Electric Cars

No, just a lot of changes will happen, that will range from annoying to catastrophic.

Global warming has been found to be a direct result of the increase in CO2 levels, which is mostly from human activities.

 The link has been proven and accepted by over 97% of the worlds scientist. The funny thing about the scientists that disagree is that there is a proven money link between them and groups that exploit natural resources, primarily oil, coal, and natural gas.

A temperature increase of just 1 degree doesn’t read like much until you remember this is worldwide, so that’s a lot of heat being added into the atmosphere and aquasphere. This heat translates into extra energy available for weather events.

A weather event is the atmosphere trying to equalize energy between 2 levels, such as a storm, tornado, hurricane, etc.

As more energy is absorbed into the atmosphere weather events will become larger, and much more dangerous. But the extra heat will cause something else much worse to happen.

As the tundras start heating up the gas is released compounding the greenhouse effect, trapping more heat, which melts more of the tundra, releasing more methane in a vicous cycle.

The extra heat will eventually cause the the melting of methane clathrates, large underwater frozen deposits of methane and natural gas.

These deposits are huge, estimated to be up to 1.2 million cubic miles. This estimate does not include estimates for deposits trapped in deep freshwater lakes and Antartica.

The effect that this has on you is loss of some mollusc species since their shells can’t form properly, loss of reefs, since the reefs are actually made of the exoskeletons of small sea creatures and their shells are dissolved by the sea water now that its more acid, and loss of many other species as their eggs are vulnerable to the change in ph.

Among the species that will disappear, crabs, clams, sea snails, lobsters, are just a few of the species directly affected by the change.

The loss of the reefs, which serve as nursery, home, and hunting range for many species, also act to protect the shores from the full force of storm surges and waves.

But the biggest losses will occur to the varied species that will lose their prey species.

These changes will only happen if we make them happen.

Governments make mandates when its politically correct to do so, but by and large have really failed to provide the solutions we need. Big businesses are heavily invested in maintaining the status quo and will continue to avoid significant investment and involvement in solutions until the projected profits can exceed the necessry costs to commit to that kind of change.

That leaves us, we the people of the world, to do this.

Since this is a company blog, let me point out that my company, WaveGo, has designed a commuter vehicle that not only gets over 60 miles per gallon with super low emissions but are also the perfect bridge vehicles as they run equally well on gasoline, diesel, kerosene, biodiesel, ethanol and methanol.

Please support us in our fund raising campaign on Indiegogo.com by visiting http://igg.me/p/336924 and making a donation.

Whether you donate or not please pass the link on to others as crowdfunding doesn’t work unless a lot of people visit the link.

We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.

In the case of the terrarists -- and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet , giant energy companies like ExxonMobil , Chevron , ConocoPhillips , BP , and Shell -- you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren.

Since then, the big energy companies have invested a remarkable amount of time, money, and energy in the development of techniques that would allow them to recover previously unrecoverable reserves : fracking , deep-water drilling , and tar-sands production , among others.

They also began to go after huge deposits of what energy expert Michael Klare calls “ extreme ” or “tough” energy -- oil and natural gas that can only be acquired through the application of extreme force or that requires extensive chemical treatment to be usable as a fuel.

The lead industry , the asbestos industry , and the tobacco companies all knew the dangers of their products, made efforts to suppress the information or instill doubt about it even as they promoted the glories of what they made, and went right on producing and selling while others suffered and died. And here’s another similarity: with all three industries, the negative results conveniently arrived years, sometimes decades, after exposure and so were hard to connect to it.

If Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 plane hijackings or the Tsarnaev brothers’ homemade bombs constitute terror attacks, why shouldn’t what the energy companies are doing fall into a similar category ? And if so, then where is the national security state when we really need it?

On July 15, 1979, at a time when gas lines, sometimes blocks long, were a disturbing fixture of American life, President Jimmy Carter spoke directly to the American people on television for 32 minutes, calling for a concerted effort to end the country’s oil dependence on the Middle East. “To give us energy security,” he announced, “I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun...

Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war. Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”

It’s true that, at a time when the science of climate change was in its infancy, Carter wouldn’t have known about the possibility of an overheating world, and his vision of “alternative energy” wasn’t exactly a fossil-fuel-free one.

Six months later, on January 23, 1980, in his last State of the Union Address , he would proclaim what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine: “Let our position be absolutely clear,” he said. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Instead, the Pentagon would fatefully begin organizing itself to protect U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.

 More than three decades later, ironies abound: thanks in part to those oil wars, whole swaths of the energy-rich Middle East are in crisis, if not chaos, while the big energy companies have put time and money into a staggeringly fossil-fuel version of Carter’s “alternative” North America.  They’ve focused on shale oil, and on shale gas as well, and with new production methods, they are reputedly on the brink of turning the United States into a “new Saudi Arabia.”

If true, this would be the worst, not the best, of news.  In a world where what used to pass for good news increasingly guarantees a nightmarish future, energy “independence” of this sort means the extraction of ever more extreme energy, ever more carbon dioxide heading skyward, and ever more planetary damage in our collective future.  This was not the only path available to us, or even to Big Oil.

With their staggering profits, they could have decided anywhere along the line that the future they were ensuring was beyond dangerous.  They could themselves have led the way with massive investments in genuine alternative energies (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, algal, and who knows what else), instead of the exceedingly small-scale ones they made, often for publicity purposes.  

They could have backed a widespread effort to search for other ways that might, in the decades to come, have offered something close to the energy levels fossil fuels now give us.  They could have worked to keep the extreme-energy reserves that turn out to be surprisingly commonplace deep in the Earth.

And we might have had a different world (from which, by the way, they would undoubtedly have profited handsomely).  Instead, what we’ve got is the equivalent of a tobacco company situation, but on a planetary scale. 

To complete the analogy, imagine for a moment that they were planning to produce even more prodigious quantities not of fossil fuels but of cigarettes, knowing what damage they would do to our health.  Then imagine that, without exception, everyone on Earth was forced to smoke several packs of them a day.

If that isn’t a terrorist -- or terrarist -- attack of an almost unimaginable sort, what is?  If the oil execs aren’t terrarists, then who is?  And if that doesn’t make the big energy companies criminal enterprises, then how would you define that term?

To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide?

Tesla Motors announced that it has paid off the entire loan awarded to the company by the Department of Energy in 2010. In addition to payments made in 2012 and Q1 2013, today’s wire of almost half a billion dollars repays the full loan facility with interest.

Tesla brought its Roadster sports car to market with a 30% gross margin, designed electric powertrains for Daimler and had done preliminary design of the Model S all before receiving a government loan.

In 2010, Tesla was awarded a milestone-based loan, requiring matching private capital obtained via public offering, by the DOE as part of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program. This program was signed into law by President Bush in 2008 and then awarded under the Obama administration in the years that followed.

This program is often confused with the financial bailouts provided to the then bankrupt GM and Chrysler, who were ineligible for the ATVM program, because a requirement of that program was good financial health.

The loan payment was made today using a portion of the approximately $1 billion in funds raised in last week’s concurrent offerings of common stock and convertible senior notes.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s Chief Executive Officer and cofounder, purchased $100 million of common equity, the least secure portion of the offering. “I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate,” said Elon Musk. “I hope we did you proud.”

Tesla Motors' goal is to accelerate the world’s transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars.

For the latest information from Tesla Motors, including press releases and the Tesla blog, please visit: teslamotors.com/press

Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors, two startups founded to make battery-powered cars, are both in the news, but for very different reasons.

Fisker seemed to think if you designed a beautiful car, people would buy it,” says Brett Smith, codirector for manufacturing, engineering, and technology at the Center for Automotive Research. “The Tesla vehicles are good looking, but Tesla focused more on the technology, not the sheet metal.”

A key example is Tesla’s battery technology. “Tesla’s lithium-ion battery pack technology is five to 10 years ahead of competitors when it comes to a passenger electric vehicle application, as measured by performance and cost to manufacture,” says Andrea James, an analyst for Dougherty.

“Tesla’s battery lead allows it to produce a better vehicle at more affordable price.”

When Tesla was founded, it was based on an idea from J.B. Straubel, now Tesla’s chief technology officer, that commodity lithium-ion batteries designed for portable electronics could be used to make relatively low-cost battery packs for electric vehicles.

The advantage of these batteries was supposed to be twofold: the batteries were designed to be safer and, because they were bigger and flat rather than cylindrical, they were simpler to package together into a battery pack.

Tesla not only benefits from lower costs for its own cars, it’s also been able to sell its technology to other automakers, providing a boost of revenue that helped it survive in the time between producing its first car, the Roadster, and the current Model S.

Unlike the Tesla Model S, which runs only on batteries, the Fisker Karma has both batteries and a gas engine for powering long trips.

FORTUNE -- China Light and Power's roots are more than a hundred years deep in Hong Kong.

That makes CLP a player in the greatest challenge of our time: How to balance Asia's soaring energy demands with the planet's urgent need to wean itself from fossil fuels.

Andrew Brandler, CEO of the CLP Group since 2000, has degrees from Cambridge University and Harvard Business School, and he's co-chair of the energy and climate group within the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

He'll be leaving CLP's corner office later this year to join Sir Elly Kadoorie & Sons Limited, the private company of the Kadoorie Family, CLP's largest shareholder. This week he sat down with Fortune's David Whitford in Hong Kong.

Across the whole group, it's mostly fossil fuels -- about 60% coal and 15% gas -- plus 20% renewables and 5% nuclear. And you're not building any more coal plants?

The government in 2010 came out with a public consultation about the future energy needs for the whole of Hong Kong that postulated by 2020 nuclear being 50% of the electricity supply, gas 40%, and coal 10%.

We were an investor in China's first commercial nuclear power station at Daya Bay, which supplies about 25% of Hong Kong's electricity.

If Hong Kong needs more nuclear, we're keen to invest in that.

If you're doing a one-off project, like in the United States, with all the regulatory issues and design issues, the costs just balloon.

But if you can spread all those upfront costs over a whole program, it's not so burdensome. And if you can get the supply chain working -- which China is very good at -- you can bring those costs down dramatically.

Without nuclear it's hard to see how the world will continue to meet energy demand growth without catastrophic risk to the climate.

Nuclear is the only technology that exists today that can provide base-load power at a reasonable cost -- if you get the program right -- with zero carbon emissions.

China has by far the most aggressive nuclear buildout underway in the world today, with 28 new plants planned or already under construction.

We're a big company -- $20 billion market cap -- and we are 20,000 megawatts across the region. But every quarter China builds another CLP.

And something like 60,000 megawatts is coming from coal.

It's very hard to say to voters, "Look, I have to make you poorer now because we're going to have to slow down growth or increase costs of energy production which will have the consequence of slowing down growth. But don't worry, it's going to benefit your children or your grandchildren by the year 2050."

What we say essentially is that if everybody followed our strategy -- if the whole industry did it -- then there's some chance by 2050 that the electricity supply industry in this part of the world is largely decarbonized, and on a trajectory to hit what the UNFCC [ United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ] has said is what you need to in order to avoid massive climate change.

Not carbon-free, but what we're saying is we want to get our portfolio to a carbon intensity of 0.2 kilograms per kilowatt hour.

One thing we could say is we're going to stop growing, stop investing, in which case someone in a white suit comes into my office, puts my arms in a straightjacket, marches me out, and someone else takes over.

We can make more investments in nuclear, more investments in renewable energy, more investments in gas-fired generation.

CLP cannot be on a trajectory of continuing to increase its carbon emissions without regard for the consequences and hope to continue to be in business.

That does not mean stopping all investments that have carbon emissions, that's unrealistic. But it's about de-risking the portfolio slowly over time so that we can still grow the business and earn returns for our shareholders, risk-adjusted for carbon, while preserving our broader franchise.

I think there needs to be a technology breakthrough -- a black swan that no one has thought about that comes along and solves the world's energy problems.

We’re being told that – thanks to technological advances like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling – the US is undergoing an energy revolution, leading us in a few short years to become once again the world’s biggest oil producer and an exporter of natural gas.

According to the Oil & Gas Industry and their proponents, “fracking” will provide the US with energy security, low energy prices for the foreseeable future, more than a million jobs, and economic growth. And they tell us that we can frack our way to independence without hurting the environment.

Help us expose these lies and turn the tide in the ultimate fight against greed by pre-ordering and participating in the writing and editing of Richard Heinberg's next book, SNAKE OIL! How Big Energy's Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.

It focuses, more than any of Richard's previous books, on the culpability of the oil industry for actively discouraging awareness and action on climate change and peak oil .

Richard Heinberg is the author of ten books, including The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Peak Everything: Waking up to a Century of Declines and The Party's Over: Oil, War & the Fate of Industrial Societies.

SNAKE OIL WILL BE FINISHED AND PRINTED BY JULY 1, 2013. $5500: This small amount will cover the book's publishing costs.

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Beyond that, as you'll see in the perks, we'll provide to you a special edition of the book, autographed copies, limited edition art prints and all kinds of recognition for recognizing that this is a critical fight at a critical time.

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Goals
The ultimate goal of the primary resistance movement in this scenario is simply a living planet—a planet not just living, but in recovery, growing more alive and more diverse year after year. A planet on which humans live in equitable and sustainable communities without exploiting the planet or each other.

Given our current state of emergency, this translates into a more immediate goal, which is at the heart of this movement’s grand strategy:

Goal 1: To disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.

This movement’s second goal both depends on and assists the first:

Goal 2: To defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.
To accomplish these goals requires several broad strategies involving large numbers of people in many different organizations, both aboveground and underground. The primary strategies needed in this theoretical scenario include the following:

Strategy A: Engage in direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure.

Strategy B: Aid and participate in ongoing social and ecological justice struggles; promote equality and undermine exploitation by those in power.

Strategy C: Defend the land and prevent the expansion of industrial logging, mining, construction, and so on, such that more intact land and species will remain when civilization does collapse.

Strategy D: Build and mobilize resistance organizations that will support the above activities, including decentralized training, recruitment, logistical support, and so on.

Strategy E: Rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including perennial polycultures for food) and localized, democratic communities that uphold human rights.

In describing this alternate future scenario, we should be clear about some shorthand phrases like “actions against industrial infrastructure.” Not all infrastructure is created equal, and not all actions against infrastructure are of equal priority, efficacy, or moral acceptability to the resistance movements in this scenario. As Derrick wrote in Endgame, you can’t make a moral argument for blowing up a children’s hospital.

On the other hand, you can’t make a moral argument against taking out cell phone towers. Some infrastructure is easy, some is hard, and some is harder.

There’s something admirable about the concept of protracted popular warfare that was used in China and Vietnam. It’s an elegant idea, if war can ever be described in such terms; the core idea is adaptable and applicable even in the face of major setbacks and twists of fate.

But protracted popular warfare as such doesn’t apply to the particular future we are discussing. The people in that scenario will never have the numbers that protracted popular warfare requires. But they will also face a different kind of adversary, for which different tactics are applicable. So they will take the essential idea of protracted popular warfare and apply it to their own situation—that of needing to save their planet, to bring down industrial civilization and keep it down. And they will devise a new grand strategy based on a simple continuum of steps that flow logically one after the other.

In this alternate future scenario, Decisive Ecological Warfare has four phases that progress from the near future through the fall of industrial civilization. 

The first phase is Networking & Mobilization.

The second phase is Sabotage & Asymmetric Action.

The third phase is Systems Disruption.

And the fourth and final phase is Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure.

Each phase has its own objectives, operational approaches, and organizational requirements. There’s no distinct dividing line between the phases, and different regions progress through the phases at different times.

These phases emphasize the role of militant resistance networks. The aboveground building of alternatives and revitalization of human communities happen at the same time.

But this does not require the same strategic rigor; rebuilding healthy human communities with a subsistence base must simply happen as fast as possible, everywhere, with timetables and methods suited to the region.

This scenario’s militant resisters, on the other hand, need to share some grand strategy to succeed.

Officially, 21 coal, gas and oil-fired plants have been slated for closure out to 2017 in the central European energy market – which includes Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

This represents about 7GW of capacity, and is over and above the 6GW of anticipated nuclear retirements in Germany and Belgium over the same period.

But according to the European energy team at UBS, this may just scratch the surface of what’s needed – and a further 41GW may have to be closed to restore the industry to profitability and offset the “downside” to centralised generation created by the renewables boom.

That would bring total closures of coal and gas plants over the coming four years to 49GW – which just happens to match the amount of wind and solar capacity that UBS anticipates will be added over the same period.

UBS says the central European market is in rapid decline because of falling demand, the construction of too much conventional generation capacity, and a low Co2 price.

But it says the most important driver has been the “remarkable” increase of renewable capacity, and in particular solar, mainly in Germany.

Solar, as is noted in a previous report about the solar “revolution”, is “cannibalising” the earnings of the centralised generators, which are unable to cut their output to changing demand conditions, and will be increasingly exposed to times when they have to generate power when the fuel cost is higher than the spot price.

The UBS analysis goes through a range of scenarios in its “base case” – including the addition of 49GW of wind and solar in the next five years, the closure of 6GW of nuclear, and 25GW of coal and gas – about three times what has already been announced. And it assumes relatively stable prices for carbon, coal, gas and oil.

This base case scenario shows relatively stable baseload prices, but peak prices plunge because of the increasing “cannibalisation” from solar power. .By 2020, UBS predicts, the gross margin for coal-fired generation is around zero and the capacity factors of the plants – the percentage of time they are used – falls dramatically: brown coal to 66 per cent from 73 per cent, black coal to 37 per cent from 47 per cent, and gas to 18 per cent from 30 per cent.

Even assuming a 5 per cent peak capacity rating for wind, and zero for solar , UBS says that at least 30 per cent of the central European coal fleet and 30 per cent of the gas fleet need to close just to maintain cash flows at the depleted 2012 levels.

Already, the impact of reduced demand, growing renewables, and rooftop solar, is causing a decline in output in coal generation, bringing capacity factors down sharply, particularly for black coal generators.

As many as 115,000 people die in India each year from coal-fired power plant pollution, costing the country about $4.6 billion, according to a groundbreaking new study released today.

This report, by the Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust, is the first full study of “the link between fine particle pollution and health problems in India, where coal is the fuel of choice and energy demands are skyrocketing.”

The findings are stunning. In addition to more than 100,000 premature deaths, it links millions of cases of asthma and respiratory ailments to coal exposure.

It counts 10,000 children under the age of 5 as fatal victims last year alone.

“I didn’t expect the mortality figures per year to be so high,” said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the Conservation Action Trust.

115,000 people die earlier than they should because of coal pollution — 10,000 children. Millions of cases of breathing problems from fossil fuel addiction.

$4.6 billion is about 250 billion rupees .

The authors had to model their own data because India does not provide good open-source monitoring information at the plant level.

The report does not focus specifically on climate impacts , but it does outline the critical importance of navigating India away from reliance on dirty fossil fuels and investing in clean renewable energy.

Climate impacts health, and so does the dirty fossil fuel that causes climate change.

Beijing is about to introduce a variety of new policies that should help to speed up the rate of electric vehicle adoption in the city, and help to reduce its dangerous levels of air pollution, according to state media reports.

Among the most significant of these new policies is a £13,000 subsidy for electric vehicles.

Another is a complete bypass of the infamous license plate lottery. “Officials are working on plans to introduce a new maximum purchase subsidy of 120,000 yuan for electric cars, while also allowing electric vehicles to obtain license plates without participating in the city’s plate lottery,” BusinessGreen reports.

It’s estimated that about 5,000 new electric vehicles will hit Beijing’s roads this year, including around 3,000 electric buses and taxis.

The aggressive new policies are largely being put forward as a means to help address the city’s significant air pollution problem.

“China is home to seven of the world’s 10 most polluted cities, according to a study from the Asian Development Bank and Beijing’s Tsinghua University, while car ownership is continuing to soar.”

The total annual cost for all of the illness, death, and lost productivity caused by air pollution in China is estimated to be higher than $100 billion by the World Bank.

That’s equal to about 3% of China’s annual gross domestic product. And of course these numbers don’t include the enormous damage done to the natural environment — the extinction of many animals, including the baji river dolphin, have been linked to the high levels of pollution in the region.

Bloomberg Energy Finance forecasts 22 percent compound annual growth in all solar PV, which means that by 2020 distributed solar (which will account for about 15 percent of total PV) could reach up to 10 percent of load in certain areas. If that happens, well:

Assuming a decline in load, and possibly customers served, of 10 percent due to Distributed Energy Resources DER (meaning Solar) with full subsidization of DER participants, the average impact on base electricity prices for non-DER participants will be a 20 percent or more increase in rates, and the ongoing rate of growth in electricity prices will double for non-DER participants (before accounting for the impact of the increased cost of serving distributed resources).

So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)

If nothing is done to check these trends, the U.S. electric utility as we know it could be utterly upended.

The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies. In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.

Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention. This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century. A friggin’ century, more or less without innovation, and now they’re supposed to scramble and be all hip and new-age? Unlikely.

So what’s to be done? You won’t be surprised to hear that EEI’s prescription is mainly focused on preserving utilities and their familiar business model.

But is that the best thing for electricity consumers?

Is that the best thing for the climate?

Yesterday, BuzzFlash wrote about how the de facto decision to let Alberta tar sands oil flow into the US -- and particularly Texas refineries and ports -- has already been made, beginning with the third segment of the Keystone Pipeline that is almost completed.

It's a symbolic victory -- and an assertion of big oil power -- because Alberta Tar Sands oil is already flowing into the US as revealed by two prominent branch line leaks in Arkansas and Michigan.

Governmental units allowed ExxonMobil, as the feds allowed BP after the Gulf oil leak, to keep the press away from the Pegasus pipeline leak of tar sands oil in Arkansas as best they could. Although ExxonMobil has not disclosed the full extent of the leak, some estimates are as high as 300,000 gallons, according to Treehugger.

Tar sands oil is 16 times more likely to breach a pipeline than regular crude oil, according to a February 2011 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation, Pipeline Safety Trust, and the Sierra Club. Yet Enbridge is determined to expand its capacity and its chances of risking more oil spills.

Indeed, InsideClimateNews won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on "' The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of ,' a project that began with a seven-month investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It broadened into an examination of national pipeline safety issue s, and how unprepared the nation is for the impending flood of imports of a more corrosive and more dangerous form of oil."

BuzzFlash received a response challenging yesterday's commentary about how the completion of the southern leg of the Keystone Pipeline will start the Alberta tar sands spigots flowing into Texas, where most of the carbon time bomb, toxic viscous oil will likely be shipped overseas.

The contention of the reader with a knowledge of the oil industry is that TransCanada has said it will not transport Alberta tar sands oil unless the new larger capacity northern pipeline is built. But why then is there a widespread belief that tar sands oil is already being stored up in Cushing, Oklahoma, the Keystone Pipeline hub, pending the opening of the southern leg?

Achieving substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system will take the better part of a century, and will depend on rapid and massive deployment of some mix of conservation, wind, solar, and nuclear, and possibly carbon capture and storage. … technologies that offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gases, such as the use of natural gas and perhaps carbon capture and storage, cannot substantially reduce climate risk in the next 100 years.

Delaying the rollout of the technologies is not an option however; the risks of environmental harm will be much greater in the second half of the century and beyond if we continue to rely on coal-based technologies. But what’s new is the first peer-reviewed analysis that “has predicted the climate effects of energy system transitions” with “a quantitative model … that includes life-cycle emissions and the central physics of greenhouse warming.”

For example, Christopher Monckton cited a climate economics review by Richard Tol in claiming: “…the overwhelming majority of economic studies on the subject find the cost of climate action greatly exceeds the cost of inaction…”

New York University survey results of economists with climate expertise when asked under what circumstances the USA should reduce its emissions Similarly, a recent letter published by the Wall Street Journal, signed by 16 climate “skeptics” misrepresented Nordhaus’ research as supporting climate inaction from an economic standpoint.

They focused on the cost-to-benefit ratio of various climate mitigation options, whereas it is the difference which tells us how much money is saved, and thus is the most important factor in determining which option is most economically beneficial. “The authors cite the “benefit-to-cost ratio” to support their argument.

This example shows why we should, in designing the most effective policies, look at benefits minus costs, not benefits divided by costs.”

Current economic studies also suggest that the most efficient policy is to raise the cost of CO 2 emissions substantially, either through cap-and-trade or carbon taxes, to provide appropriate incentives for businesses and households to move to low-carbon activities.” “The claim that cap-and-trade legislation or carbon taxes would be ruinous or disastrous to our societies does not stand up to serious economic analysis.

Despite the economic reality that CO2 limits will save money, the myth that they will harm the economy is a pervasive one. However, this myth is based on nothing more than a misunderstanding of climate science and economics, and misrepresentation of the climate science and economics body of research.

The world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to leading economists. "The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed," said Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics.

The Bank of England has also recognised that a collapse in the value of oil, gas and coal assets as nations tackle global warming is a potential systemic risk to the economy, with London being particularly at risk owing to its huge listings of coal.

The world's governments have agreed to restrict the global temperature rise to 2C, beyond which the impacts become severe and unpredictable. But Stern said the investors clearly did not believe action to curb climate change was going to be taken. "They can't believe that and also believe that the markets are sensibly valued now." "They only believe environmental regulation when they see it," said James Leaton, from Carbon Tracker and a former PwC consultant.

Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC, said: "The scale of 'listed' unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing. This report makes it clear that 'business as usual' is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term. [The market] is assuming it will get early warning, but my worry is that things often happen suddenly in the oil and gas sector."

HSBC warned that 40-60% of the market capitalisation of oil and gas companies was at risk from the carbon bubble, with the top 200 fossil fuel companies alone having a current value of $4tn, along with $1.5tn debt.

Citi bank warned investors in Australia's vast coal industry that little could be done to avoid the future loss of value in the face of action on climate change. "If the unburnable carbon scenario does occur, it is difficult to see how the value of fossil fuel reserves can be maintained, so we see few options for risk mitigation."

Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire fund manager who oversees $106bn of assets, said his company was on the verge of pulling out of all coal and unconventional fossil fuels , such as oil from tar sands. "The probability of them running into trouble is too high for me to take that risk as an investor."

From 1989 to 2002, several large US companies, including the oil companies Exxon and the US subsidiaries of Shell and BP, sponsored a lobbying organisation called the Global Climate Coalition , to counter the strengthening consensus that human carbon dioxide emissions posed a serious threat to the Earth’s climate.

The climate scientist Benjamin Santer accused the GCC of deliberately suppressing scientific information that supported the IPCC consensus. ''Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next.'' ''Companies composed of highly skilled and trained people can't live in denial of mounting evidence gathered by hundreds of the most reputable scientists in the world.''

From BigOil Websites:

Exxon: "Rising greenhouse gas emissions pose significant risks to society andecosystems."

Shell : "CO2 emissions must be reduced to avoid serious climate change. To manage CO2, governments and industry must work together. Government action is needed and we support an international framework that puts a price on CO2, encouraging the use of all CO2-reducing technologies."

BP : "According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , warming of the climate system is happening and is caused mainly by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Results from models assessed by the IPCC suggest that to stand a reasonable chance of limiting warming to no more than 2˚C, global emissions should peak before 2020 and be cut by between 50-85% by 2050."

Chevron : "At Chevron, we recognize and share the concerns of governments and the public about climate change. The use of fossil fuels to meet the world's energy needs is a contributor to an increase in greenhouse gases —mainly carbon dioxide and methane—in the Earth's atmosphere. There is a widespread view that this increase is leading to climate change, with adverse effects on the environment."

The denizens of "skeptic" climate blogs and the majority of Republican Party politicians will find little in the way of support for their anti-consensus views on the climate webpages of the big oil companies. Nevertheless, the damage done to the public perception of climate science by the GCC and other oil-company-sponsored organizations lingers on.

Despite this, all of these Really Big Oil governments participate in the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change and none of them publicly dispute the science. However, when it comes to the scale of reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change , the fact is that the oil industry will have to go into a production decline very shortly and fossil fuel production will have to shrink dramatically by mid-century, especially in industrialized countries where the IOCs make most of their sales

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On the basis of my own involvement in the climate debate, it seems fair to conclude that individuals who reject human-caused climate change tend to be stubborn in their beliefs and it is a rare occurrence when somebody admits that they have changed their minds due to the mounting evidence. In contrast, oil-producing corporations and countries seem to have embraced the scientific consensus quite readily, even though their current business models are incompatible with the emissions cutbacks that will be required for mitigation.

Even though big oil companies are, for the most part, no longer actively questioning the fundamentals of climate science, they are spending millions in the 2012 presidential elections in the USA to support politicians perceived as more inclined to approve projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline and more ready to reduce regulatory burdens and allow more drilling on federal lands.

More details on this can be found in a report by the Sustainable Prosperity think tank. Although some of the oil company climate action statements may appear to the cynical to be mere greenwash , some actions have produced real results, notably efforts to reduce methane leakage.

That’s probably the best that climate activists can hope for from commercial organizations whose business is in extracting hydrocarbons fuels from the Earth so that their customers can burn them and dispose of the waste into the atmosphere.

But there’s also an important lesson here for those individuals who persist in rejecting or downplaying the consensus on climate change: if the big oil companies can suck it up and face scientific reality, why can’t you?

The suits over at Shell (NYSE: RDS-A) have been in the hot seat over the past year or so after burning through more than $5 billion to tap Arctic oil reservoirs in the Chukchi Sea.

As I've discussed in these pages before, the risk-versus-reward scenario for Shell's Chukchi Sea adventure never made much sense. The independent oil producer simply had too little experience in Arctic oil production and too many mishaps last year (including a damaged containment dome that was crushed by the weight of unforgiving Arctic waters) to make it a particularly profitable venture.

Moreover, after two of President Obama's advisors called for a permanent halt to oil exploration in the Arctic, long-time investors got skittish.

Truth is — and I've said this time and time again — Shell would've been better off working with the Russians to tap Arctic oil treasures, as producers have more experience in those climates and the regulatory environment is less stringent.

Certainly this is what Exxon (NYSE: XOM) did a couple of months ago after signing a deal with Russian petroleum giant Rosneft (PINK SHEETS: RNFTF). Back in February, the two companies approved a deal that resulted in some easy money for Russia and an additional 234,000 square miles of oil exploration for Exxon in the Russian Arctic.

It looks like Shell is now heading down the same path...

Last week we learned Shell inked a deal with Russia's Gazprom Neft (PINK SHEETS: GZPFY) to jointly drill in the frigid waters of the Russian Arctic.

Finally, Shell strikes Arctic oil!

This was the best decision Shell could've made in regards to its quest for Arctic oil.

After all, Russia is the gatekeeper to about 70% of all Arctic oil. And the truth is it's really up to Mother Russia as to who gets what and how much.

Now, while Exxon and Shell are actively holding hands with Russian roughnecks, Mao's descendants are also siphoning off the Russian teat.

Last month Vladimir Putin handed over a share of its Arctic exploration licenses to China — a near perfect deal for the world's largest oil and gas producer and the world's biggest energy consumer.

Under a new agreement that was signed on March 22, China will now have the opportunity to double its oil imports from Rosneft as well as begin construction on a pipeline that'll run Russian gas to the Middle Kingdom.

But for the big score, China's foaming at the mouth over its chance to explore three new offshore Arctic regions with Rosneft...

This, by the way, is all part of deal that involves Exxon, EniSpA (NYSE: E), and Statoil ASA (NYSE: STO) ponying up to help finance the drilling.

The IMF report lists several of these reasons, including the fact that it's simply impossible to obtain data for all fossil fuel subsidies in all countries.  However, the biggest contributor to the conservative dollar figure is related to the social cost of carbon.

The social cost of carbon is an estimate of the direct effects of carbon emissions on the economy, and takes into consideration such factors as net agricultural productivity loss, human health effects, property damages from sea level rise, and changes in ecosystemservices.  It's the economic damage caused by CO2 via climate change. 

The IMF report uses an average US government agency value of $25 per tonne of CO2 emissions; however, there is substantial evidence and research suggesting the value should be much higher. 

Dave Roberts provides some references in his post on the report, and we go into detail on the subject here.

The true cost of carbon emissions could easily be four times higher, at $100 per tonne. Chris Hope, climate policy researcher at Cambridge University, has argued that an estimate around $150 per tonne may be more accurate.  

Thus the true cost of our fossil fuel subsidies could be over $4 trillion per year, or over 6% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). 

 Compare that to the estimated cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels, which are generally on the order of 1% of GDP, and it becomes clear that our current priorities are completely backwards, pumping trillions of dollars into our fossil fuel addiction when we should be trying as hard as we can to break the habit

THERE ARE SIGNS THE CLIMATE movement could be on the verge of a remarkable and surprising victory. 

If we read the current context correctly, and if the movement can adjust its strategy to capture the opportunity presented, it could usher in the fastest and most dramatic economic transformation in history.

This would include the removal of the oil, coal and gas industries from the economy in just a few decades and their replacement with new industries and, for the most part, entirely new companies. 

It would be the greatest transfer of wealth and power between industries and countries the world has ever seen.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that this kind of economic transition is OK.

That's how markets work and while it will be challenging and require huge effort, it will work out. Yes, huge amounts of wealth will be lost and gained in the process, industries, countries and cities will face massive economic and practical restructuring challenges and many people will suffer in the process.

But that's how market shifts happen.

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe this process and to explain why it's the underpinning strength of capitalism, calling it: "A process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."

But while we can be comfortable that this process will deliver the required outcome, it's not going to be smooth or pleasant for many participants. It will rather be messy, highly controversial and see huge amounts of value and employment both destroyed and created as the economy restructures around the necessary reality of a post fossil fuel economy. 

I'm neither relaxed about this nor naïve about the scale of the challenge. I just accept that it's now inevitable. I also know we can do it and that we simply have no choice.

Of course, the losers will fight all the way to the end, using every argument, manoeuvre and delay they can think of. We should expect nothing else of them and, realistically, most of us would do likewise faced with similar circumstances. But they will still lose.

I do not however think we should demonise the fossil fuel industry or the people involved in it. The job to remove this industry has to be done - the future of civilisation literally depends on it - but we can do this firmly and clearly without making it personal. As I've said in recent speeches on this topic - with some humour but a serious message - "we have to remove the coal, oil and gas industries from the economy with love and compassion."

This is the tough love of responsible parenting - the kids don't like it but it's still the right thing to do.

So with some surprise, this is where we find ourselves. It still won't happen without focused and determined effort, but for the first time, we can envisage victory in the decades long fight on climate change. The science is clear, the technology is ready, significant sections of the elite are on side and the financial momentum is with us.

And this time, the economics is playing on the same side as the environment.

Just in time.

Even with the current boom in oil production , we should not get our hopes up for a significant drop in prices any time soon.

In an article from the Washington Post, Author Brad Plumer explains, “The big thing to remember is that oil prices are a function of both supply and demand.

If world demand for oil rises faster than producers can pump the stuff out, prices will go up. And that’s what is happening now.” Although the world is producing more oil than ever before, demand for this resource continues to soar.

For the majority of 2012, world petroleum production averaged 88.8 million barrels per day, 2 million barrels more than in 2010.

The International Energy Agency projected that oil production in the U.S. will continue along this path until 2020, possibly even longer, because of companies that are extracting “unconventional” oil from shale rock and other sources.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration found that China boosted its petroleum consumption by roughly 500,000 barrels per day in 2011, and another 420,000 barrels per day in 2012.

The way most states are headed, residents will likely see $4 per gallon by summer, if not sooner. “Speculators in future oil prices are already sniffing an opportunity and if they become optimistic that the $4 barrier can be reached and overcome, they will start investing heavily in oil futures and the prices at the pump will reflect that,” he added

Their coal mines along the West Virginia border are still working, having survived a painful 30-year decline in the industry. But a new threat has pushed into Ohio, imperiling the primacy of coal here and all over the country.

“I feel worried about the future, that natural gas is a threat to us,” said Tim Merryman, 54. “ Some of those coal plants will convert , and that’s a threat to coal guys.”

For more than 200 years, coal has been king in Ohio, occupying a privileged position in state politics and as the fuel of choice for local power plants.

A natural-gas rush that has hurtled through the country over the past five years has pushed its way into the coal fields of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.

Entire villages in eastern Ohio are leasing their land for gas drilling, and huge energy companies that relied on coal to generate electricity are turning to natural gas.

Long the primary fuel for the country’s power plants, coal has been squeezed by cheap natural gas and tightening environmental regulations.

With the arrival of gas companies in Ohio, the coal industry and the towns and people tied to it find themselves grappling with the complex risks and rewards unlocked by the national energy shift.

“Is the coal industry suffering?

You bet,” said Thomas Stewart, executive vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association. “Not too long ago, coal was king and natural gas was the ugly stepchild.

Industry lobbies and their political allies assert that the Environmental Protection Agency has declared “a war on coal” in the form of tighter pollution rules. But independent analysts say cheap gas has played as crucial a role as regulation in eroding coal’s supremacy.

Ohio has a long history of oil and gas production, but this latest wave of natural-gas development is still in its early stages, unlike in Pennsylvania, where thousands of wells already are producing.

The gas here is so-called wet gas, more valuable than the “dry gas” prevalent in Pennsylvania because it is extracted with certain liquids such as ethane and butane that can also be sold on commodity markets.

The country’s second-largest power company and a huge coal consumer, AEP, based in Columbus, has been burning more natural gas than in previous years because increased availability has driven down the price.

As part of a recent legal settlement with the EPA and other parties, AEP agreed to stop burning coal at power plants in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio by 2015. But as gas elbows its way into coal country, disputes have started to emerge.

The Smith-Goshen Landowners Group has leased 35,000 acres for gas drilling, and nearly all of it sits above seams belonging to Murray Energy, the country’s largest privately owned coal company.