Also available on-line and via Android, Skeptical Science lists 119 one-line responses to combat climate “skeptics” and “disinformers”.  Each response links to the supporting scientific references.  The counter to “…no consensus about climate change”, is “97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.”   To add credibility to your rebuttal, a click on the answer links to a basic 500 word explanation.  If you need to pull out the big guns you can click on the intermediate level of response for a more detailed explanation with charts, peer-reviewed research etc. 

 Skeptical Science is the labor-of-love of Australian John Cook.  He notes that “Scientific skepticism is healthy.”  In fact skepticism is at the core of the modern scientific method.  The ideas of scientists are tested and retested.  Evidence is challenged and scrutinized in the crucible of honest scientific examination.  Critical to the process is peer-reviewed research, the purpose of which is to advance science in the direction of consensus understanding. 

All of scientists who hold a common understanding about the impact of human activity upon climate embrace the integrity of the scientific process described above.  Outside of this scientific process are those self-proclaimed experts who present non-reviewed opinions as facts.

John Cook deserves our appreciation for addressing a complicated subject in a clear and efficient manner.  His website draws an active global participation every day.

Those in attendance were of diverse backgrounds, but by the end of the evening I sensed a common denominator of extreme frustrated concern.   What we learned from SIO Professors Richard Somerville, Ray Weiss, Ralph Keeling and Andrew Dickson was made doubly disturbing by their personal testimony.  It is one thing to discuss climate change denial in the abstract.  It is another to hear the stories of deceit and distortion directed at the life’s work of serious scientists whose only motivation is to “do science” honestly and objectively.  This is not a story of competing theories, but rather one in which established science is ignored or misrepresented.  The complexity and scope of climate change denial is of enormous magnitude.   As the evening ended I was saddened with the sense that none of us saw a clear path of response.   The following month Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway published a book which beams light on the path.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming will, I guarantee, make you angry.  Oreskes and Conway pinpoint the scientists-for-hire, think tanks and foundations which thread from one denial campaign to another beginning with the tobacco industry’s multiple decade stall on the linkage between smoking and cancer.  The stage is filled with many of the same players who challenged the science behind acid rain, ozone depletion and now global warming.  What is amazing is that denial-for-hire has become a robust industry.  Huge funding from the tobacco industry, oil and others hides behind the artifice of educational foundations and even attorney-client privilege.  Some big-name national commentators have set up “foundations” so that they can receive funding from special interest groups and maintain deniability that they are not journalists for hire. 

Go to Amazon.  Buy the book.  If you already own it, buy copies to give to your smart friends.  Thought leaders everywhere need to know this story.  You can make a difference.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego.  There have been many reviews written about this important book.  Here’s one by Jesse Kornbluth.

Solatube

ZuumCraft

Portable Farms LLC

D&K Engineering

Elliptigo

EcoATM

DriveCam

On Tuesday the California Department of Labor awarded the San Diego region a $4 million grant to implement new workforce training programs for jobs in the emerging biofuels industry.  The San Diego Biofuels Initiative, a collaborative effort including CleanTECH San Diego, BIOCOM, San Diego Regional EDC, San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology (SD-CAB) and the San Diego Workforce Partnership, captured the grant.  The San Diego Biofuels Initiative’s proposal, titled the Educating and Developing Workers for the Green Economy (EDGE Initiative), will provide education, training and placement services to unemployed and dislocated workers within San Diego and the Imperial Valley.

Also on Tuesday the Governor’s Office of Economic Development designated the San Diego region as a California Innovation Hub.  The designation clears the way for the San Diego iHub Consortium to apply for stimulus funds from the Federal government.  The consortium has identified biofuels, wireless health and solar power/energy storage as the three areas of greatest job growth potential.

On Monday the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology (SD-CAB) announced that the region will receive funding of $9 million from the Department of Energy for algae R&D.  A team of seven companies including locals Sempra Energy, General Atomics and Sapphire Energy are adding another $3 million to support the R&D effort.

CleanTECH San Diego’s website lists 37 Biomass Energy & Biofuel local companies in their company database. 

On July 20^th CONNECT presents Algae Biotechnology: Working to Transform Fuel, Food and Medicine with Stephen Mayfield, Director, San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology and John Dove Isaacs Chair of Natural Philosophy Department of Biological Sciences, UC San Diego.  Click here for details.

Two new algae resources

National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap, a 140 page report just released by U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office of the Biomass Program.  (This PDF file is 7 MB).

Also new is a report from the Milken Institute, Scaling Enterprise Finance, The Future of Biofuels, which addresses the question, “How can we facilitate the flow of private capital into the production of biofuels?”  Please e-mail me at glenn@glennmosier.com for a PDF copy of this 40 page report.

Last week the House and the Senate introduced separate but similar bills in support of Electric Cars.  Both are called “Electric Vehicle Deployment Act of 2010″, both have the same outcome but go about it a bit differently.  They will each allocate about $10 billion to fund charging infrastructure and increase consumer tax credits. 

House Will:
-  Give $800 million to five regions.
-  Increase the Fed tax rebate for EV purchase to $9,500.
-  Give Tax Credits for the purchase and instalation of EV infrastructure up to $50,000.
-  Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) introduced the bill.

Senate Will:
- Give $250 million to fifteen cities.
- Increase the Fed Tax Rebate for EVs to $10,000.
- Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Jeff Merkley(D-Ore.) presented the bill.
Both bills look at reducing the nation’s dependency on Oil and follow the recommendations set forth by the EV Coalition earlier this year.  The exact language isn’t available yet; the bills are in the markup stage which means they will look completely different from the original documents.  Several large players are weighting pro and con.  The BP spill is rather unfortunately helping to push it along.

Mariana Gerzanych is CEO of 350Green LLC, a Company that will be installing charging station infrastructure for Electric Cars.  350Green is a partner in the eTec $99.8 mill DOE grant award to electrify the EV infrastructure in 5 markets: San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Phoenix/Tucson and Nashville.  You can find Mariana on Twitter @ukr50 and read more of her musings on www.350Green.com/news.

CleanTECH San Diego’s database of cleantech companies include 47 solar innovators and 129 solar facilitators. 

The networking hour before the CleanTECH San Diego Showcase is a unique opportunity to get face to face with the captains of industry, futurists, venture capitalists and propeller heads who play in the clean tech space.  All you need to do is register and show up with a fistful of business cards.  Click here to make your reservation.

This week’s SCRUB showcased four distinctly different clean tech businesses.  350 Green intends to provide developmental infrastructure for electric vehicle charging stations.  Butler Sun Solutions has developed a solar assisted hot water system, featuring “do-it-yourself” installation options.  Home Town Farms plans a vertical organic urban farming model that has the capacity to reduce water and energy consumption.  WaterSmart Systems provides resources to water utilities to help optimize water conservation.

In January the SCRUB featured Shrink NanoSolar, Eco ReBox, and Vari-Ro Technologies.  In the past six quarterly SCRUB sessions CleanTECH San Diego has provided advice, introductions and critical evaluations to 21 future clean tech stars.  If you have a clean tech enterprise that would benefit from a good SCRUB you should forward your business summary to Shaina Brown at shainab@cleantechsandiego.org

Recently I had the honor to be included in a group brought together to discuss the communication challenges discussed in the letter.  In attendance that evening were four scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who have spent decades dealing first hand with the study of climate.  It was a wide ranging discussion.  One concept that I took away was that the science we use to make decisions is the best science we have at hand.  Like climate science, medical science is imperfect and essential.  If my surgeon tells me that 95% of medical specialists are 95% confident of the efficacy of a recommended procedure, I will use that information to make my decision.  Even if my choice were to side with the minority viewpoint, I would make a decision.  What I would not do is revert to the no-decision mode of “the jury is still out” and “there is still some debate”. 

Our scientists need and deserve our active support.  The April 12th issue of The New Yorker noted, “No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists, at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax”.  “The message from scientists at this point couldn’t be clearer: the world’s emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous.  Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories—these are all a distraction from what’s really happening”.  Indeed.

The cost paid by the user plus the externalized costs equals the all-in cost.  If you were to ask the residents of the Montcoal, WV, the all-in cost of coal is about $50 per ton plus the loss of their husbands, sons and fathers.  For a Louisiana shrimper the all-in cost of oil is $80 per barrel plus the loss of his income for years. 

There are externalized costs associated with every source of energy whether it is coal or solar, wind or oil, nuclear or cow dung.  The only universal reducer of externalized costs is “to consume less energy” either through energy efficiency or frugality.  As a society we will be better able to make rational decisions about energy production and use if we have a clearer vision of the externalized costs associated with the various sources of energy.

I am at odds with the climate change deniers and with the strict environmentalists.  However, I would no more attempt to change them than I would try to persuade a Red Sox fan or a Yankees fan to switch allegiance to their rival.  It just isn’t going to happen.  What the Bostonian and New Yorker have in common is their love of the game.  What I share with the climate change deniers and the strict environmentalists is a belief that there are consequences to our choices of energy sources.  Clearer information about the externalized costs of all the energy options will bring all parties closer together. 

To climate change deniers I say that it is not inconsistent for them to maintain their skepticism while at the same time embrace those changes which will encourage the shift away from fossil fuels.  Let’s give everyone the information to make decisions on an apples-to-apples basis.  The explosion of just one oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico generates an externalized cost to our economy and to those of us who pay taxes that is huge.  The cost and fines paid by the rig operator, BP, will be a small fraction of all the externalized costs to the region, our economy and the ecosystem.  (FYI.  The number of oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico is in the thousands). 

If we locked a climatologist, an economist and an actuary in a room for a few days they could generate a rough model of some of the externalized costs associated with drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  Insurance companies already have the data about the probability of loss from fire, hurricanes, etc.  Those costs are built into the price of oil.  Using those same probabilities we want to model what the externalized costs which are not expressed in the barrel price of oil.  Over time what is the cost of oil production which is not paid for by the user of the oil?  Is it $3 per barrel or $30 or ?  Of course it’s a projection and all projections are guesses, but wouldn’t a wild-guess be more useful than what we currently have, which is zip.  I am not suggesting that off-shore drilling is inherently good or bad.  I just don’t know how high the all-in cost might be.

My message to environmentalists is the same.  Let us focus on shared beliefs.  In my adult lifetime the population of the United States has increased by 100 million people.  Locate a 21 year-old and ask him or her to think about adding the equivalent of another dozen cities the size of New York City during the next 30 or 40 years.  Energy frugality and efficiency will help, but the demand for energy will increase year-over-year. 

A more thoughtful examination of externalized costs can guide us to decisions which are quicker and more insightful.  Some birds and bats are killed by wind turbines (and also by tall buildings, semi-trucks and power lines).  My guess is that the recent event in the Gulf of Mexico will kill more wild life in the next few months than all the wind turbines in the United States will over the next several years.  If we had a better measure of the externalized costs we would be enabled to make better decisions.  Obstructionists who block the construction of large scale wind and solar energy projects may be unintentionally advancing the growth of fossil fuel alternatives which are substantially more harmful to the very creatures they seek to protect.  The only way we can address the issues logically is to have the true costs, the all-in costs, as the basis for our judgments.

Q&A

Algae lesson number two is the Algal Biofuels Symposium 2010 “The Science to Support Algal Biofuel Commercialization” to be held this Friday April 23rd at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.  This all day event features a dozen of the top experts in the field of what many believe will be the leading alternative fuel for transportation, algae biofuel.  Just $25 covers the event including lunch and a hosted reception.  Click here for details. 

You will want to become a SD-CAB Associate Member.  Click here to join for $100.

For five more useful algae resources see Algae spoken here which was posted below on October 21, 2009