high.
Grid Net, a developer of WiMAX-based smart grid software, announces its first paying customer. Further discussion of WiMAX and smartgrid. See earth2tech.

Government and Regulation

Smart grid gets multibillion-dollar injection.—reliability medium.
"The Obama administration is scheduled to announce Tuesday where it is spending $3.4 billion of stimulus money on 100 smart-grid projects in 49 states. As part of the funding, utilities are contributing $4.7 billion to the projects, pushing the total spending to $8.1 billion." See CNET News Green Tech blog.

Lord Turner to unveil £150bn green tax overhaul.—reliability high.
"The campaign for the government to overhaul the UK's tax system in favour of new green taxes will gather fresh momentum today with the release of a major report from the Green Fiscal Commission (GFC) calling for the introduction of up to £150bn of new green taxes." From Business Green. Summary at GFC site, with access to PDF of report.

Research Analyzes 270 Global Climate and Energy Policies to Drive Investment.—reliability high.
"To provide investors with an analysis of global climate change policies, Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management division (DeAM) has released a new report that assigns a risk rating to 109 countries, states and regions based on key government mandates and supporting policy frameworks. The "Climate Tracker" report is designed to help investors identify the best risk-adjusted returns in climate-change investment opportunities around the world, said DBCCA." From Environmental Leader. DBCCA site with access to PDF of report.

Scary Science

Recent changes in a remote Arctic lake are unique within the past 200,000 years.—reliability high.
Report of analysis of environmental ups and downs recorded in the sediments of an arctic lake over 200 millennia show that there have been several warming trends and periods as warm as today, but all "tracked orbitally-driven solar insolation." Since the middle of the 20th century an anomalous warming trend is seen that is not associated with the forces that drove earlier ones. From PNAS.

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