Did we say deforestation causes warming? We meant cooling

Deforestation Causes Cooling in Northern U.S., Canada

New Haven, Conn.—Deforestation, considered by scientists to contribute significantly to global warming, has been shown by a Yale-led team to actually cool the local climate in northern latitudes, according to a paper published today inNature.

“If you cut trees in the boreal region, north of 45 degrees latitude, you have a net cooling effect,” said Xuhui Lee, the study’s principal investigator and professor of meteorology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “You release carbon into the atmosphere by cutting down trees, but you increase the albedo effect—the reflection of sunlight.”

Lee and a team of researchers from 20 other institutions found that surface temperatures in open areas were cooler because snow cover reflected the sun’s rays back into outer space, while nearby forested areas absorbed the sun’s heat. At night, without the albedo effect, open land continued to cool faster than forests, which force warm turbulent air from aloft to the ground.

“People are debating whether afforestation is a good idea in high latitudes,” said Lee. “If you plant trees you sequester carbon, which is a benefit to the climate system. At the same time, if you plant trees you warm the landscape because trees are darker compared to other vegetation types. So they absorb solar radiation.”

The researchers calculated that north of Minnesota, or 45 degrees latitude, the temperature decreased by an average of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.On the other hand, deforestation south of North Carolina, or 35 degrees latitude, appeared to cause warming. In addition, Lee said that “statistically insignificant” cooling occurred between these two latitudes.

The researchers collected temperature data from a network of weather stations in forests from Florida to Manitoba and compared results with nearby stations situated in open grassy areas that were used as a proxy for deforested land.

“The cooling effect is linear with latitude, so the farther north you go the cooler you get with deforestation,” said Lee.

David Hollinger, a scientist with the USDA Forest Service and study co-author, said, “Another way to look at the results is that the climate cooling benefits of planting forests is compounded as you move toward the tropics.”

The researchers call for new climate-monitoring strategies. “Because surface station observations are made in grassy fields with biophysical properties of cleared land, they do not accurately represent the state of climate for 30 percent of the terrestrial surface covered by forests,” the study says.

The study, “Observed Increase in Local Cooling Effect of Deforestation at Higher Latitudes,” can be viewed on Nature's website. The study was supported, in part, by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Yale Climate and Energy Institute.

The President's Venture Capitalist

• 

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• NOVEMBER 17, 2011

Steven Chu, Solyndra and the political allocation of capital.

Lately Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been dismissing his Solyndra critics with mock apologies: "Hindsight is often said to be 20/20," he said last week. "In this case I think some of the hindsight was 20/10, or even better—clairvoyant." Ho ho ho. Maybe Mr. Chu will be more contrite when he pays a visit to the House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday, but for now let's step back and review the story of this fiasco.

Mr. Chu's defense is particularly ironic because the self-proclaimed clairvoyants—make that carnival mind readers—actually inhabit the White House. The Solyndra economic model is that government knows how to allocate the national wealth better than private investors do, with Mr. Chu among the oracles who saw something in the now-bankrupt solar panel maker that capital markets never did. To adapt Rick Perry, oops.

The green energy promotion program that ultimately resulted in Solyndra's $535 million loan guarantee originated in the Bush years as a $4 billion fillip in the 2005 energy bill. Democrats saw that and raised the Energy Department's total guarantee capacity to $77 billion, as part of the stimulus.

Associated Press

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu

To put that influx in perspective, at the time total U.S. venture capital under management was about $176 billion. To put it doubly in perspective, DOE's annual budget during the 2000s held constant at about $27 billion, most of which went towards nuclear security.

President Obama hired Mr. Chu as his chief venture capitalist, though his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and work on climate change as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggested no special expertise in, say, financing start-ups. Solyndra was Mr. Chu's first pick, a month after the stimulus passed. And rather than merely guaranteeing a commercial loan —i.e., eliminating any private downside for failure—Solyndra borrowed its money directly from taxpayers through the Federal Financing Bank.

It soon became apparent that Solyndra's balance sheet was shedding cash. Its sales growth held at 0% after it received the Chu loan, and it was selling its panels at a loss. Its production floor was almost as much of a shambles as its executive suite. Its few private investors had little skin in the game—27% of the project's cost, well below the industry standard 35% equity contribution.

Mr. Chu decided to throw good taxpayer money after bad.

In February of this year, DOE decided to restructure Solyndra's loan so that taxpayers were suddenly subordinate to the company's private backers if it was liquidated. This dispensation came after Solyndra had already technically defaulted on Mr. Chu's original terms. The Treasury typically reviews the term sheet in such cases, but email traffic made public suggests DOE tried to stymie its Treasury and White House budget office critics.

As reams of internal Administration emails have shown, other Obama economic officials were treating Solyndra's viability and the wider DOE loan program as something of a running joke. And little wonder: The latest revelation is that days before the company went bust, DOE was negotiating a second restructuring that would have left taxpayers even worse off.

Much of the Washington debate now turns on whether Mr. Chu showed favoritism toward such Solyndra investors as the Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser, or whether such political connections were incidental to a well-vetted play that simply didn't pan out. This deserves scrutiny but it misses the larger point: Every green energy firm has some kind of political connection, given that the entire industry is a creation of the government.

In this symbiotic world, cause and effect blur. Loan programs like DOE's are always going to pick the Solyndras of the world, since their reason for being is to help companies that can't acquire private financing, and can't persuade enough investors that the risks they take on will be profitable. A government program dedicated to uneconomic goals is naturally going to end in economic failure.

The amazing thing is that by this standard Solyndra may not be the worst investment, relatively speaking, since the entire DOE portfolio seems to be such a dog. "What's terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones that came next, this one started to look better," one White House budget staffer wrote in an April 2010 email. "Bad days are coming."

They would certainly be coming for Mr. Chu if the Energy Department were a company accountable to shareholders who could demand a change in management. But Mr. Chu is an appointee doing the political bidding of the President, so voters will have to wait until the next election to hold someone responsible. Perhaps the Energy Secretary will still do the honorable thing, if only for the sake of his reputation.

Obama Abandons (Private) Labor

The Keystone pipeline decision is a signal to blue-collar workers that this is no longer their fathers' Democratic Party.

WSJ.com 11/17/11

The decision by the Obama administration to "delay" building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn't hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

The Keystone XL pipeline would have created at least 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Much of this would have been well-paid work for craftsmen, not jobs as hod carriers to repave the Interstate.

On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., Mr. Obama signaled where his head was on the pipeline during a TV interview: "Folks in Nebraska, like folks all across the country, aren't going to say to themselves, 'We're going to take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health." Imagine if he'd been leading a wagon train of workers and farmers across the Western frontier in 1850.

Within days of the Keystone decision, Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, said his country would divert sales of the Keystone-intended oil to Asia. Translation: Those lost American blue-collar pipeline jobs are disappearing into the Asian sun. Incidentally, Mr. Harper has said he wants to turn Canada into an energy "superpower," exploiting its oil, gas and hydroelectric resources. Meanwhile, the American president shores up his environmental base in Hollywood and on campus. Perhaps our blue-collar work force should consider emigrating to Canada.

Recall as well the president's gut reaction in 2010 to the BP Gulf oil spill: an order shutting down deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. The effect on blue-collar workers in that industry was devastating. Writing in these pages this week, Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski described how Mexico, the Russians, Canada and even Cuba are moving to exploit oil and gas deposits adjacent to ours, while the Obama administration slow-walks new drilling permits.

Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger argues that President Obama is leaving private sector workers out to dry on Opinion Journal. Photo: AP.

No subject sits more centrally in the American political debate than the economic plight of the middle class. Presumably that means people making between $50,000 and $175,000 a year. The president fashions himself their champion.

This surely is bunk. Mr. Obama is the champion of the public-sector middle class. Just as private business has become an abstraction to the new class of public-sector Democratic politicians and academics who populate the Obama administration, so too the blue-collar workers employed by them have become similarly abstracted.

You would think someone in the private labor movement would wake up and smell the tar sands. Last week's Big Labor "victory" in Ohio was about spending tens of millions to support state and local government workers. Many union families attached to the state's withering auto plants no doubt voted with their public-sector brothers in solidarity. But why? Where the rubber hits the road—new jobs that will last a generation—what does this public-sector vote do for them?

Many farmers, ranchers and timber workers went Republican years ago over an increasingly ideological and uncompromising Democratic environmentalism that was wrecking their livelihoods. Now the same thing is happening to blue-collar workers. Mr. Obama from his first days made clear his hostility to carbon production. At best he views much of the private blue-collar work force as carbon enablers for whom he himself will create a new harmony of "green" industries. That would be Solyndra.

Solyndra isn't just a fiasco. It's a clear warning that launching new industries onto the big muddy of massive public subsidies is fraught with economic and political problems.

Martin Kozlowski

The Democratic promise to private blue-collar workers has been that the party would use its clout to in effect "manufacture" new jobs out of public budgets—high-speed rail projects, school construction and the like. But surely that's gone aglimmering.

Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, New York and California—whose blue-collar families traditionally hand those states to Democratic candidates—are all locked in budgetary death struggles to pay for their public workers. That conversation is about generations-long budget commitments. There isn't going to be anything large left over for "public-private" job schemes.

There's little hope that anyone in the leadership of the traditional union movement, public or private, would entertain a rethinking of their historic ties to the Democratic Party. But younger workers should. The economic crisis of the past two years is no blip. In some construction unions, unemployment is well over 25%. The only force out there that can create real jobs over the longer term is the strongest private economic growth the U.S. can muster. The past three years of a Democratic administration's economic policies have the U.S. mired in a growth rate rotating like a forgotten flywheel around 2%.

America's workers, no matter the color of their collars, desperately need a higher economic growth rate than decisions such as the delay on Keystone are going to give them. The Keystone shuffle should make clear to many middle-class workers that this is no longer their fathers' Democratic Party. It's going in a different direction, toward the clouds. This may be the year to open negotiations with the alternative.

Scientists find biofuels increase greenhouse gas emissions

The November 2011 edition of Nature Climate Change notes that a team of independent scientists has accused the European Union of a "serious accounting error" regarding 'greenhouse' gas emissions from biofuels, finding their use results in a net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere:

Nature pans Gore's 24 Hours of 'Reality'

The November 2011 edition of Nature Climate Change pans Al Gore's 24 Hours of 'Reality', disputing Gore's suggestion that global warming is responsible for all extreme weather and noting, "Gore may have briefly pumped up his disillusioned environmental base, but it's hard to imagine such a polarizing figure convincing anybody who has honest doubts about the severity of the problem, let alone the diehard skeptics."

Pipeline Project Comes Under Further Scrutiny

WSJ.com 11/8/11

A federal auditor said Monday it would review the State Department's handling of a disputed Canada-U.S. oil pipeline, ratcheting up scrutiny of the project less than two months before the department is due to issue a verdict on it.

The battle over the pipeline has become increasingly contentious, with growing opposition from environmentalists, who say it could pollute water supplies. Protesters formed a human chain around the White House Sunday, calling on President Barack Obama to block construction.

If approved, the Keystone XL pipeline would stretch from Canada to Texas, transporting up to 500,000 barrels of oil a day. Proponents say the pipeline would create thousands of jobs and boost U.S. energy security.

Officials at the State Department, which has jurisdiction because the pipeline crosses national boundaries, have said they hope to decide on approval of the project by year's end, but are willing to let the decision slip into next year if necessary. A spokesman for the department's inspector general's office, which is conducting the review, said the review would be expedited.

The issue presents a dilemma for Mr. Obama, who wants to rally his base among environmentalists while rebutting Republican charges that his policies are blocking job creation.

In a Nov. 4 memo, released Monday, the State inspector general said it was looking in particular at the department's handling of an environmental analysis. The review was requested by 14 members of Congress, all Democrats except Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with Democrats. They cited concerns over State's choice of a company that had worked on other Trans-Canada projects to review the pipeline's environmental impact.

State declined to comment, but has denied claims of bias toward TransCanada's proposal. In an Oct. 31 letter to Mr. Sanders, it said that it was "committed to a thorough and transparent" process.

TransCanada's Terry Cunha said: "We conduct ourselves with integrity and in an open and transparent manner. We are certain that the conclusion of this review will reflect that."

Fred Singer: Why I Remain a Global-Warming Skeptic

WSJ.com NOVEMBER 4, 2011

Searching for scientific truth in the realm of climate


By FRED SINGER

Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released the findings of its extensive study on global land temperatures over the past century. Physics professor Richard Muller, who led the study, heralded the findings with a number of controversial statements in the press, including an op-ed in this newspaper titled "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism." And yet Mr. Muller remains a true skeptic—a searcher for scientific truth. I congratulate Mr. Muller and his Berkeley Earth team for undertaking this difficult task in the realm of climate.

The Berkeley study reported a warming trend of about 1º Celsius since 1950, even greater than the warming reported by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I disagree with this result, which perhaps makes me a little more of a skeptic than Mr. Muller.

Mr. Muller has been brutally frank about the poor quality of the weather-station data, noting that 70% of U.S. stations involve uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius. One could interpret the Berkeley study's results as confirmation of earlier studies and of the IPCC's conclusions, despite the poor quality of the stations used. But perhaps the issue is that the Berkeley study and the ones that came before suffer from common errors. I suspect that the temperature records still are affected by the urban heat-island effect—a term given to any local warming, whatever its cause—despite efforts to correct for this. The urban heat-island effect could include heat produced not only in urban areas, but also due to changes in land use or poor station siting. Therefore, I suggest additional tests:

1. Disassemble the "global average" temperature to get a better picture of what's going on regionally. This could involve plotting both the IPCC's and the Berkeley study's data only for tropical regions, separating the northern and southern hemispheres and testing for seasonal variation and differences between day and night.

2. Better describe what we can think of as the demographics of weather stations, a major source of possible error. The IPCC used 6,000 stations in 1970 and only about 2,000 in 2000. Let's examine their latitude, altitude and possible urbanization, and see if there have been major changes in the stations sampled between 1970 and 2000. For example, it is very likely that airports were used as temperature stations in both 1970 and 2000, because airport stations are generally of high quality. But airports are likely warming rapidly because of increasing traffic and urbanization. So if the number of airport stations remained constant at, say, 1,200 over that 30-year interval, the warming observed there might have increased between 20% and 60% over the same period of time, thereby producing an artificial warming trend.

3. The Berkeley study used a total of 39,000 weather stations, an impressive number. But again, we need to know if that number changed significantly between 1970 and 2000, and how the demographics of the stations changed—both for stations that showed cooling and for those that showed warming.

But the main reason that I am skeptical about the IPCC, and now the Berkeley, findings, is that they disagree with most every other data source I can find. I confine this critique to the period between 1978 and 1997, thereby avoiding the Super El Niño of 1998 that had nothing to do with greenhouse gases or other human influences.

Contrary to both global-warming theory and climate models, data from weather satellites show no atmospheric temperature increase over this period, and neither do the entirely independent radiosondes carried in weather balloons. The Berkeley study confined its findings to land temperatures as recorded by weather stations. Yet oceans cover 71% of the earth's surface, and the marine atmosphere shows no warming trend. The absence of warming is in accord with the theory that climate is heavily impacted by solar variability, and agrees with the solar data presented in a 2007 paper by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Moreover, independent data using temperature proxies—various non-thermometer sources such as tree rings, ocean and lake sediments, ice cores, stalagmites, and so on—also support an absence of warming between 1978 and 1997. Coral data also show no pronounced warming trend of the sea surface, and there are good reasons to believe that reported sea-surface warming is an artifact of thermometer measurements.

The IPCC's 2007 Summary for Policy makers claims that "Most of the observed increase in global average [surface] temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [90-99% sure] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." While Mr. Muller now seems to agree that there has been such global average warming since the mid-20th century, he nonetheless ended his op-ed by disclaiming that he knows the cause of any temperature increase. Moreover, the Berkeley team's research paper comments: "The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated." I commend Mr. Muller and his team for their honesty and skepticism.

Mr. Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, with specialties in atmospheric and space physics.

Global temperatures: All over the map

WSJ.com 11/5/11


Taking the Earth's temperature requires more than lots of thermometers. It also relies on surveying tools, satellites—and confidence in statistical models used to put the numbers together.

Still, those thermometer readings do matter. So a team of scientists recently tackled the job of cleaning up and organizing 1.6 billion temperature readings from two centuries and nearly 40,000 land-based locations.

That required removing duplicate numbers, tossing out clearly erroneous records—such as temperatures above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—and fixing Celsius readings mislabeled as Fahrenheit. The process took nearly two years and has yielded a data set the project's leader says can be analyzed in a matter of hours.

"Before us, there was a huge barrier to entry" in the field of analyzing temperature numbers, says Richard Muller, scientific director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team and a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many scientists are giving the Berkeley Earth team kudos for creating the unified database.

Plaudits are coming even from some scientists who dispute the conclusions of the Berkeley Earth team itself. The team analyzed its own temperature records and concluded that the Earth's land has warmed by an average of about 0.9 degree Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-1950s. That is in line with some earlier efforts that used smaller sets of temperature readings.

Some scientists reaching into the new database, while generally agreeing the Earth has been warming, disagree with details of the team's findings. For instance, Berkeley Earth's trend graphs, which reflect some modeling, show temperatures continuing to rise since the late 1990s. But the raw numbers show no definitive evidence of an increase in that time. The group also hasn't made use of satellite-derived temperature readings. These show a smaller increase. The difference may reflect that some land-based weather stations aren't well maintained.

"I'm inclined to give [satellite] data more weight than reconstructions from surface-station data," says Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician who writes about climate, often critically of studies that find warming, at his website Climate Audit. Satellites show about half the amount of warming as that of land-based readings in the past three decades, when the relevant data were collected from space, he says.

Such disputes demonstrate the statistical and uncertain nature of tracking global temperature. Even with tens of thousands of weather stations, most of the Earth's surface isn't monitored. Some stations are more reliable than others. Calculating a global average temperature requires extrapolating from these readings to the whole globe, adjusting for data lapses and suspect stations. And no two groups do this identically.

The Berkeley Earth team uses a statistical tool it calls a scalpel to cut out data when there is a gap. It uses a process called Kriging to fill in gaps in data, borrowed from geoscientists and surveyors, who used it, for example, to estimate the elevation at point B that is between A and C, points where altitude is known. And it weights data more heavily from stations that are reliable than that from those that produce erratic numbers.

The result is a statistical model of what the temperature was at any given moment at any given location. Actual thermometer readings, when they are available, are used only as fodder for the statistical model.

The Berkeley scientists "have a very complicated model," says William Briggs, a member of the probability and statistics committee of the American Meteorology Society. "They reported on the setting of one of those dials" in the model. "That is not the actual temperature."

Calculating a global temperature is necessary to track climate trends because, as your TV meteorologist might warn, local conditions can differ. Much of the U.S. and Northern Europe has cooled in the last 70 years, Berkeley Earth found. So did one-third of all weather stations world-wide, while two-thirds warmed. The project cites this as evidence of overall warming; skeptics aren't convinced because it depends how concentrated those warming sites are. If they happen to be bunched up while the cooling sites are in sparsely measured areas, then more places could be cooling.

The risk with models is that scientists can become enslaved to one they have chosen, says Mr. McIntyre. "The best antidote is for authors to make all their data available at the time of publication together with scrupulous documentation," he says, crediting Berkeley Earth with attempting to do this.

Any statistical model produces results with some level of uncertainty. The Berkeley Earth project is no different. That uncertainty is large enough to dwarf some trends in temperature. For instance, fluctuations in the land temperature for the past 13 years make it extremely difficult to say whether the Earth has been continuing to warm during that time.

This possible halting of the temperature rise led to a dispute between members of the Berkeley Earth team. Judith Curry, Mr. Muller's co-author and a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told a reporter for the Daily Mail she questioned Mr. Muller's claim, which he published in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, that "you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer." She said that if the global temperature has flattened out, that would raise new questions, and scientific skepticism would remain warranted. Asked for further comment, she referred questions to Mr. Muller, and on her blog she said that after a 90-minute talk with him, "there isn't much that we disagree on."

This sort of messy hashing-out of the global climate record is happening in the open because the Berkeley Earth team chose to release its data, and its papers, before undergoing peer review by scientific journals. Already some feedback has led to updates and corrections to the research. Berkeley Earth plans other work, including adding ocean temperature trends to the land records and fixing errors in its database.

"Some people mistakenly think peer review means secret review by anonymous referees at journals," Mr. Muller says. "We're getting wonderful peer review, from McIntyre, from Briggs, from other people. That's the process of science."

Another bankruptcy for Obama's green energy program

Energy program suffers new blow  WSJ.com 11/1/11

By KATY STECH

A Massachusetts energy company that received a $43 million U.S. loan guarantee has filed for bankruptcy protection, in a new black eye for the Obama administration's clean-energy program following the collapse of solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC two months ago.

Dow Jones Newswires Reporter Katy Stech has details of Massachusetts-based Beacon Power Corp., which filed for bankruptcy after receiving a $43 million U.S. loan guarantee. AP Photo/Lisa Poole

Beacon Power Corp. used the U.S. backing to build a plant outside Albany, N.Y., designed to store power and help electric companies manage minute-by-minute movements in supply and demand. But the firm said it was operating at a loss and couldn't raise more funds amid the political furor over Solyndra, whose bankruptcy filing could cost taxpayers more than $500 million.

Compared with Solyndra, Beacon's Chapter 11 filing, made on Sunday, will be less costly. The company has drawn down $39 million of its U.S.-guaranteed loan, which carries the New York plant as collateral. Unlike the Solyndra case, in which the government agreed to take second place behind other creditors for some assets, the U.S. has first priority on the Beacon collateral.

Republicans renewed their criticism of the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee called Beacon Power's bankruptcy filing "a sharp reminder that DOE has fallen well short of delivering the stimulus jobs that were promised, and now taxpayers find themselves millions of more dollars in the hole."

The White House last week said it had ordered an independent review of the Energy Department program, which has offered final or provisional guarantees for nearly $36 billion in loans to projects in clean energy, electric cars and other areas. The 2009 economic-stimulus bill provided funding for the Solyndra and Beacon guarantees.

Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said, "Protecting taxpayer dollars remains the top priority for Secretary [Steven] Chu and the department, which is why we were careful to include many protections for the taxpayer" in the Beacon deal. He said the plant in Stephentown, N.Y., was "operational and generating revenue," making it a "valuable collateral asset."

A Beacon spokesman didn't return calls requesting comment.

Solyndra received $535 million in loan guarantees and had drawn down about $527 million when it filed for bankruptcy protection in September. Mr. Chu is set to testify about Solyndra before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Nov. 17.

Mr. Chu and President Barack Obama have said that failures of some companies in the loan-guarantee program are to be expected because they are working with unproven technologies.

Beacon's plant takes excess electrical energy from the power grid and converts it into the energy of a series of spinning flywheels. It has sought to win contracts from grid operators to supply power when needed to even out the flow of electricity.

Beacon Power was also awarded a $24 million Smart Grid stimulus grant in 2009 to build a plant outside Wilkes-Barre, Pa. That plant hasn't been built yet but could "attract equity capital or be sold on advantageous terms" once it begins operating, the company said in court papers.

Beacon, which employs 65 people and is based in Tyngsboro, Mass., trades on Nasdaq but has been warned by the exchange that it faces delisting. It told investors earlier this year that its survival was at risk if it failed to raise more capital.

"The current economic and political climate, the financing terms mandated by DOE, and Beacon's recent delisting notice from Nasdaq have together severely restricted Beacon's access to additional investments through the equity markets," Chief Executive F. William Capp said in court papers.

Beacon listed assets of $72 million and debt of $47 million in its Chapter 11 filing.

Another Obama green energy favorite in financial trouble

Your Cash for Their Clunkers     WSJ.com  10/18/11

Here's some investment advice: When looking for tips on green technology plays, steer clear of the stock pickers located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They've made a habit of investing your cash in their clunkers.

Following on Solyndra's great success comes Ener1 Inc., a lithium-ion battery maker also promoted by the White House. President Obama gave the company's subsidiary, EnerDel, a shout out in August 2009, in a speech in which he announced $2.4 billion in grants "to develop the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks powered by the next generation of battery technologies."

EnerDel snagged a $118 million grant, and Vice President Joe Biden toured one of its two Indianapolis-area factories as recently as January, citing it as proof that government isn't "just creating new jobs—but sparking whole new industries."

He didn't say profitable industries. Ener1 was founded in 2002, went public in 2008 and has never turned a profit. In August, it restated its earnings for fiscal 2010 at a $165 million loss—nearly $100 million more than previously reported. On September 27 it ousted its CEO, and its share price yesterday was 27 cents—a 95% decline from its 52-week high of $5.95 in January. Nasdaq is threatening to delist the stock, and Ener1 disclosed in a mid-August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is "in the process of determining whether the company has sufficient liquidity to fund its operations."

Ener1 attributed its financial restatement to the bankruptcy earlier this year of Norwegian electric car maker Think, in which Ener1 had invested, and with which it had signed a contract to supply batteries. Think had a long history of financial troubles and was hardly a safe investment.

Then again, Ener1 had to rely almost exclusively on Think after it lost its bid to supply batteries to Fisker Automotive, a battery-powered car maker which received a $529 million U.S. taxpayer-backed federal loan guarantee in 2010. Fisker chose to buy its batteries from a company called A123 Systems, itself the recipient of a $249 million U.S. Department of Energy grant (announced at the same time as Ener1's grant).

It's hard to sell electric car batteries when the market for electric cars is so small. Electric cars are expected to make up less than 1% of car sales by 2018, but that hasn't stopped the feds from financing a glut of battery makers. Some 48 different battery technology and electric vehicle projects received federal money as part of the Administration's August 2009 announcement, including such corporate giants as Johnson Controls and General Motors.

Current estimates are that by 2015 there will be more than double the supply of lithium-ion batteries compared to the number of electric vehicles. This government-juiced industry is headed for a shakeout, taking taxpayer dollars with it.

That may include Indiana state tax dollars. In recent years the Indiana Economic Development Corporation has offered Ener1 up to $21.1 million in performance-based tax credits and $200,000 in training grants. A spokeswoman for the state agency said Ener1 hasn't used the training money and that the tax credits were conditioned upon jobs created. She said the agency isn't at liberty to divulge Ener1's use of the tax credits. The company had promised the combination of federal and state money would allow it to create 1,700 new jobs in Indiana by 2012, and 3,000 by 2015. At last count, Ener1 employed 380 in Indiana. The company didn't return a call seeking comment.

There's no pleasure in Ener1's troubles, but there is a lesson: Better to leave commercial financing decisions to private investors and bankers who are likely to take more care with their own money. Politicians write the press releases first and worry about the taxpayer losses later.

Elevated CO2 improves plant nutrition and a boon to crop production

A paper published in the journal Plant Physiology shows that elevated levels of CO2 result in remarkable improvement of chlorophyll synthesis and nutrition for plants grown in iron-deficient soils (30% of earth's surface). The authors conclude elevated CO2 would be highly beneficial to crop production.

Photo on left is from tomato plant grown in iron-deficient soil with elevated CO2 of 800 ppm, on right grown at current levels of CO2 

Added to the NIPCC Report this week:

Reference: Jin, C.W., Du, S.T., Chen, W.W., Li, G.X., Zhang, Y.S. and Zheng, S.J. 2009. Elevated carbon dioxide improves plant iron nutrition through enhancing the iron-deficiency-induced responses under iron-limited conditions in tomato. Plant Physiology 150: 272-280.

Jin et al. (2009) grew twenty-day-old plants for an additional seven days within controlled-environment chambers maintained at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of either 350 or 800 ppm in an iron (Fe)-sufficient medium with a soluble Fe source or under Fe-limited conditions in a medium containing the sparingly soluble hydrous Fe(III)-oxide, while measuring a number of pertinent plant parameters. According to the researchers, plant growth was increased by the elevated CO2 in both the Fe-sufficient and Fe-limited media, with shoot fresh weight increasing by 22% and 44%, respectively, and root fresh weight increasing by 43% and 97%, respectively. In addition, Jin et al. report that "the elevated CO2 under Fe-limited conditions enhance[d] root growth, root hair development, proton release, root FCR [ferric chelate reductase] activity, and expressions of LeFR01 and LeIRT1 genes [which respectively encode FCR and the Fe(II) transporter in tomato], all of which enable plants to access and accumulate more Fe." And they add, as would be expected, that "the associated increase in Fe concentrations in the shoots and roots alleviated Fe-deficiency-induced chlorosis."

Jin et al. write that the bioavailability of iron to terrestrial plants "is often limited (Guerinot and Yi, 1994), particularly in calcareous soils, which represent 30% of the earth's surface (Imsande, 1998)," and they thus conclude that "Fe nutrition in plants is likely to be affected by the continued elevation of atmospheric CO2, which, in turn, will affect crop production." And as their work strongly suggests, those important effects should be highly beneficial, while even wider biospheric benefits are suggested by the work of Sasaki et al. (1998), who have demonstrated that both the ferric reductase activity and Fe uptake capacity of the marine alga Chlorococcum littorale cultured in Fe-limited media have been significantly enhanced by elevated CO2 concentrations.

Additional References:

Guerinot, M.L. and Yi, Y. 1994. Iron: nutritious, noxious, and not readily available. Plant Physiology 104: 815-820.

Imsande, J. 1998. Iron, sulfur, and chlorophyll deficiencies: a need for an integrative approach in plant physiology. Physiologia Plantarum 103: 139-144.

Sasaki, T., Kurano, N. and Miyachi, S. 1998. Induction of ferric reductase activity and of iron uptake capacity in Chlorococcum littorale cells under extremely high-CO2and iron-deficient conditions. Plant & Cell Physiology 39: 405-410.

Judge throws out rule declaring global warming a threat to polar bears

APNewsBreak: Judge blocks polar bear rule

By MATTHEW DALY - Associated Press | AP – 7 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has thrown out a key section of an Interior Department rule that declared global warming is threatening the survival of the polar bear.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled Monday that the Bush administration did not complete a required environmental review when it said the bear's designation as threatened in 2008 could not be used as a backdoor way to control greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The Obama administration agreed a year later, saying that activities outside of the bear's habitat such as emissions from a power plant could not be controlled using the Endangered Species Act. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that filed a lawsuit over the 2008 rule, said the decision puts the fate of the polar bear back in the hands of the Obama administration and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

"The Obama administration has the chance to do right by the polar bear," said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the group. "They need to decide whether the polar bear gets all the protections that other endangered species get, or whether they want to re-adopt a flawed Bush administration decision that exempts greenhouse gases" and other pollutants from the Endangered Species Act.

Sullivan's decision directs the Interior Department to respond by Nov. 17 with a timetable for when it will complete the required environmental review. Sullivan left an interim 2008 designation intact while the case continues.

Asinine climate theory of the week: Columbus caused the Little Ice Age

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate


By Devin Powell   Science News

MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.

By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas. Many of them burned trees to make room for crops, leaving behind charcoal deposits that have been found in the soils of Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.

About 500 years ago, this charcoal accumulation plummeted as the people themselves disappeared. Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.

Trees returned, reforesting an area at least the size of California, Nevle estimated. This new growth could have soaked up between 2 billion and 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

Ice cores from Antarctica contain air bubbles that show a drop in carbon dioxide around this time. These bubbles suggest that levels of the greenhouse gas decreased by 6 to 10 parts per million between 1525 and the early 1600s.

“There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake,” says Jed Kaplan, an earth systems scientist at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College. [Mann still refuses to admit the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming Period were global, not local, phenomena]

But reforestation fits with another clue hidden in Antarctic ice, says Nevle. As the population declined in the Americas, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got heavier. Increasingly, molecules of the gas tended to be made of carbon-13, a naturally occurring isotope with an extra neutron. That could be because tree leaves prefer to take in gas made of carbon-12, leaving the heavier version in the air.

Kaplan points out that there’s a lot of uncertainty in such isotope measurements, so this evidence isn’t conclusive. But he agrees that the New World pandemics were a major event that can’t be ignored — a tragedy that highlighted mankind’s ability to influence the climate long before the industrial revolution.

Republicans have their own green baggage

The GOP's Solyndra Problem    WSJ.com 10/10/11

On Friday Rick Perry delivers his first major policy address, unveiling an aggressive energy and jobs plan. It will no doubt be good. It will no doubt address serious problems. It will no doubt be ignored.

That's because, unfortunately for Mr. Perry, drilling isn't the energy topic du jour. The buzz is the bankrupt Solyndra, which is why the only energy question that came to Mr. Perry at Tuesday's New Hampshire debate was this: How, exactly, is his state's vaunted "Emerging Technology Fund"—which has dumped some 200 million taxpayer dollars into private companies—any different from Obama programs that subsidized the likes of Solyndra?

It isn't, of course, and that's a problem for Mr. Perry. The political merit of Solyndra is that it perfectly illustrates the failed Obama economic mentality—that politicians should allocate capital, that government creates industries. Nothing should be further from a free-market mentality, and Solyndra ought to be providing Republicans a potent contrast with the president. Instead, candidates like Mr. Perry and Mitt Romney are dragging green baggage.

Congressional Republicans are now investigating the solar panels out of Solyndra, and rightly so. But no one should forget it was Republicans who in 2005 created the loan program that Mr. Obama would later expropriate to funnel stimulus dollars to his green boondoggles. This was the height of the Bush-era spending craze, when the GOP had come to see green energy as a slick way to funnel yet more pork (ethanol, nuclear, wood chips) to their states. As a side benefit, it offered cover against charges that Republicans were stooges of Big Oil.

Where the handouts really got rolling was at the state level. It used to be that Republican governors competed for business by lowering taxes and regulations. Then some genius worked out that it was easier to flat-out bribe companies to relocate by offering cold, hard taxpayer cash. And with green energy all the rage, a lot of state tax dollars started flowing to Solyndra-like ventures.

Mr. Perry did all this on a grand scale, convincing his legislature to create two investment funds, one being the Emerging Technology Fund, which has acted as state venture capitalist to more than a hundred firms, including green companies. In fairness, he wasn't alone. Indiana's Mitch Daniels, Mississippi's Haley Barbour, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal—conservatives all—have happily staked their taxpayers' dollars on green bets.

But it's Mr. Perry who is running for president, and who came out of the primary gates touting his funds as a centerpiece of Texas's job-creation story. As Solyndra has escalated, the Obama political liabilities have begun to attach to the Texan. The press is churning out exposés about how many jobs the Texas grants actually produced, or how many recipients had donated to Mr. Perry. His rivals, notably Michele Bachmann, have directly called the funds Mr. Perry's "Solyndra."

Mr. Perry's response has been to say that "the federal government shouldn't be involved in that kind of investment, period," but that it is "fine for states" to pick winners and losers in the economy. All of which sounds a bit like a certain governor attempting to explain away RomneyCare.

Speaking of Mr. Romney, he's taken his own shots at Solyndra, and his 59-point economic plan warns that government "should not be in the business of steering investment toward particular politically favored approaches." The former governor seems to be hoping that the press won't notice a day in early 2003 when he used a solar company as the backdrop to announce that his state was shifting millions to a new Green Energy Fund (still in existence) that would provide venture capital and loans to renewable companies.

True, the Massachusetts fund wasn't run out of the governor's office, and the amounts were a smidgen of Mr. Obama's green stimulus. Bets are Team Obama won't make that distinction when highlighting Mr. Romney's prior support for state-sponsored venture capital for solar.

Past mistakes aside, why aren't candidates using this moment to disavow green slush? Congressional Republicans—the tea party at their backs, Solyndra in their sights—are themselves beginning to envision the upside of abandoning green pork.

Yet Mr. Perry sticks to his flawed federalism argument. And the Romney jobs plan insists "government has a role to play in innovation in the energy industry," although Romney spokesman Ryan Williams tells me his candidate is focused on "basic research through programs that ensure long-term, apolitical funding for a wide variety of early stage technologies," and that he "opposes President Obama's efforts to play venture capitalist."

The problem is that there are no apolitical subsidies. The economics of political venture capital are bad, but the politics are worse. For Republicans in particular, the green subsidy road leads only to scandals, job-number embarrassments, poor excuses, and a missed opportunity to draw distinctions with big-government liberals.

At Tuesday night's debate, Mr. Romney told Herman Cain that "simple answers are . . . often inadequate." But when it comes to green subsidies, Mr. Cain's simplicity is to die for. Government simply "should not be in the business of picking winners and losers, because most of the time they pick the losers," said Mr. Cain. Now there's a presidential energy philosophy for the ages.

Green Jobs Brown Out

How to spend $157,000 per job WSJ.com 10/11/11

The green jobs subsidy story gets more embarrassing by the day. Three years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade America would have five million green jobs, but so far some $90 billion in government spending has delivered very few.

A new report by the Labor Department's Office of Inspector General examined a $500 million grant under the stimulus program to the Employment and Training Administration to "train and prepare individuals for careers in 'green jobs.'" So far about $162.8 million has been spent. The program was supposed to train 125,000 workers, but only 53,000 have been "trained" so far, only 8,035 have found jobs, and only 1,033 were still in the job after six months.

Overall, "only 10% of participants entered employment." In the understatement of the year, the IG says the program failed to "assist those most impacted by the recession."

The jobs record is even more dismal when you consider that many of the jobs classified as green aren't even new jobs, much less green, according to a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. They include positions that have been "relabeled as green jobs by the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics]."

This means that bus drivers, Environmental Protection Agency regulators, university professors teaching ecology, and even the Washington lobbyists who secure energy loan guarantees count as green employees for the purposes of government counting. The Oversight Committee finds that even a charitable assessment of the Labor program puts the cost of each green job at $157,000.

The silver lining is that the IG found that as of "June 30, 2011, $327.3 million remained unexpended" from the Labor program's appropriation. The IG urges that all funds "determined not to be needed should be recouped as soon as practicable and to the extent permitted by law." That ought to be the deficit supercommittee's first $327 million in savings.

WSJ: 'A consensus of scientists is no substitute for, and often a bar to, great science'

Chemistry's Cinderella Story   WSJ.com  Review & Outlook 10/10/11

A Nobel winner who challenged dogma.

When it comes to scientific discovery, the world loves a Cinderella story: The lone genius, from Galileo to Darwin to Wegener, who bucks the received wisdom of his field and makes us see the world anew. The scientific community, however, would often prefer to keep its Cinderellas in the attic. Just ask Israel's Dan Shechtman.

Mr. Shechtman, who last week won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is credited with the discovery in 1982 of quasicrystals, patterned but nonrepeating atomic structures that resemble the mosaics found in medieval Islamic art. For observing under an electron microscope what the scientific community held to be a physical impossibility, Mr. Shechtman was accused of "bringing disgrace" on his lab. Linus Pauling, the chemistry (and peace) Nobelist, called the discovery "nonsense" and denounced Mr. Shechtman as a "quasi-scientist." It took two years before a scientific journal would deign to publish his findings.

Today, Mr. Shechtman's observations have been fully validated and quasicrystals are beginning to have commercial applications. But his story is a reminder that a consensus of scientists is no substitute for, and often a bar to, great science. That's especially so when the consensus hardens into a dogmatic and self-satisfied enterprise.

Isn't there another field in which a similar kind of consensus has taken hold, with similarly unpleasant consequences for those who question its core assumptions? Take a guess. Meantime, it's worth noting that, as with Cinderella, Mr. Shechtman's story has a happy ending. No doubt this will turn out to be true for others who dare to think different.

Treasury Dept warned Solyndra loan restructuring might be illegal

Energy Department Aide Pushed for Action on Solyndra   WSJ.com 10/8/11

By RYAN TRACY and JARED FAVOLE

The Treasury Department warned this year that the restructuring of a government loan to solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC might be illegal, newly released email excerpts show.

Those excerpts and other emails released Friday offer a new picture of how the Obama administration may have brushed aside warnings and, in one instance, a possible conflict of interest as officials pushed to support the solar-panel maker.

Solyndra received a $535 million Department of Energy loan guarantee in September 2009, and the loan itself came from a part of the Treasury Department. Early this year, with the company's finances growing shakier, private investors agreed to pump an additional $75 million into Solyndra. As part of that restructuring, the government agreed to take a back seat to those investors in getting repaid if Solyndra had to be liquidated. The company filed for bankruptcy last month.

Republican lawmakers have questioned the legality of the restructuring deal, and released email excerpts Friday to back their case. In an Aug. 17, 2011, email, a Treasury Department official said the department's "legal counsel believes that the statute and the DOE regulations both require that the guaranteed loan should not be subordinate to any loan or other debt obligation."

The email said Treasury believed the Department of Justice's approval should have been sought for the restructuring. It didn't say when the legal counsel warned of the possible violation.