Bush Cuts Solar Energy Funding

From The Center for American Progress:

President Bush has repeatedly said in recent months that he would lead the United States in taking steps to reduce oil consumption, combat global warming and expand the production of renewable fuels. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act in December, and in his State of the Union address just last week, he said that we must continue to invest in renewable fuels and that the United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change.

Yet a quick look at the president's FY 2009 budget proposals for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency programs show cuts in critical areas, including climate protection, tribal energy, and solar energy, while funding for fossil and nuclear energy was increased. And some programs, such as Weatherization Assistance Grants, and the Renewable Energy Production Incentive, were zeroed out entirely.

The Basics

$1.26 billion: Total fiscal year 2009 budget request for Department of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs.

27 percent: Decrease in funding from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

$385.5 million: Increase in nuclear energy funding, which amounts to 37 percent increase from FY 08 appropriations.

$222.7 million: Increase in fossil energy funding, which amounts to a 25 percent increase over FY 08 appropriations.

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program

$570 million: Proposed cut to The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which assists low income households in meeting their immediate home energy needs. This is a 22 percent cut from FY 08, even before adjusting for changes in energy prices. The new energy law authorizes $5. 1 billion for this program.

More than one million: Number of low-income families and elderly people that would need to be cut from the LIHEAP program to meet the new budget.

65 percent: The percentage increase in home energy prices since 2001.

0 percent: The percentage increase in this year's LIHEAP budget since 2001.

Weatherization Assistance

$0: Proposed budget for Weatherization Assistance Grants, which increase the energy efficiency of dwellings occupied by low-income Americans, thus directly reducing their energy costs, electricity use, and global warming emissions. This is a 100 percent cut from the $227 million allocated in fiscal year 2008.

Renewable Energy

$0: Proposed budget for the Renewable Energy Production Incentive program, which provides financial incentive payments for electricity produced and sold by new qualifying renewable energy generation facilities. This is a 100 percent cut from the $5.0 million allocated in fiscal year 2008.

$6.9 million: Proposed cut to the hydropower program, whose purpose is to develop, conduct, and coordinate research and development with industry and other federal agencies to improve the technical, societal, and environmental benefits of hydropower, which includes wave, tidal, and traditional dam hydropower. This is a 70 percent cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

$12.3 million: Proposed cut to the solar energy program, which works to accelerate the development of solar technologies as energy sources for the nation and the world, as well as educate the public about the value of solar power as an energy choice. This is a 7 percent cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

$26.8 million: Increase in biomass and biorefinery systems R&D. This is a 13 percent increase from FY08 appropriations and should be commended as an investment in low-carbon alternatives.

$10.2 million: Increase in geothermal technology. This is a 51 percent increase from FY08 appropriations and should also be commended as an investment in low-carbon alternatives.

Climate

$0: Proposed budget for the greenhouse gas reporting registry, an EPA program for voluntary reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and reductions. This is a 100 percent cut from the $3.4 million allocated in fiscal year 2008.

$6.9 million: Proposed cut to the EPA Climate Science and Technology Program, which focuses on research and development of energy and sequestration technologies critical to long-term emissions reduction for coal fired power plants and other sources. This is a 38 percent cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

$10.3 million: Proposed cut overall to climate protection programs such as Energy Star, SmartWay Transport, the Methane to Markets Partnership, and the Asia-Pacific Partnership. This is a 9.5 percent cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

$4.0 million: Proposed cut to Energy STAR, a joint program of the EPA and the DOE helping consumers save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices. This is an 8.3 percent cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

Tribal Energy

$4.9 million: Proposed cut to tribal activities such as the Tribal Energy Program, which provides financial and technical assistance to Native American tribes for feasibility studies of renewable energy development on tribal lands, and offers assistance to tribes for the initial steps toward renewable energy and energy efficiency development. This is an 83 percent cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations level.

Mass Transit

$3.2 billion: The amount the administration is proposing to transfer from the Mass Transit Account to the Highway Account. This is going in the wrong direction; funding for mass transit is a more effective way to encourage people to drive less and reduce global warming pollution from cars.

The president's budget stands in the way of progress on the urgent task of global warming reduction. It will be up to Congress to see to it that these critical programs are represented in the final budget.

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Bush Budget Cuts Environment, Funds Nuclear Weapons

WASHINGTON, DC, February 5, 2008 (ENS) - The White House budget request released Monday for Fiscal Year 2009 is historic as it is the first budget in U.S. history to crack the $3 trillion mark. It takes the United States deep into deficit spending - the deficit is predicted to be $407 billion in FY09. Even so, President George W. Bush requests less money for environmental measures and more for nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

Bush asked Congress to fund the first new U.S. nuclear weapons in two decades and requested additional funding to build a new nuclear bomb making plant.

......

President Bush again has cut the budget of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, this time by $330 million to a total of $7.14 billion.

The cuts include over $270 million dollars from EPA programs that would clean up and restore lakes, rivers and streams. Global climate change research comes in at $16 million.

...

The Bush budget eliminates a $5 million EPA program to restore the San Francisco Bay. It cuts air pollution programs, including over $31 million dollars for grants to states, and eliminates a $10 million dollar program that would help clean up the air in some of California’s most polluted communities.

It eliminates funding for a new national registry to track global warming pollution."

More...

Report: Solar Energy Could End Dependence on Foreign Oil

A Solar Grand Plan

By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Key Concepts
• A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
• A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours. Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
• A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
• But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.

The editors of Scientific American have produced this report. Click here for the full article...

Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Experts

An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

More....

Loss of Arctic ice leaves experts stunned

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced. Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030. Mark Serreze, an Arctic specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University in Denver, said: "It's amazing. It's simply fallen off a cliff and we're still losing ice." The Arctic has now lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements began thirty years ago, and the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002.

Tropical storms doubled due to global warming, study says

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.

A satellite image of Tropical Storm Dalila off Mexico's Pacific coast.

The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded.

Their findings were being published online Sunday by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

An official at the National Hurricane Center called the research "sloppy science" and said technological improvements in observing storms accounted for the increase.

From 1905 to 1930, the Atlantic-Gulf Coast area averaged six tropical cyclones per year, with four of those storms growing into become hurricanes.

The annual average jumped to 10 tropical storms and five hurricanes from 1931 to 1994. From 1995 to 2005, the average was 15 tropical storms and eight hurricanes annually.

Even in 2006, widely reported as a mild year, there were 10 tropical storms.

"We are currently in an upward swing in frequency of named storms and hurricanes that has not stabilized," said Holland, director of mesoscale and microscale meteorology at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

"I really do not know how much further, if any, that it will go, but my sense is that we shall see a stabilization in frequencies for a while, followed by potentially another upward swing if global warming continues unabated," Holland said.

It is normal for chaotic systems such as weather and climate to move in sharp steps rather than gradual trends, he said.

"What did surprise me when we first found it in 2005 was that the increases had developed for so long without us noticing it," he said in an interview via e-mail.

Holland said about half the U.S. population and "a large slice" of business are "directly vulnerable" to hurricanes.

"Our urban and industrial planning and building codes are based on past history," he said. If the future is different, "then we run the very real risk of these being found inadequate, as was so graphically displayed by (Hurricane) Katrina in New Orleans."

Hurricanes derive their energy from warm ocean water. North Atlantic surface temperature increased about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit during the 100-year period studied. Other researchers have calculated that at least two-thirds of that warming can be attributed to human and industrial activities.

Some experts have sought to blame changes in the sun. But a recent study by British and Swiss experts concluded that "over the past 20 years, all the trends in the sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures."

As the sea surface temperatures warm, they cause changes in atmospheric wind fields and circulations, and these changes are responsible for the changes in storm frequency, Holland said.

Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center, said the study is inconsistent in its use of data.

The work, he said, is "sloppy science that neglects the fact that better monitoring by satellites allows us to observe storms and hurricanes that were simply missed earlier. The doubling in the number of storms and hurricanes in 100 years that they found in their paper is just an artifact of technology, not climate change."

But Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the study was significant. "It refutes recent suggestions that the upward trend in Atlantic hurricane activity is an artifact of changing measurement systems," said Emanuel, who was not part of the research team.

Improvements in observation began with aircraft flights into storms in 1944 and satellite observations in 1970. The transitions in hurricane activity that were noted in the paper occurred around 1930 and 1995.

"We are of the strong and considered opinion that data errors alone cannot explain the sharp, high-amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes, each with an increase of around 50 percent in cyclone and hurricane numbers," wrote Webster, of Georgia Institute of Technology, and Holland.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Peer Reviewed Study: "Earth today stands in imminent peril"

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world's leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the "gravest threat" of climate change.

"Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures," the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

In their 29-page paper, "Climate Change and trace gases", the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change.

In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: "In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control."

The unnatural "forcing" of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a "flip" in the climate that could "spark a cataclysm" in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.