CEO Jim Rogers of Duke Energy hasn't done jack to help mitigate global warming

Should Environmentalists Ever Count On Their "Enemies" To Make Change?

BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER JIGAR SHAH, Fast company,May 16, 2011

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.

Some people fighting for climate change legislation have apparently taken the position that beggars can’t be choosers.



The need to choose good partners to make change might seem obvious. But in the current political and economic climate, some environmentalists apparently have taken the position that beggars can’t be choosers.



I just finished reading The Climate War by Eric Pooley, a book about the failed political battle to get Congress to take legislative action on global warming. In the book, Pooley describes the extraordinary efforts by former Vice President Al Gore, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp and Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers (pictured below) to get comprehensive national climate legislation passed.



Pooley portrays Jim Rogers as a man divided by his passion for climate mitigation on the one hand and his fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and ratepayers on the other. This may be an apt description of many CEOs I have met that have publicly pushed for comprehensive climate legislation. But in the case of Jim Rogers, a more appropriate conclusion might be that he is only involved in climate legislation efforts to make sure that new laws enrich his shareholders.



The relationship between Krupp and Rogers dates back to 1990, when the two men worked together on amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1990 that legislated a cap and trade approach to reducing sulfur and nitrogen emissions from coal plants. Both called their victory good for the environment and the economy.

As head of the Environmental Defense Fund, Krupp wanted to test his theories on cap and trade. Rogers was the new CEO of Public Service of Indiana (PSI), a failing electric utility that, it is important to note, was turned around in part by the free allocations of valuable emission credits that it received under the bill. These credits allowed PSI to continue polluting without legal or financial consequences.

Since Jim Rogers completed his ascent to CEO of Duke Energy in 2006, he hasn't changed much of the culture there. Duke Energy has not presented shareholders with a model for a "Utility 2.0" that they can embrace in a low carbon world. In fact, Duke Energy is not number one in any environmental category.

A few years ago, when Ohio and North Carolina passed renewable portfolio standards (RPS)--laws that required utilities to use certain amounts of renewable energy, Duke Energy fought them every step of the way. When asked about the technical capacity of the grid to integrate renewables in North Carolina, the utility told the North Carolina Utilities Commission it could expect a paltry 3% overall penetration. Only under heavy pressure did Duke concede that its technical analysis was flawed, and that the utility could in fact meet the entire RPS requirement without much difficulty.


Despite Rogers’ dismal track record, in 2010 Fred Krupp teamed up with him again to try and replicate their earlier success in legislation around carbon dioxide emissions, but the effort failed to garner sufficient votes in the U.S. Senate. While Rogers was pushing for a national climate bill, he decided to build two new coal plants (one in Indiana and another in North Carolina) even as he admitted that coal can have a significant negative health impact.

In my view, Rogers’ support for national climate legislation in 2010 was nothing more than a hat trick. Whatever else it might have done, the legislation he supported would certainly have provided regulatory  cover to build 20 new coal plants. At the same time, the legislation did not contain measures to help support solar power and energy efficiency. It would not have created a level playing field for next generation renewable technologies in the states in which Duke Energy operates.

Today, Jim Rogers continues to charm people like Fred Krupp into thinking that he is a messenger for change. I do not fault Rogers for his strategy, but I do fault Krupp and others for not holding Rogers to a high enough standard before giving him a seal of approval.



The actions of Rogers and others like him are not new; history repeats itself.  The largest suppliers of wood in the 1800s did not become prominent coal companies and the largest coal companies didn’t become the largest oil companies. And I highly doubt that most utilities and oil and gas companies will lead the way in our transition to a carbon-free economy. So let’s stop filling Rogers’ mantle with environmental champion awards and look for partners that can truly help cut down on energy waste and accelerate low carbon solutions. 

[Photo: Duke Energy]

Jigar Shah is CEO of the Carbon War Room, a nonprofit that harnesses the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change and create a post-carbon economy. 

http://www.fastcompany.com/1753719/should-environmentalists-ever-count-on-their-enemies-to-make-change

Kerry Emanuel slams media, asserts Lindzen charge in Boston Globe is “pure fabrication”: Worst news article ever published on global warming? by disgraced "journalist" Beth Daley of the Boston Globe - Climate Denial Machine propagandist

Kerry Emanuel slams media, asserts Lindzen charge in Boston Globe is “pure fabrication”

Worst news article ever published on global warming?

by Josesph Romm, Climate Progress, May 16, 2010

UPDATE:  I emailed MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel about the smear that Richard Lindzen launched at him with the help of a credulous Boston Globe reporter stenographer.  His reply is below.

I’ve been bombarded with emails from folks stunned by a shamefully bad Globe article by Beth Daley, “A cooling trend.”  It certainly qualifies as one of the worst news articles ever published on global warming.
But is it the worst piece ever?  I’d love your thoughts.  The competition for that title is, unfortunately, very tough (see “And the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to …“)

The piece does have the four horsemen of awful climate journalism:  Dreadful headline, grotesque imbalance (including a staggering choice for “tie-breaker”), a total lack of understanding or even interest in climate science, and a wholly unsubstantiated, near-libelous slur against a leading scientist
.
Also, it comes from a newspaper that has been highly regarded (though collapsing fast).  Certainly, one wouldn’t give the award for worst news article ever on climate to a newspaper that routinely prints crap on this subject, say the Wall Street Journal or almost any British newspaper.

This piece, however, has a combination of flaws that are unique, as this screen capture shows:

Where to begin?

Big problem #1 is that, as any reader can see even before getting to the headline, this is filed under “News/Science.” So while it is essentially a twin personality profile — a full-length he-said, she-said — you can’t simply dismiss it as, say, a grotesquely bad piece of non-science journalism, like, say, the NYT magazine profile of Freeman Dyson (see Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not”).

No, the Globe is telling readers that this piece should be considered — and judged — as a science news piece.

Big problem #2 is the headline and subhead.  As I’ve noted many times, a lot of people don’t actually get far past the headline and subhead.  They are skimming the paper, they may not actually be following this issue closely or be very interested in it.  And, of course, in the internet age, the headline is what gets grabbed and repeated.

So a large fraction of readers are just going to see that this is another piece about global warming, how scientists can’t come to a consensus, and heck, maybe it is “cooling” just like the anti-science crowd says.  And that alone makes this piece unconscionable — without even considering the ironic timing (see NASA: Easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — in temperature record:  Plus a new record 12-month global temperature, as predicted).

And yes, I’m quite aware that the person who wrote this headline was making a play on words about the relationship between Lindzen and Emanuel.  That doesn’t change the point about the misleading nature of the headline for casual readers.

Big problem #3 is the absurd false balance. Hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel remains highly respected in his field, whereas Lindzen has been widely discredited and debunked:

• Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error” –  Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”).
• Re-discredited climate denialists (aka Lindzen) in denial:  “The fact remains that the overwhelming body of evidence suggests that the alarmists’ fears are grounded in empirical reality.”
• Science: “Clouds Appear to Be Big, Bad Player in Global Warming,”an amplifying feedback (sorry Lindzen and fellow deniers).
• For more Lindzen debunking — see RealClimate here.

Big problem #4 is the utter lack of understanding in climate science. The notion that the scientific debate is between “you should worry” and “you shouldn’t worry” is just patently absurd.  I’ve said it before many times and I’m sure I will keep saying it again and again:  The scientific literature doesn’t really leave much doubt that if we, say, listened to the people like Lindzen, then we are headed to very high concentrations (and yes catastrophic impacts) with high probability:

• M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10 °F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20 °F
• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm
• Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90 °F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”
• “The Copenhagen Diagnosis” warns “Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 °C by 2100.”
• Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7 °C warming by 2100 on current emissions path

Since this egregious Boston Globe is supposedly about how MIT experts view the facts and how how hard climate consensus will be, let’s reprint this figure from a bunch of M.I.T. experts just to make clear what we’re talking about from a risk assessment or probabilistic perspective:



Even Emanuel, like many climate scientists, doesn’t quite understand this either.  Doing nothing sharply reduces the uncertainty of hypothesized catastrophic impacts (see here).

Big problem #5 is the utter lack of interest in climate science. You would never know from this piece that there is a vast array of climate scientists who share Emanuel’s view (or a more dire view), along with all the major scientific bodies in this country, as well as hundreds of peer-reviewed publications in every major scientific journal — but virtually none that support Lindzen’s.  You would never know that because Reporter Beth Daley never quotes a single one.  Not one!

Once again, bad timing on Daley’s part reveals just how uninformed she (and her editors) are:

• 255 National Academy of Sciences members, including 11 Nobel laureates, defend climate science integrity:  “There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.”

And yes, it is absurd that Daley framed this “News/Science” story as supposedly being around “one of the world’s most acrimonious political debates” — rather than, say, “our incredibly well established understanding of climate science.”

Warning:  Please put your head in a vise before reading further.
Seriously, I mean it.  Get out the vise.  Or at least a really strong headband.
Okay, if you’re in a hurry, double up a rubber band.


Big problem #6 is the choice of “tie-breaker” in this he-said, she-said — and what the tie-breaker actually said. So the person Beth Daley picks to break the tie between Emanuel and Lindzen is none other than … wait for it … one of the other people besides Lindzen that Foreign Policy profiled in their “Guide to Climate Skeptics”!!!

The story of the scientists’ relationship is much more than a curiosity. The fact that these serious-minded colleagues and longtime friends disagree so vehemently highlights the immense difficulty of finding common ground on human-caused global warming. That’s because their disagreements are not just about interpretations of scientific data, but about how they assess the risks, amid the uncertainty over global warming’s future impact.

Their divide mirrors a much larger political split, as the US Senate begins to debate a climate bill written in large part by Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry. All parties to the debate have the same evidence to draw on; their conclusions are another matter. Lindzen and Emanuel’s collision spotlights the ultimate sticking point: What steps should we take, and at what cost? That is: How much insurance against the possibility of catastrophe should a prudent planet buy?

“If these two guys can’t agree on the basic conclusions of the social significance of [climate change science], how can we expect 6.5 billion people to?’’ said Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado at Boulder professor who writes a climate blog.

Well, actually, given how discredited Lindzen is, this story is mostly a curiosity.

Lindzen apparently doesn’t want any meaningful action at all — much like Pielke (see Finally, Roger Pielke admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7 °C warming or more).  Indeed, I didn’t realize until I read his profile in Foreign Policy’s climate skeptics guide how much Lindzen’s views matched that of the mainstream anti-science crowd (see “The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science“):

His own political leanings are clear (he sees climate advocates as wanting “to roll back industrial society” and an excuse “to redistribute global wealth”).

As an aside, that isn’t the agenda of any climate advocates I know.  On the other hand, if we listen to Lindzen (or Pielke) and fail to reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends rapidly, then global warming guarantees a massive redistribution of global wealth, from those who have money to those who desperately need to build levees, desalinate water, grow food, flee Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise, and on and on and on and on and on (NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

But Pielke’s quote is absurd.  Yes, I am aware that Pielke tried to cover himself by throwing in the phrase “the social significance of,” so he wouldn’t be directly equating the scientific conclusions of Emanuel and Lindzen.  But the quote is still absurd.

Since when do we have to wait until 6.5 billion people agree before we act on a global problem of massive social significance?  Somehow we managed to eradicate small pox without the entire planet adjudicating the risks.

More to the point, we managed to save the ozone layer without the entire planet agreeing on the basic conclusions of the social significance of [ozone science]. And yes, the climate change problem is a quantum leap difference in scale and difficulty than the ozone problem.  But the reason we have political leaders — and a key reason they created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — is precisely because it’s not possible for the world to wait for billions of people to become expert in every aspect of science and public health before we act.  As the letter from the 255 NAS scientists put it, “When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.”

As another aside, the “insurance” metaphor is the wrong one.  Insurance pays off when the catastrophe occurs.  We’re trying to minimize the chances of the catastrophe occurring in the first place.  The correct analogy is risk reduction.

Big problem #7 is the shameful near-libelous attack on Emanuel:

Lindzen watched his colleague become a media star with growing unease….

He began to see questionable motivations in Emanuel’s transformation into a scientist outspoken about the possible dangers from global warming.

Emanuel “would tell me that he really felt that it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the issue . . . there is funding . . . it could benefit the department,’’ Lindzen said in an interview. “I always took a more moralistic view. There has to be a foundation.’’

What had been an academic dispute was about to become personal.

Anyone who knows Emanuel — and I got to him a bit when I was interviewing hurricane experts for Hell and High Water — knows that this charge is absurd and utterly beyond the pale.

Really, has journalism sunk so low that a reporter for a major newspaper simply reprints any charge, no matter how outlandish, against a highly respected scientist like Emanuel, with not one single substantiating fact or independent quote?

Shame on Beth Daley and shame on the Boston Globe for running this piece.  They should quickly run an apology to Emanuel.

UPDATE:   Since I have interviewed Emanuel in the past, I sent him an e-mail requesting a quote for the record, responding to this outrageous charge by Lindzen that the Globe stenographer reprinted.  He answered:

“The only group that has really profited from the denial of global climate change is the media, who have a strong vested interest in keeping a debate going. You are correct that I never said to Lindzen or anyone else that we should take advantage of the situation for the benefit of the department; this is pure fabrication.”

One additional point using the Michael Tobis (and Stephen Ban) figure.


Lindzen is on the left hand side of “the ‘debate’ in the popular press” and Emanuel looks to be near where the IPCC is, maybe slightly to the right.  Reality, however, is moving ever rightward from Emanuel.

In a AAAS presentation this year, William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge”:

New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected”

Someday the status quo media will get this story right.  But not soon, apparently.

Link:   http://climateprogress.org/2010/5/16/lindzen-emanuel-boston-globe-beth-daley-worst-global-warming-article-ever/#comment-275987

Duke Energy's Jim Rogers: Why nuclear power will probably trump coal

Duke’s Rogers: Why nuclear power will probably trump coal

by Keith Johnson, environmentalcapital blog at The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009

Duke Energy boss Jim Rogers is a big voice on energy and climate change for a couple of simple reasons. He runs a big utility, heavily invested in coal power, and he’s an outspoken proponent of climate-change legislation that spooks many of his peers.

Duke’s Jim Rogers: “We could find ourselves in 2050 where coal has a limited role, if any.” (AP photo)

So his take on America’s energy future is usually interesting. No exception in this recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, where he makes the case for why nuclear power will likely beat coal in a country still heavily reliant on the black stuff.

Coal has all sorts of issues, he says, not just carbon emissions. Coal plants produce other particulate emissions, create fly-ash dumps, and promote harsh mining practices:

Decarbonization of coal is just on top of that. If you asked me today based on current technologies–and assuming we have no advances in technology with respect to decarbonization of coal–I would say nuclear would trump coal because it produces zero greenhouse gases, it provides power 24/7, and, probably most importantly, it probably produces more jobs than even solar or wind on a per-megawatt basis.

Now, Mr. Rogers has been amping up his support for nuclear power since the summer, including a big op-ed in the WSJ. He’s often mentioned the jobs angle before, but rarely with such detail:

In an operation of a nuclear plant, there [are] .64 jobs per megawatt. The wind business–and we have a very large wind business–is .3 jobs per megawatt. In the solar business–and we’re installing solar panels–it’s about .1. But the difference in the jobs is quite different, because if you’re wiping off a solar panel, it’s sort of a minimum wage type of job, [with] much higher compensation for nuclear engineers and nuclear operators. If our goal is to rebuild the middle class, nuclear plays a key role there, particularly if coal is out of the equation.

Ever since last year’s presidential campaign, the energy debate has been largely a jobs debate—for better or for worse. With unemployment still creeping upward, will jobs—not joules—be the crucial element for America’s energy future?

Link to blog:  http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/11/20/dukes-rogers-why-nuclear-power-will-probably-trump-coal/