Here’s a map of CO2 released from fossil fuels (with red and yellow marking the biggest pollution points), compiled from 2002 data by the Vulcan Project at Purdue University. It’s a map of emissions, which isn’t quite the same as airborne concentrations, but it gives a sense of where pollution happens:
Here is the map:
There are two reasons why I haven’t had much sleep the past few nights. The first is about three-and-a-half feet tall, wears diapers, has long eyelashes and a dangerously cute smile. It’s our little boy Sebastian. He’s 18 months old and the poor guy is getting three of his molars at the same time. During the daylight hours, all is good. But when the sun goes down and the moon comes up, the howling begins, and his mom can only nurse for so long. A few back-arching, full-throated roars would jolt anyone awake, but lately I’ve found it particularly difficult to get back to sleep. I’m starting a new job. The mind races. I left my post recently as executive director of Rainforest Action Network to become the next executive director of the Sierra Club. I’ll be the sixth director of the Club in its 118-year history, and I’ll be following people like Carl Pope, Mike McCloskey, David Brower, and Club founder John Muir. Gotta be on my game!
Via Framing Science, this Stanford study (PDF) shows that the decline in concern regarding global warming some polls are finding is not entirely accurate.
Here is a video of Professor Krosnick discussing the survey:
Separately, an international survey of 9,000 people in 22 countries had the following findings:
About 16% of the respondents were from the United States.
And yet another Gallup poll shows Republicans as outliers in terms of understanding environmental issues. While Democrats and Independents think the quality of the environment has improved since Barack Obama took office, Republicans aren’t so sure:
Nobel Prize-winning economists and scientists will deliver a letter to the U.S. Senate today, urging lawmakers to require immediate cuts in global warming emissions. The letter was signed by more than 2,000 prominent U.S. economists and climate scientists, including eight Nobel laureates, 32 National Academy of Sciences members, 11 MacArthur “genius award” winners, and three National Medal of Science recipients.
“The nation’s leading scientists and economists have joined together to tell policymakers we agree about the urgency of addressing climate change now,” said James McCarthy, one of the letter’s organizers and a biological oceanography professor at Harvard University. “The bad news is the science of climate change is indisputable. The good news is we can cost-effectively cut the emissions that are causing it.”
Here is the letter:
Today the Senate Energy Committee will begin debating a weatherization bill known as Home Star that aims to make American homes more energy efficient, while creating thousands of American jobs in the process. Home Star has the potential to significantly reduce residential energy consumption, saving consumers almost $10 billion over the next ten years, while cutting greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to the removal of more than 600,000 cars from American highways.
Even more importantly given the state of our economy, the legislation is projected to create 168,000 local jobs in communities all across the country. That, more than anything else, is what Americans urgent want, particularly the people who have been hardest hit by the tough economic times – poor people and people of color.
While job creation is the consensus number one national priority at the moment, global climate change threatens not only the long-term health of the planet but our economic viability as well. We believe that the solution to both these crucial problems is a clean energy economy that creates million of green jobs that do not harm the planet. Home Star moves us in the right direction. And it is exactly the kind of innovative thinking and leadership that the American people want.
That was evident this week in the results of a survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies which found that African Americans — who as a group were disproportionately impacted by the recession — said they were willing to pay more for clean energy in order to combat global warming.
During the last three weeks of November 2009, The Joint Center, a Washington think tank focused on African American issues, surveyed 500 black adults in each of four states — Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina. By considerable majorities in each state [See Table 6 of Survey], they said global warming was a major or moderate problem and that they were willing to pay an extra $10 each month on their electric bill if it would help fight global warming.
All we need now is leadership. Home Star is a small but significant step in the right direction.
Washington these days is spending a lot of time obsessing over its own gridlock, with each party blaming the other for the lack of action on issues critical to the American people. The completely broken process on health care reform stands as the prime example.
Outside of Washington however, the only concern is the ragged state of the job market and what is being done to fix it. Congress needs to pass a comprehensive jobs bill in order to further stimulate the economy, and that bill needs to include provisions that direct both investments and hiring to the people and communities where they are most needed. As we continue to debate the size and shape of such a jobs bill, Home Star is a good first step that can quickly generate jobs, many of them in low-income neighborhoods, and boost appliance sales.
Home Star, and the larger question of job creation, gives Washington a chance to break out of the current cycle of gridlock, recrimination and failure and do something for the American people at a time when we urgently need the government to be aggressively working on our most urgent interests.
Home Star will help three million American families retrofit their homes to make them more energy efficient, and will save those consumers as much as $9.5 billion over ten years. The program dedicates $200 million to provide access to low-interest financing for homeowners to weatherize their homes or buy new, more energy efficient appliances.
In addition, the majority of the goods used for home weatherization are made in the U.S., and as a result the program will also boost domestic production in the building materials manufacturing sector. This sector is operating at less than 60 percent of capacity today, with an unemployment rate of almost 25 percent.
The country needs the economic jolt that Home Star can provide and Congress needs to rise to the occasion and pass it as soon as possible. If it gets to the President’s desk he is sure to sign it. Last week in Georgia he laid out the stakes around Home Star: “We know it will make our economy less dependent on fossil fuels, helping to protect the planet for future generations,” he said. “But I want to emphasize that Home Star will also create business and spur hiring up and down the economy.”
We are for that.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the CEO of Green For All
“I might. I’m looking at it. I think it’s a reasonable thing to do,” the North Dakota Democrat told reporters this morning after speaking at an energy efficiency conference on the Hill.
Senator Rockefeller’s legislation can be viewed here.
On March 5, the state Senate approved a measure to increase Colorado’s renewable energy standard (RES) to 30% by 2020, and on March 8th, the House finalized the bill, sending it to Gov. Bill Ritter for his signature.The legislation confirms Colorado’s leadership in nurturing the development of clean, renewable energy just six years after voters approved the state’s first RES – 10% by 2015. In 2006 the state legislature doubled the RES to 20% by 2020, and with enactment of the latest measure only California will have a set a more ambitious state requirement than Colorado, 33% by 2020.
Here is the legislation:
That is accurate, but it doesn’t get at the most striking data. The most important finding in the survey is the fact that clean energy and mass transit investments are vastly more popular than nuclear investments and offshore drilling.
Here is how Pew presents the data (Figure 1):
As a mini-case study on how informational graphics can add significant meaning to this sort of data, I’ve created a few simple charts.
This chart (Figure 2) shows the approval and disapproval numbers for the four policy options:
And this chart (Figure 3) shows the net approval numbers for the four policy options:
Presenting the information in text only format, as Pew chose to do in Figure 1, leaves the reader to their own devices to identify the most compelling data. While the data is technically accurate, it fails to bring the meaning of the data to the forefront. Pew’s accompanying analysis of the polling data also somehow fails to identify the massive gap in net approval for the policies they surveyed.
Creating a simple chart (Figure 2) based on the data itself adds significant value to the presentation of the data, especially for the casual reader. The reader can tell at a glance that clean energy investments are significantly more popular than polluting energy sources, and that unpopularity follows the opposite pattern.
Going one step further and doing simple arithmetic to determine the net approval for each of the policies in the survey, as I’ve done with Figure 3, brings the most striking data to the forefront. The fact that more than 50% of Americans support a variety of policies to produce-more or consume-less energy is not, in itself, especially meaningful. But the fact that the net approval for some of these policies is 40-60%, while it is barely 10% for others, is fairly compelling.
Naomi Oreskes’ upcoming book, Merchants of Doubt, explains “the troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda.”
The prolific UC San Diego professor discusses the history of both our understanding of human-caused global warming and the anti-science disinformation campaign in this terrific talk from last week.
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