Roger Pielke, Jr. and Dan Sarewitz have a new Op-ed in the Financial Times on energy development and poor nations:

Climate policy robs the world’s poor of their hopes
We need technologies that work in the US and in Pakistan, say Roger Pielke and Daniel Sarewitz

Excerpt: Having failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to begin with.

Legislation to cap US carbon emissions was defeated in Congress in 2009. But that did not prevent the Obama administration from imposing a cap on emissions from energy projects of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a US federal agency that finances international development. Other institutions of the rich world that have decided to limit support for fossil fuel energy projects include the World Bank and the European Investment Bank.

Such decisions have painful consequences. A recent report from the non-profit Center for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it would supply about 90m people – three times as many.

In Nigeria, the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment . . . in residential and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from plentiful local sources. Read more …

Max Boykoff has a new article published in the March 2014 edition of Nature Climate Change:

Boykoff, M. T. (2014). Media discourse on the climate slowdown. Nature Climate Change, Volume 4, pp. 156-158, Published March.

Media discourse on the climate slowdown
We must not fall victim to decontextualized and a historical media accounting of climate trends.

Excerpt: In August 1968, protestors from the Students for a Democratic Society — an activist movement in the United States — repeatedly hurled the phrase ‘the whole world is watching’ outside the hotel in Chicago where the Democratic National Convention was being held. As Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin later documented in a book1 titled by the same phrase, media coverage of the clashes accompanying the refrain then served to draw wider visibility to their antiwar activities and claims. He found that implications from the media representations were twofold: first, coverage largely framed the protests as a fringe action promoted by marginalized actors; however, second, the increased media coverage of the Students for a Democratic Society actions actually boosted awareness and bolstered member enrolments in the student-led movement.

These insights from Gitlin, along with those of other scholars across a range of perspectives, help inform considerations of the interactions between climate science, policy, media and the public today. Specifically, these findings guide our thinking about the swirling media discourses of a global warming pause, or hiatus or slowdown, that gained momentum, especially in this past year.

Discourses are essentially sets of categories, ideas and concepts that give meaning to phenomena. Maarten Hajer has pointed out that they can “frame certain problems … [and can] dominate the way a society conceptualizes the world”2. Through media representations, framing processes have had important effects on marginalizing some discourses while contributing to the amplification of others. Among early media discourses that sought to explain this climate phenomenon, environmental scientist Bob Carter penned an op-ed in The Telegraph of London in 2006 called ‘There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998’3 where he pointed to University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit records of stalled global surface temperatures. Blog posts and media stories in the years that followed (for example, Real Climate, Watts Up With That, Tom Nelson, Andrew Revkin at DotEarth and the New York Times) logically sought to better understand this trend. Read more …

Editor’s Note: Marisa McNatt researched information for this story while traveling in Copenhagen, Denmark as part of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Climate Media Fellowship program.

Excerpt from The Boulder Stand by Marisa McNatt

What if there were a way for Boulder to visualize what would happen if the city were to take more aggressive action for reducing carbon emissions, or to map what it would look like to meet its renewable energy targets through municipalization? Lego blocks and “Change Cards” provide just such a tool, offering insight into the technological, economic and political challenges to making Boulder’s clean-energy and carbon-reducing visions a reality.

In July I traveled to the E.U. as a Heinrich Böll Climate Media Fellow, to learn about policies that the EU and Germany are implementing to transition to a carbon-free economy and translate them to U.S. policy-makers.  My first stop took me to Copenhagen, home to the inventors of “Changing the Game” — a game that allows you to dream up your ideal energy scenario for a region in Europe in 2030 and see if you can get there under realistic technological and economic conditions.  The Game uses Lego towers to visually capture the basic principles of the energy system.  As you implement policy measures throughout the game using “Change Cards” that modify the energy system, the Lego towers are altered in tandem, so that the changes are visualized.

Participating in a round of Changing the Game on day two of my travels, I learned that even with a well-educated and ambitious group, it’s pretty difficult to overcome the technological and economic constraints to meeting renewable energy and carbon reduction targets.  Despite the cultural and political differences between Europe and the U.S., there are similar constraints to transitioning to a carbon-free economy on either side of the Atlantic.  Even for Boulder, the Game offers insight into what it will take to reach municipal climate and clean energy goals.

The recent election shows that Boulder is still intent on exploring taking control of its electricity supply.  The city is pursing municipalization in part because of the possibility to more actively implement clean and renewable energy.  If Boulder adopts a carbon neutrality goal for 2050 (or an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if that goal can’t be met) then more renewables will have to be part of the picture — a goal that the City Council is expected to approve next year.  A City Council memo notes that to reach the long-term carbon neutrality goal, energy from renewable sources will need to increase “by as much as 50 percent in the next seven to 10 years.”

The city of Boulder’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) includes multiple measures and city assistance that individuals and organizations can take advantage of to reduce their carbon footprint, from building more efficient buildings, to using public transit.  Yet, even with CAP in place, Boulder has continually failed to reach past carbon reduction goals, like the goal to be 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.  Although voluntary measures are politically more acceptable, Changing the Game allows you to see the progress that can be made toward carbon reduction goals when climate policies are mandatory – and if municipalization were to become a reality.

In the late-afternoon of day two of my journey, I bused to Central Copenhagen to meet with energy consultant Julia F. Chozas, an expert in offshore wind and wave energy and a Changing the Game pro.  In an old brick building, several floors up, I watched Chozas setup the Legos-based game, alongside water, juice, biscuits and a bowl of pears to get us through the potentially three-hour-plus game. Read more …