It’s Getting Hot In Here

After a long break from blogging, I’m glad to have the time to get back! First of all, from my title you will have probably noticed that I’m partially against cellulosic and plug-in hybrids as the solution to the world food crisis that biofuels and oil are helping to fuel. Sure, cellulosic can ensure we don’t use corn for ethanol and we don’t change wheat, barley, and other crops to corn fields for ethanol production. Sure, we can use plug-in hybrids and, if we’re lucky to scale renewables enough, power them with clean electricity and wean ourselves off of coal and oil. But have you stopped to think about what that means? I bet Mr. Henry Ford would have told you that you don’t have to think about it, that you should just go ahead and support the “real” solutions… Right!

In the last two weeks, biofuels have been attacked more than ever before from many angles. The world food crisis has become so severe that anybody who supports any biofuel that either uses food crops or takes land that would have otherwise gone to food production is criticized sharply. The arguments against biofuels, especially corn ethanol, are clear.

·         First, ethanol produced from corn takes a chunk away from the corn that would otherwise go to direct human purposes, excluding livestock (of course, nobody ever questioned before the fact that directing corn and soybeans to cows makes the supply available for exports lower, and therefore keeps prices relatively higher; in other words, food prices before the current crisis could have been much lower if it wasn’t because of the luxury of eating high quantities of meat; maybe a big tax on meat can lower other food prices, which politician will be smart enough to propose this?).

·         Second, as the demand for corn and soybeans surges, land that was used for other purposes is converted to corn and soy fields, therefore increasing the cost of the other crops (wheat, barley, etc.) because they’re less available.

·         Lastly, using ethanol has no impact on how much oil we use because the energy balance is 0 or negative. On top of all this, we are losing benefits from cheaper ethanol that could be imported from Brazil if our goal was really to get rid of oil at the lowest possible cost.

So, we know all these things. We also know that the increasing price of oil, now nearly $125 per barrel, is also pushing food prices up, and that decreasing water supplies and crazier weather is also pitching in into the food price hikes we’re seeing. What we also know is that every policymaker and the public at large is thinking that the way out of this is making ethanol from something that doesn’t take up food or converting our cars to plug-in hybrids to have them run on electricity. So lots of money is going into cellulosic research and lots of venture capitalists are fully funding new ventures that hope to bring to market “environmentally-friendly” plug-in electric vehicles. At the same time, GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and other car companies are stepping up their development of these same technologies to bring such cars to market soon. What’s the problem with this?

Continue reading ‘Cellulosic, Plug-In Hybrids Are Biofuel Solutions? Think Again!’

Over the years, many island nations have fought hard to be heard in the international arena about the effects that global warming is already having on them. Some islands have already been lost in the Pacific, and the forecast is that many more will go in the coming decades, especially if nothing is done to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions globally. Now, in the Caribbean, the picture is looking bleak as well. Today, the top newspaper in the Dominican Republic reported that global warming will eliminate tourism by 2050 under business-as-usual.

The Caribbean islands, for the exception of Cuba and Haiti, are largely dependent on tourism. Coastal development for the purpose of tourism is growing in the region at a high rate despite a recent regional decline in tourism. In the Caribbean, tourism accounts for 15% of the gross domestic product, with higher rates in many islands, and over 2.4 million jobs (about 16%). It has also pushed populations towards the coasts. For example, in the Dominican Republic, over 50% of the population lives near coasts where a 6-m sea-level rise would plunge them into the sea.

Continue reading ‘Global Warming To Eliminate Tourism in the Caribbean’

At the close of the Bali climate change negotiations, we are left again with the disappointment of the Bush administration and all the other climate criminals in Washington. These fossil-fuel-phillic people have slowed down negotiations, stripped key renewable energy provisions in the US energy bill, and pretty much told the rest of the world that they don’t care if global warming cripples their economies. Ted Glick, now in a climate emergency fast for over 100 days, recently said the truth about these climate criminals, and Gore made it clear at Bali that the world must move without the US for the moment. Of course, wonderful things are building on the ground in the US, but we’ll have to wait until 2009 to get seriously going on this issue in the US.

But we don’t have to stop here. We have to make 2008 bigger than 2007. So, to kickoff the year, I created a petition, with the help of peer organizers, for youth around the world to tell world leaders that we want, in 2008, mandates to get rid of coal use by 2020. Dr. James Hansen from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies has made it clear that we can’t continue burning coal if we can’t capture it, and that it must stop within the next decade, or else we risk runaway climate that will literally cook the planet. So, youth have to tell world leaders that we want exactly that. On January 1st, we need to send these leaders a strong message with international media on this Youth Call to End Coal by 2020!

To make this really big, we need 10,000-100,000 youth from around the world to sign the petition and get ready to do media work on January 1st about it in every major global warming polluter. So, what are you waiting for? Sign the petition now and tell your friends to do the same! Go!

From November 16-18, students from across the state of New York gathered at Cornell to launch the NY Student Sustainability Coalition (NYSSC, pronounced NISC). The New York Climate Summit ended with a structured coalition of campus student groups that will work from now on with the goal of getting climate legislation passed in Albany in 2008 that will require the state to reduce its emissions 80% by 2050.

The Summit included students from Cornell University, Fredonia College, Ithaca College, New Explorations High School, NYU, Plattsburgh University, St. Lawrence University, University of Rochester, Wells College, and Westchester Community College. It also included members of the Central NY Climate Change Action Group, Sustainable Tompkins, and Energy Independent Caroline.

Our strategic plan includes a push for New York to be a leader on global warming at the upcoming Presidential Debate on Global Warming in New Hampshire, a coordinated Focus The Nation event where we invite legislators and demand them to state their position on global warming and a bill to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 in the state, and a Lobby Day during St. Valentine’s Day (Date Your Elected Officials, Show Love For Warming Action).

Our website will soon be up at www.nyssc.org, but in the meantime people (especially NY students) can visit our google group.

I’m going to join everyone in saying that Powershift was absolutely mind-blowing! The energy there was incredible and no words can describe what we all felt when we were together as a growing movement with its eyes on a clean energy future. We are ready to take this to the next level. It’s Getting Hot In Here should continue to grow and tell the stories from around the world (see here). I wanted to share with everybody Ted Glick’s Future Hope Column for this week. Ted, one of the best activists in the nation, has been fasting for over 60 days now. He was at Powershift sharing with all of us young people the incredible energy that this movement has. His column sums up what most of us feel like after Powershift:

“Words fail me as I try to figure out how to capture in words the profound significance of the student-based Power Shift conference which took place November 2-5 at the University of Maryland and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Historic—Powerful—Deep—Amazing—Awesome—Astounding—Incredible—Hope at the Highest Level: these are the adjectives and phrases that come to mind.

So what happened?

Continue reading ‘“We Want More”’

So we all want the world to be climate neutral, right? Yea, some people spit out numbers like 50% and 80%, but in the end we just want to get rid of fossil fuels for good. Those that claim that fossil fuels are going to be an important part of the energy mix for the world in the future are either ignorant, are not aware of what global warming is already doing, or are simply obsessed with fossil fuels. Sorry if it annoys anybody, but this is true. So, assuming we want a climate neutral world (with no net greenhouse gases coming from humans) or perhaps a climate positive world, we need to address sectors like electricity and transportation, among others. In the transportation sector, there has been a huge push for different fuels (biofuels) and for increased fuel mileage. Unfortunately, proponents of these seem to also be obsessed with fossil fuels and, particularly, cars.

Let’s start with biofuels. Ethanol and biodiesel are the big ones today. Ethanol from corn, sugar cane, and cellulose (which is far away into the future anyways), and biodiesel from vegetable oil from any source. Ethanol from corn is simply an extremely bad choice. First of all, there isn’t even consensus on whether corn ethanol is energy positive. The numbers range from slightly energy positive to slightly energy negative. The energy positive folks are simply supported more widely because people want to jump into the lucrative corn ethanol bandwagon. If positive, the small gains are extremely small and are largely outweighed by the fact that we’re depleting more farmland to do this. At the same time, it’s taking a huge amount of corn agriculture and shooting up prices like crazy, which may be good for the big food companies, but bad for people in Mexico and elsewhere. So those people investing in corn ethanol are investing in something that will come to an end. At best, they’ll cash out of the boom, but many will be left severely hurt.

Continue reading ‘Transportation in a Climate Neutral World’

This is the first post of an ongoing series to show the United States how Latin America, with limited resources, is leading on renewable energy.

While there is a lot of debate about a national renewable energy standard and more than half of the states have some kind of RPS, where does the rest of the world stand on renewable energy targets? As an Hispanic, I’m very interested in what Latin America and the Caribbean do about global warming, not just because we need to show leadership to northerners, but also because this is our future. Most countries in Latin America depend on oil imports, and most of them are also already being and will be impacted by global warming. So, not surprisingly, we are seriously trying to be on top of this.

Everybody knows about what Brazil is doing with ethanol, but what about other countries in Latin America? And what does the future hold for renewable energy in this region. I’m from the Caribbean, specifically the Dominican Republic, and I’m very involved in what’s happening in that country and elsewhere around the region. Since 2005, I’ve been visiting the country quite often, helping found an organization that promotes sustainable development and now looking into renewable energy ventures in that country. So, what is the Dominican Republic doing about global warming? In short, it’s emissions are going up, but it has a renewable energy standard that says 25% renewables by 2025. Let’s take a closer look at the details.

Continue reading ‘Renewable Energy in LAC: The Dominican Republic Set To Lead’

Suppose you’re a business major attending a great business school. Your chances of being wealthy are pretty high. Ten years later, you decide to live near a poor neighborhood, but your standard of living is high (i.e. you have more than what you need and you produce lots of wastes). There are no services to pick up waste, so you decide to dump it in the area where the poor people live. They, on the other hand, don’t produce as much waste, and probably can’t do more than complain because you’ve got the big bucks and you can get them into trouble if you wanted to. You try to calm them by explaining that there’s no harm and that they should go on their daily lives as usual. But eventually, some scientists get together and show this waste is killing these people, and morally it is clear to the judge that you’ve gotta clean up your act. Not only do you have to take out their stuff, but you gotta figure out where your waste is going (or you gotta stop producing it) and you gotta compensate them for their loss. Or did you think you were playing some game on X-Box where you do whatever the hell you wanted at no cost?
Continue reading ‘The Tipping Point: A Climate Neutral World Now!’

In today’s The Oregonian, an article painted what we have been hearing as a very dire future for Greenland and West Antarctica. Now, new data has shocked scientists because Greenland, like the Arctic sea ice, is melting much faster than the most optimistic projections of the IPCC, as expected. You see, the IPCC has people who really know their thing, and people who kind of know and so want to fight about what is said. From now on, we should base what we know about climate on current observations, not a document that will be unchanged for at least 5 years.

At the UK Climate Camps, organized by climate activists who see the growth in aviation a huge barrier to eliminating global warming pollution, George Monbiot said his recent book, Heat, is now outdated because of the recently recorded effects of global warming, which point to the fact that the industrialized world must be climate neutral within 2 decades to perhaps have a chance of preventing the ice sheets from fighting back.

Perhaps scarier than that was the idea that as these massive ice sheets melt, the land beneath it springs back. What if the land beneath these ice sheets can influence land elsewhere? Another scary observation is the fact that the Arctic tundra, as opposed the the Alaskan tundra, has been found to contain massive amounts of carbon as well that could spontaneously be released with moderate warming. All this points to a clear picture. We need a climate neutral world as soon as possible.

Continue reading ‘Ice Sheets Speak: Do or Die’

The U.S. climate movement is rapidly strengthening. Global warming is becoming one of the top issues for business, youth, labor, and other communities, and we hear calls for immediate action everywhere.

In the last two years alone, there has been a surge in public opinion and activism about this issue, including carbon neutral businesses and schools, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the IPCC report and other recent scientific studies, and commitments by other nations to fight global warming aggressively. All this has led to the U.S. movement to rally behind one simple call: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by 80% below 1990 levels by the year 2050. Clearly, this is an aggressive target, making many in Washington uncomfortable, but is it enough to save our society from climate tipping points? Let’s take a closer look. Continue reading ‘Our National Climate Target: A Worthy Discussion’