I am delighted to announce that the inaugural issue of Washington and Lee University School of Law’s Journal of Energy, Climate Change and Environment, which focuses on Climate Policy for the Obama Administration, is now available on-line at http://law.wlu.edu/jece/page.asp?pageid=1082.  It features articles by Robin Craig, David Markell, J.B. Ruhl, Nathan Sayre, and Alexandra Khrebtukova on a wide range of timely topics.

Best,

Hari

___________________________________________________________
Hari M. Osofsky
Associate Professor
Washington & Lee University School of Law
Lewis Hall #4006
Lexington, Virginia 24450
Email:
Phone: (540) 458-8259
Fax: (540) 458-8488

For instructors of climate change courses who incorporate video presentations into the curriculum, I recommend the Climate Change library of United Nations University: http://videoportal.unu.edu/collection/climate-change.

The latest video in the collection, “Coping after Copenhagen: Maximimizing Mexico” is an excellent colloquium on contemporaneous negotiations.

Dear Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce Climate Lab’s public launch of Climate Lab Networks, a new online network for sharing and accessing open-source climate change information.

In 2009, Climate Lab launched http://climatelab.org, an interactive wiki website where users can collaboratively author and edit climate change information and media online.  To date the site has generated more than 250 original articles and over 350 registered users (and counting).

Building on the climate wiki, Climate Lab Networks enables partners to directly pull wiki information and media from climatelab.org into their own websites. Contributions and edits to climatelab.org are immediately available to partner sites connected to the network.  In that way, partners can contribute to building a common information resource while directly accessing and leveraging the collective knowledge, expertise, and efforts of the larger community to support their individual missions and campaigns.

Climate Lab Networks has been launched in collaboration with the Climate Institute and the Latin American and Caribbean Council on Renewable (LAC-CORE), our first NGO network partners.

To demonstrate Climate Lab Networks, the Climate Lab article on “Small Island Developing States,” for example, at climatelab.org…

• http://climatelab.org/Small_Island_Developing_States

… can now be accessed on our partners’ sites:

• http://climate.org/climatelab/Small_Island_Developing_States
• http://lac-core.org/climatelab/Small_Island_Developing_States

We are eager to build new partnerships using Climate Lab Networks.  For more information, I invite you to contact us and visit our website: http://climatelab.org/climate_lab/partnerships. A press release about the launch can be found on our blog: http://blog.climatelab.org/?p=611

Best regards,
Adam Tapley

–
Adam Tapley
Climate Lab
e –
w – +1 (202) 640-1899
t – @climatelab
climatelab.org

NEW PAPER ON GEOENGINEERING

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr Strangelove was the unhinged US general who risked nuclear apocalypse by ordering a first strike against the Soviet Union. The character was modelled on Dr Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb”. In the 1990s, Teller and his colleague at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lowell Wood (a weapons researcher nicknamed “Dr Evil”), were among the first to advocate responding to global warming by transforming the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Taking control of the climate by injecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere sounds like science fiction, but there is now a powerful alliance of scientists and venture capitalists backing the idea. It’s endorsed by climate deniers in conservative think tanks, but the public remains mostly in the dark. This paper, by Clive Hamilton, explores the strange politics of geoengineering.

Read it here:

http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/index.php?page=articles

For instructors who include a geoengineering module in their courses, an excellent new article on one of the leading carbon dioxide removal (CDR) schemes, air capture, was published this week in Scientific American, Klaus L. Lackner, Washington Carbon out of the Air, Scientific American 66-71 (June 2010) (subscription required). Lackner, a professor of geophysics, at Columbia University is also co-founder of a company that is seeking to develop air capture technology. This article is appropriate for undergraduate, graduate and law students and provides a passionate, “birds eye” view of efforts to develop geoengineering technologies. It also focuses on a form of geoengineering that could pose far fewer risks of side effects than many of the others that have been discussed in this blog to date. It should be noted at the outset that Lackner himself argues that air capture doesn’t constitute “geoengineering” because “the process doesn’t change the natural dynamics of the earth or create a potential environmental risk.”  However, I subscribe to the National Academy of Science’s definition, which is “options that would involve large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry.” One would be hard-pressed to argue that air capture would not fit under the rubric of this definition” given its potential for removing huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the potential impacts on warming.

Among the take-aways from the article:

1. Air capture machines, or “synthetic trees,” as the Lackner often terms them, could trap carbon dioxide from a ton to several hundred tons per day. The system being developed by Lackner’s company uses thin fibers of sorbent material that are arranged in large, flat panels. As Lackner explains the process, capture is effectuated when air passes through fibers covered by negative charged carbonate ions, which attract the hydrogen ions from residual water molecules, resulting in the formation of bicarbonate. The remaining hydroxide ions capture carbon dioxide molecules, also forming bicarbonate. Once the panels were saturated with carbon dioxide they would be moved down a track into a regeneration chamber inside a container. The trapped gas would then we freed from the sorbent and compressed into a liquid;
2. Lackner suggests that collected carbon dioxide could be piped underground for storage, as is contemplated in carbon capture and sequestration systems. However, he also suggests several potential alternative uses, including sales to industries that use carbon dioxide, e.g. purveyors of carbonated beverages and dry ice. Ultimately, Lackner argues that ultimately companies could claim carbon credits for gas sequestered underground, and could contribute to enhanced oil recovery efforts. Additionally, captured carbon dioxide could be utilized to produce synthetic gases;
3. Ten million units could collect 3.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, which could reduce atmospheric levels by 0.5ppm per year, perhaps escalating to 5ppm annually, more than the rate of global increase at this point. In a future scenario in which atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are stabilized, carbon capture technologies could reduce atmospheric concentrations;
4. The initial cost of capturing carbon dioxide could be high, about $200 per ton; however, if the technology followed standard learning and manufacturing curves, capture costs could ultimately drop to around $30 per ton.

Among the discussion questions that might be relevant:

1. Could air capture technologies result in a moral hazard problem, i.e. divert efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by mitigation approaches.If the technology proved to be effect, would that be problematic?

2. What are the opportunity costs, if any, in pursuing this technological approach vis-a-vis mitigation and adaptation responses?;

3. Is there a possibility that some countries would object to reducing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide? If yes, what would the implications be for governance?