Energy Star on the chopping block

Since it was established in the 1990s, the Energy Star program has saved U.S. consumers some $360 billion, mostly in electricity and water costs. According to a program report, consumers and business saved $31.5 billion in 2014 alone, while costs were about $57 million. That puts the return on investment for taxpayers at about 550 to 1.

The concept is simple: When someone goes to buy a washing machine (or drier, or blender, or light bulb), she looks at a number of factors — the price, the capacity, the size, maybe the brand name — and picks the one that is the cheapest while meeting her needs. But it's not always obvious what the ownership cost of a washing machine is. How much water does it use? How much electricity? In other words: How efficient is it? The Energy Star program (which has a whopping 85 percent brand recognition rate in the United States) offers that valuable information. 

And largely because of that high recognition rate, the program also incentivizes manufacturers to develop and offer more efficient products. Energy Star sells.

But maybe not for long. President Trump reportedly aims to kill the program entirely.

[Climate Progress]

India and China with some good news

India is planning to cut coal consumption by dialing coal plants back so they are running less than half time over the next 5 years. 

"CEA has also estimated that all coal-based thermal power plants need to brace for drastic fall in capacity utilisation to as low as 48 per cent by 2022 as additional non-thermal electricity generation capacities come on stream." [India Times]

Beijing has announced a plan to replace all 67,000 fossil-fueled taxis in the city with electric cars. [Clean Technica]

Photos of the US before the EPA

Green Car Reports has a series of photos reminding us why the EPA was created in the first place. 

That is the George Washington Bridge below - if you can't tell. 

1970s Los Angeles smog

[Green Car Reports]

Wind and Solar are disrupting utility business models

The Economist lays out the problems and solutions of integrating renewables with the grid. Their assessment of the problem.

ALMOST 150 years after photovoltaic cells and wind turbines were invented, they still generate only 7% of the world's electricity. Yet something remarkable is happening. From being peripheral to the energy system just over a decade ago, they are now growing faster than any other energy source and their falling costs are making them competitive with fossil fuels. It is no longer far-fetched to think that the world is entering an era of clean, unlimited and cheap power. About time, too. 

There is a $20 trillion hitch, though. To get from here to there requires huge amounts of investment over the next few decades, to replace old smog-belching power plants and to upgrade the pylons and wires that bring electricity to consumers. Normally investors like putting their money into electricity because it offers reliable returns. Yet green energy has a dirty secret. The more it is deployed, the more it lowers the price of power from any source. That makes it hard to manage the transition to a carbon-free future, during which many generating technologies, clean and dirty, need to remain profitable if the lights are to stay on. Unless the market is fixed, subsidies to the industry will only grow.

[Some see] ...this inconvenient truth as a reason to put the brakes on renewable energy. 
However, the solution is not less wind and solar. It is to rethink how the world prices clean energy in order to make better use of it. 

Their conclusion,

The bigger task is to redesign power markets to reflect the new need for flexible supply and demand. They should adjust prices more frequently, to reflect the fluctuations of the weather. At times of extreme scarcity, a high fixed price could kick in to prevent blackouts. Markets should reward those willing to use less electricity to balance the grid, just as they reward those who generate more of it. Bills could be structured to be higher or lower depending how strongly a customer wanted guaranteed power all the time—a bit like an insurance policy. 

In short, policymakers should be clear they have a problem and that the cause is not renewable energy, but the out-of-date system of electricity pricing. Then they should fix it.

[Economist]

Devastating budget cuts for earth science satellites

Under the draft Trump plan, NOAA's satellite program would be cut by more than a half billion dollars. 

These cuts would be particularly dangerous given that the Trump team has suggested eliminating NASA's Earth observation program and shifting its work over to NOAA.

Apparently, the only kind of satellites team Trump likes are those that point away from Earth and thus can't see and report on our changing climate. Who cares if those satellites are also critical for agricultural forecasting, disaster planning, weather prediction, and predicting the path of extreme events like hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornadoes?

"Cutting NOAA's satellite budget will compromise NOAA's mission of keeping Americans safe from extreme weather and providing forecasts that allow businesses and citizens to make smart plans," former NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco told the Post. NOAA's former chief scientist Rick Spinrad said such cuts "would virtually guarantee jeopardizing the safety of the American public."

[Climate Progress]

Cities Buying $10 Billion in Electric Vehicles

Dozens of U.S. cities are willing to buy $10 billion of electric cars and trucks to show skeptical automakers there's demand for low-emission vehicles, just as President Donald Trump seeks to review pollution standards the industry opposes.

Thirty cities including New York and Chicago jointly asked automakers for the cost and feasibility of providing 114,000 electric vehicles, including police cruisers, street sweepers and trash haulers, said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is coordinating the effort.

[Bloomberg]

Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead

Severe bleaching last year on the northern Great Barrier Reef affected even the largest and oldest corals, like this slow-growing Porites colony. CreditTerry Hughes et al./Nature

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world's most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.

But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.

Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef's most visited areas of color and life.

"We didn't expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years," said Terry P. Hughes, director of a government-funded center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature. "In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead."

Mature stands of clonal staghorn corals on Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef could be seen destroyed by heat stress on Feb. 26, 2016, at left, and colonized by algae just a few weeks later on April 19, at right.CreditPhotographs by Terry Hughes et al./Nature

​[NY Times]