The floodwaters of Superstorm Sandy amounted to a proverbial black swan event whose sudden, shocking appearance made many private insurance firms reach for their shotguns.

Defenses against the unlikely swan -- a metaphor for a disastrous event believed to be possible but highly improbable -- include socking away cash reserves, in the billions, to pay off claims made by policyholders.

If that taps out, there is another defense. Costly reinsurance, which is purchased more often than it's used, can cover damage claims that threaten to make a firm go bankrupt. This is similar to hiring an escort ship to refill your fuel tanks at sea after they surprisingly go dry. It's a backup that's rarely needed, but that's the point, experts say. You can't know when a big disaster will strike, just that it might sometime.

While these are common tools in the insurance industry, they are absent in the federal government's National Flood Insurance Program. After operating for nearly 40 years without encountering a black swan, it got hit with its second in seven years when Superstorm Sandy drained the funding it derives from 5.6 million policyholders nationwide.

Critics, and even some supporters, contend that the program often charges rates that are too low for today's mounting catastrophes, a result of technical challenges, like outdated flood maps, and political interference to suppress premiums. That makes it difficult to build up reserves, or to buy reinsurance.

The result was witnessed 10 days ago, when Congress authorized the program to borrow $9.7 billion from the Treasury to pay claims. That means the program is close to $27 billion in debt to taxpayers, after adding its losses from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, its first encounter with a black swan.

"It's a perfect storm of factors," David Conrad, a water specialist who has followed the flood program for years, said of its rising debt.

Encountering riskier business

The program is operating in an era of climbing disaster losses -- driven by the presence of more homes in riskier areas, harder surfaces that accelerate runoff, rising oceans and stormier conditions, many experts say. But as all that is happening, many of the program's protocols remain the same.

The program clings to a 1 percent chance of annual flooding to determine where hazards will occur, even as critics contend that the risks have intensified since the program's inception in 1968, from changes in development and climate.

"There is mounting evidence that the effects of changing climate and rising sea levels is having an effect which broadly means that unless we increase standards ... and even consider some strategic retreat from the increased risk areas, we can only expect the program to become weaker and weaker financially," Conrad explained.

So what does the future hold for a program that carries $1.2 trillion in exposure to loss but raises only about $3.5 billion annually from policyholders, many of whom are undercharged and living in areas that are increasingly prone to flood? And how can it cope with the future challenges of climate change, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates will expand the volume of floodplains by up to 45 percent nationally by 2080?

There is broad optimism that the program would improve with the help of higher rates, tougher standards, fewer high-risk properties and stronger incentives for more durable homebuilding. But that optimism is largely born from the lack of an alternative. The flood program was created to fill an absence of private coverage for one of the most prevalent and damaging disasters in the world.

No large group of private insurers has stepped up to take on that widespread risk, but there may be other ways for the private sector to become involved. The program is exploring how it might use reinsurance to cover some of its risks. That would require higher premiums, because the price of reinsurance can be costly and it fluctuates wildly. But it could also protect taxpayers from shouldering rising damages.

"[If] you want to play with the big guys, that comes at a price," said Erwann Michel-Kerjan, managing director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. "Reinsurance is typically a very volatile market after a large disaster. If there is a big earthquake, tsunami [or] nuclear explosion in Japan, the price of reinsurance increases everywhere around the world."

Blame Congress, not the flood program

Still, he said, reinsurance is an important tool that could offset some of the program's public cost. It should also be combined with higher premiums to account for the true risks of living along the shore, and doubling the number of policyholders to increase revenue and to spread the risk of floods across geographic and time horizons.

But even if those big changes are successfully implemented, Michel-Kerjan believes the public should prepare for future costs.

"Does that mean you and I as taxpayers would never have to bail out the NFIP? No," he said. "One day, a catastrophe could go bigger than that [reinsurance] level."

And it probably would.

But others say the program was never meant to cover black swans. Congress is supposed to forgive the debt from major disasters, said David Maurstad, who ran the program under President George W. Bush. The fact that lawmakers failed to forgive the debt from Katrina, now around $17 billion, before Sandy struck gives the program a sense of failure that it doesn't deserve, he thinks.

"The program is designed to take care of the average historical loss year," Maurstad added, noting that losses rarely exceed the program's revenue of about $3 billion. "It wasn't designed to have a reserve enough to take care of a catastrophic year."

The blame is really Congress', Maurstad said. For years, lawmakers imposed "un-insurancelike" provisions on the program, like requiring discounts for homeowners in risky locations and demanding "artificially low" premiums to please constituents. Those factors foretold big losses, he said.

Other federal policies also contributed to the program's debt, like the failure to maintain New Orleans' levees, which resulted in the bulk of flooding damage during Katrina.

"Ten billion [dollars] of that Katrina loss has been attributed to the federal government's own ineptness in the failure of the levees," Maurstad said. "That's the other irony of all of this."

Looking back for future floods

Others, though, believe the program is doing more damage than good. John Echeverria, a professor who specializes in land-use policies at the Vermont Law School, said the program is dramatically increasing the nation's exposure to risk by facilitating overdevelopment in floodplains. He calls it a "maladaptive" climate change policy because he believes it pushes people toward coastlines being made more dangerous by climate change.

"I think the federal government gets so little in terms of responsible coastal land-use regulation from the flood insurance program that I'm with the libertarians who are in favor of getting rid of the flood insurance program," Echeverria said.

"The private market will come back in. It will provide limited coverage to those people with the means to run those kinds of risk. But it will create a proper incentive structure that will cause people to leave fragile areas. That's the optimal policy solution. The flood insurance program's been a failure."

But he acknowledges there are significant challenges to extinguishing the program. In the short term, it would likely increase the amount of disaster aid shouldered by taxpayers, which also sends a signal that it's safe to build near the beach. And apart from the likely economic toll on the housing market, ending the flood program would also leave 5.6 million families living in risky areas without insurance.

Congress is slowly addressing the program's problems. Last summer, it authorized FEMA to increase rates by 25 percent per year on second homes, businesses and some repetitively flooded properties. It also requires the agency to consider sea level rise and current scientific findings related to hurricanes in its hazard maps for the first time.

The legislation will increase rates on about 400,000 homes whose owners have enjoyed subsidized rates while living in the riskiest areas. That's an improvement, but it still leaves about 800,000 primary residences with suppressed premiums, said Conrad, the water specialist. And the program continues to use historical flooding data, rather than future predictions by computer models that show more substantial future risks.

"We are still approaching flooding in hindsight, and not even well there," Conrad said.

Food security may be less of an issue for urban dwellers than previously thought.

Take the case of 70-year-old Andy Hoi-Csiu Chan. He tends bamboo, peonies, watermelon, eggplants and other vegetables in his Chicago backyard. Chan, an immigrant from China who teaches traditional brush painting at his Chinatown studio, started his garden about 12 years ago.

"I love to see that they grow," he said. "Many, many friends to come to my house and I cook for them." Even in January, Chan keeps a stock of vegetables from his garden grown the previous summer.

Chan is a member of a significant and previously undocumented population of Chicago urban farmers. Though Chan said he wasn't aware of it, researchers at the University of Illinois recently discovered that many of his neighbors, especially those of Chinese origin, are also enjoying the fruits and vegetables of backyard gardening.

John Taylor, standing in a vegetable garden he found blooming in a vacant lot. Photo courtesy of John Taylor.

Based on the number of newly located food-producing backyards, Chicagoans may be more protected from future climate-induced food shortages and food price swings than some researchers have thought. The study sheds more light on food security issues that could arise as more people around the world are moving to cities.

Using satellite images from Google Earth, researchers Jon Taylor and Sarah Taylor Lovell have produced a new, more accurate study of Chicago's urban agriculture sites, revealing a significant number of home gardeners like Chan.

Taylor, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois' Department of Crop Sciences, and Taylor Lovell, an assistant professor in the same department, discovered that residential gardens accounted for almost three-fourths of the total area of Chicago's urban agriculture sites.

Taylor and Taylor Lovell also found that earlier records of Chicago's community gardening sites, mostly provided by local nongovernmental organizations, were misleading. Among the 1,236 sites listed as community gardens, only 13 percent were actually growing food.

Hunting vegetables by satellite

The project began as an attempt to locate community gardens for use as research sites. Using the only lists available, Taylor and his fellow researchers learned that many of Chicago's recorded community gardens were actually ornamental gardens, playgrounds or parks.

"We kept visiting gardens thinking, 'Oh, there are vegetables here,' and there weren't," Taylor said.

In an attempt to identify workable research sites, Taylor and his fellow researchers turned to satellite images on Google Earth.

"We noticed that we could actually look in people's backyards and identify the larger sites of food production on private lots," he said. "I was surprised by the size of some of the backyard gardens."

A garden of tropical corn, cucumbers and hot peppers has taken over the front yard of an apartment building in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. Photo courtesy of John Taylor.

The researchers decided to manually survey the quantity and area of Chicago's urban agriculture. Taylor examined hundreds of high-resolution aerial images of Chicago's neighborhoods on Google Earth. By searching for signs of vegetation, raised beds and tilled earth, he was able to mark the location and size of both community and residential gardens.

To account for the Chicago area's 234 square miles, Taylor spent about 400 hours in front of a computer screen and visited almost 200 undocumented community gardens to confirm his findings.

Ultimately, Taylor was able to identify 4,648 urban agriculture sites in the city of Chicago, with a total production area of 315,958 square yards -- enough garden sites to fill almost 50 football fields. Most of these sites -- 86 percent -- were identified as food-producing residential gardens.

Taylor believes his official report of about 120,000 residential garden sites is a conservative number. Google Earth's satellite images aren't detailed enough to show smaller gardens, he said. "I think people will find a way to garden, no matter how small the space is."

'Food deserts' were blooming

While examining satellite images of two unique Chicago communities, Taylor discovered something else about Chicago's residential gardeners.

"When I was looking at the images, I kept seeing these curious structures in backyards," he said. "I saw them mostly in Chinatown and also in the Bridgeport neighborhoods, and both of those neighborhoods have large Chinese-origin populations."

Taylor decided to visit Chinatown, and while walking up and down alleys behind residences, he discovered the structures were trellises, made of pieces of pipe and wood, supporting vining crops like melons and other gourds. After examining their data, Taylor and Taylor Lovell concluded that many of Chicago's residential gardens are tended by immigrants like Chan, living in the city's Chinatown area.

"Two neighborhoods on the near south side, Chinatown and Bridgeport, appear to be home garden hot spots for demographic and cultural reasons," said the final report, published in August in the scientific journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

Chinatown and part of Bridgeport were classified as "food deserts" in a 2011 report compiled by the Chicago-based Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group. Taylor thinks that, to some extent, home gardens help compensate for the lack of quality, culturally appropriate foods in this area.

"That's a really important component of food security," he said. "We often think about food security just having enough food to eat, but it's also about having the right kinds of food."

The bounty of immigrants

Chicago neighborhoods with significant populations of European immigrants, like Dunning and Norwood Park, also had high concentrations of residential gardens.

As of yet, there are no significant data to support the supposition that certain recent immigrant groups are more likely to have home gardens than others, said Alicia Woodbury, a doctoral student at Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation, who researches inequalities in food and agricultural systems.

"What I do think is true, based on my own research, is that many recent immigrant groups are more likely to have agricultural knowledge than the average American who is just getting involved with gardening for the first time," she said. "In many cases, this is because they were farmers in their countries of origin."

In light of these findings, Taylor believes the many recently discovered home gardens should be acknowledged as an asset to Chicago's urban agriculture. Communities can use this and similar research to promote and assist backyard gardeners like Chan.

"People are doing an incredible job, basically on their own, and sometimes with few resources," Taylor said. "I think that if there were ways to augment those resources, that would be terrific."

The state of Virginia needs to act now to prepare for rising sea levels to avoid catastrophic flooding in the coming decades in its Tidewater region, a new report from the College of William & Mary warns.

More than 40 percent of Virginia's Accomack and Northampton counties, for example, could face saturation with a "moderate" level of sea-level rise of 1.5 foot, combined with a 3-foot storm surge, researchers from the college's Virginia Institute of Marine Science found. Virginia Beach could witness 289 miles of flooded roadways and a quarter of its land would be hit with flooding under the modeled scenario, the institute said.

"We have a problem, but it is not an insurmountable problem," said Molly Mitchell, a marine scientist at the institute and a co-author of the report, produced in conjunction with Old Dominion University, Wetlands Watch and various state and regional agencies.

The study came as a result of a joint resolution of Virginia's Legislature last year that was mired in controversy.

Initially, the name of the General Assembly study included the words "sea level rise," but the phrase was taken out amid objections from climate skeptics and many Republicans, according to William "Skip" Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, who participated in the report.

The Virginia Tea Party slammed the "sea level rise" study, before the name change, as being "ridiculous," according to The Virginian-Pilot. The new study is now known as the "Recurrent Flooding Study for Tidewater Virginia."

Regardless, it is important for policymakers in Richmond to consider the findings because of the 10- to 20-year planning horizon for much of the state's infrastructure and buildings, said Mitchell.

One thing state lawmakers can do immediately to prepare the state for rising seas, she said, is clarify legal uncertainty under the "Dillon Rule," she said. The rule -- a legal framework in Virginia -- dictates that municipal governments only hold power specifically granted to them by the state.

That puts local areas at risk of lawsuits if they change things such as zoning regulations in floodplains without state approval.

The report notes, for example, that local leaders at a meeting last year said they were concerned that recent changes to state health codes allow engineered septic systems to now be located in flood-prone areas. "However, the localities feel that they do not have the authority to deny development," the report states.

Wanted: a state-local dialogue

Mitchell said the state could clarify confusion with the Dillon Rule by requesting an "expert review" of the legal authority of local governments. "It would help tremendously to get a dialogue going between state and local officials" about the rule in regard to flooding, she said.

Another issue is data, considering that many localities do not know how often, and where, flooding occurs in their jurisdictions, said Mitchell.

There is no uniform database on the topic, so local leaders are relying on word of mouth, repetitive loss records from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and road closure information from the Virginia Department of Transportation.

"It makes it difficult to plan ahead," she said.

Consolidation of information from emergency managers, who often know the flooding hot spots, would help build a database, Mitchell said. It also will be important to conduct cost-benefit analyses of various flood-control strategies to prioritize projects, she said.

Additional scientific research -- funded by the state and federal government -- also would help fine-tune projections for rising seas, she said.

Stiles said Virginia should follow Florida and other states and devise a uniform future estimate for sea-level rise, based on scientific projections. Southeast Florida officials, for example, have range numbers for the year 2060 that are being incorporated into urban planning decisions (ClimateWire, Jan. 10, 2012).

Concerns about lawsuits

Not having an estimate makes it tough for public works departments, and engineers, to design infrastructure such as pipes and stormwater drains outside of "state-vetted guidelines," Stiles said. "People are worried about lawsuits," he said.

Many scientists agree that seas could rise globally by roughly 3 feet by 2100. Much of Virginia sits in a hot spot, where seas have been rising three to four times faster than average, partially because of land subsidence, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The institute also examined various flood-control measures, ranging from rolling easements to flood walls in use around the world, with an analysis of how they might work in various parts of Virginia.

In one example, the researchers said raising roads may be an option in rural areas, where stormwater drainage essentially consists of ditches. That eliminates the need for dealing with much additional, complicated infrastructure.

On the other hand, much of Virginia's waterfront property is privately owned, making it tricky to implement "soft" engineering measures being tried in other states, such as beach dune restoration, to protect against storms, the report notes.

It is not clear how much the report will be considered by state lawmakers after its formal release to the Legislature last week.

"Until the Navy and the Hampton Roads region uses their political leverage, I'm not sure how much can get done at the state level," said Jay Fisette, vice chairman of the Arlington County Board in Virginia.

Los Angeles' abundant sunlight will soon be converted into energy and cash for millions of everyday Angelinos under a new solar feed-in tariff (FiT) program that allows electricity ratepayers, solar companies and even third parties to generate and sell solar energy back to the city's public utility.

Phase 1 of the FiT program, approved last week by the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners, calls for individual proposals starting next month to provide up to 100 megawatts of solar power to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) at a fixed rate of 17 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The Adelanto solar power plant, one of several new sources for Los Angeles' electricity. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

According to the agency, LADWP will issue 20 MW requests for proposals at six-month intervals between early 2013 and the end of 2016. Eligible projects can range in size from 30 kilowatts -- an amount easily produced with residential rooftop solar panels -- to as much as 3 MW. Each request for proposals will require that a certain amount of the solar capacity come from small-scale producers of between 30 and 150 kW.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a strong proponent of distributed energy projects to help stimulate the city's economy, hailed the FiT program as "another major step forward in transitioning to a clean energy future for Los Angeles."

"I'm proud of the LADWP Board of Water and Power Commissioners for moving Los Angeles forward to become the largest city in the nation to offer a feed-in tariff solar program," Villaraigosa said in a statement. "The FiT program takes advantage of our abundant sunshine to spur new private sector investment that will create jobs and decrease our city's reliance on dirty fossil fuels."

Solar to help meet Calif. RPS

More than stimulating California's clean energy economy, the program should also help Los Angeles meet one of the country's most ambitious renewable portfolio standards. Under state law, utilities must meet a 25 percent renewable energy benchmark by 2016, followed by a 33 percent firm standard to take effect in 2020.

The California Air Resources Board has estimated that the state's RPS should cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by 12 million to 13 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020. In Los Angeles alone, renewable energy projects either completed or in the development pipeline are expected to reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.1 million metric tons annually, an amount roughly equivalent to removing the emissions from 210,000 motor vehicles in this traffic-clogged city.

Ronald Nichols, LADWP's general manager, said officials carefully studied their options for meeting the renewable energy mandates and determined that a feed-in tariff program was the best solution for the utility, which provides power to 1.46 million customers in Los Angeles. The initial offering price of 17 cents per kWh, while higher than what is available for other renewable power purchases, was established as an incentive for people to participate in the program, Nichols said.

"We learned from working with the business community, environmental leaders and solar industry representatives, and based on lessons learned from other FiT programs in California, that we needed to price the program to be successful," he said. "If we did not buy solar locally through FiT, we would need to purchase other renewable energy from outside the city and bring it into Los Angeles."

Under the program, LADWP will sign 20-year power purchase contracts with approved providers at 17 cents per kWh until the first 20 MW are met. After that, the price will drop by 1 cent per kWh under a tiered schedule that ties the price to the amount of reserve capacity left in the program.

The incorporation of more solar and natural gas into Los Angeles' electricity mix, combined with energy efficiency measures, should help LADWP shift from one of the nation's most coal-dependent municipal utilities into a clean energy leader.

According to Nichols, the utility will replace more than 70 percent of its existing energy supply over the next 15 years, with most of the shift involving transitions away from polluting fossil fuels. "Local solar not only increases the level of renewable energy we provide to customers but also helps maintain power reliability as we transition away from coal power," he said.

Energy-hungry city bets on renewables

In fiscal 2010-11, LADWP's power customers consumed roughly 25.2 million megawatt-hours of electricity. More than half that output was consumed by businesses and other commercial customers, while residences used an estimated 7.23 million MWh of power.

All the agency's revenues are derived from the sale of power and water, and it receives no additional taxpayer support. In November, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the utility board's plans to generate as much 460 MW of clean solar power.

In addition to the feed-in tariff solar power program, LADWP has invested heavily in utility-scale solar deployments. Two such projects, the Adelanto Solar Power Project and the Pine Tree Photovoltaic Project, are expected to produce a combined 940 gigawatt-hours of clean power over 25 years.

Another 250 MW solar plant has been proposed for utility-owned land in Kern County, and the city has negotiated power purchase contracts to bring renewable energy into Los Angeles from utility-scale arrays in neighboring Nevada.

LADWP also generates 150 kW of solar electricity at two sites at the Port of Los Angeles and has plans to install 490 kW of solar capacity atop its Ascot and Susana water tanks.

LA JOLLA, Calif. -- California's renewable energy mandate has fueled growth of green power so swiftly that utilities here won't need to buy much more for several years, officials said yesterday.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. (SDG&E) all are on track to hit the state's 33 percent renewable portfolio standard (RPS) by 2020.

They'll reach that target with energy already under contract, creating a bust for developers that were hoping for continued growth, experts said at the American Wind Energy Association's (AWEA) regional summit.

"The good news, bad news is that we're incredibly successful," said Catherine J.K. Sandoval, a commissioner with the state's utility regulator. "For you as developers, the bad news of California being incredibly successful is that we really don't need a lot of contracts right now."

The Golden State's RPS, requiring one-third of all power to come from renewable sources, is the most aggressive in the country. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has said that proportion is intended to be a floor, not a ceiling, although he has not made any official moves to expand it further.

Because of the RPS, California is the country's dominant player in green energy, said Tanuj "TJ" Deora, director of energy and environment at forecasting firm IHS.

By 2025, renewable power generated in the state will represent one-fifth of the nation's total, he said.

"Clearly, California is the big market," Deora said.

The mandate became 33 percent in 2008, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) increased it from what had been 20 percent by 2010. The following year, "a lot of developers with big balance sheets came in wanting to build in California," said Paul Douglas, supervisor of renewable procurement and resource planning at the California Public Utilities Commission.

It created competition, he said, and the amount of green power demand yet to be filled dwindled quickly. Los Angeles-based utility SCE now has so much energy from renewable power, it is selling surplus outside the state, Douglas said. "So that's a real glut," he added.

Will some projects fail?

The big utilities aren't expected to solicit more green power contracts before 2017 for SDG&E and closer to 2020 for SCE and PG&E.

The wind industry will stay busy in California building out the projects under contract, said Tom Darin, Western regional representative with AWEA.

Darin disputed that wind developers have entered a period of economic bust for new projects in California, saying that "it's a flatter period of growth."

Some are questioning whether the surplus of renewables might actually turn out to be a "phantom glut," said John Pimentel, president of Foundation Windpower, a Menlo Park, Calif., company. It is part of a larger company that also has a solar arm, PV2 Energy.

Competition between developers led to contract terms that are favorable for the utilities but might not be sustainable, he said.

"We've seen the utilities push back on pricing and terms to a point where we're concerned there may be significant projects that are not financeable and may never come to fruition," Pimentel said.

Douglas with the CPUC, however, noted that both regulators and the utilities assume that a certain number of contracts will fail. There are extras built into planning, he said, to ensure that the power companies will still hit their RPS mandate.

The failure rate historically has been about 40 percent. But because the market has matured, Douglas said, companies and utilities have learned more about what is needed to make projects successful.

An analysis of future projects also looks at transmission. All of the ones that are included as part of the 33 percent RPS have planned connections to the grid, Douglas said.

Because of the economic downturn, Douglas said, there is less need for new transmission than what was expected several years ago. It's possible that there's a forecasting error in the analysis of contracts, he explained. If that happened, utilities would need to solicit more green power.

There could also be new demand if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not allow the San Onofre plant in San Diego County to restart one of its generators, said Darin with AWEA. The facility -- which provided power to 1.4 million households -- has been closed since a radiation leak in January 2012.

Shifting markets

Developers that still want to sell projects in California might want to consider targeting city-owned power companies or cooperatives, said Deora with IHS.

There also are opportunities in repowering, in which companies tear down wind developments built decades ago and replace them with updated equipment, said Mark Tholke, vice president of origination for EDF Renewable Energy's West Region.

That company's predecessor, enXco, in 2001 acquired a site with a wind project that had been built in 1989. Earlier this year, EDF removed the older turbines and put up new ones. The project, located southwest of Sacramento, produces 10 times the energy on the same land footprint, Tholke said.

That underscores the efficiency gains of the new technology, he added.

Other renewable developers are seeing success in the distributed generation market, where smaller projects are built, said Pimentel with Foundation Windpower. The company focuses on small wind that is placed adjacent to businesses. Clients include Wal-Mart, Safeway and Anheuser-Busch, with wind helping to make beer in Fairfield, Calif., Pimentel said.

There is a new political push for distributed generation, he said, but that has been more focused on solar power.

"We're one of the few players who've figured out how to use wind to support that policy goal," Pimentel said. Even so, he said, "we find it is an educational process with our customers each time to explain and quantify the benefits." The biggest challenge, he said, is that the small projects must clear the same environmental hurdles as utility-scale wind. It can take six months to two years to get all the approvals.

Clarification appended.

The Obama administration has tapped a Yale economist to lead the Treasury Department's international energy work, including the development of the Green Climate Fund.

Matthew Kotchen, associate professor of environmental economics and policy at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, will serve as the agency's deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy. He replaces Gilbert Metcalf, who returned last month to his post as a professor at Tufts University.

As a researcher, Kotchen has written on everything from bias in college football rankings to daylight saving time. He once argued in a New York Times op-ed for eliminating the tradition of changing clocks ahead and back with the seasons and showed in a study of Indiana's 92 counties that granting an extra hour of summer sunlight actually wastes energy.

More recently, he published a review of U.S. EPA's proposed carbon pollution standards for new power plants and found that no coal plants and only a few natural gas plants currently online would comply with the standards without new innovation in carbon capture and storage technology to meet the average emission rate over 30 years. The study found that 81 to 90 percent of plants planned for construction and subject to EPA's rule would comply.

In a separate study, he found that Americans would be willing to pay about 13 percent more on their annual electric bills to create a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2035.

At Treasury, Kotchen will be responsible for the administration's commitment as part of the Group of 20 economies to phase out fossil fuel subsidies globally; managing U.S. foreign aid through the World Bank and other multilateral agencies for energy and environment work; and continuing to negotiate the creation of the Green Climate Fund, which will manage some portion of $100 billion in annual funding that nations vowed to mobilize by 2020.

How best to mobilize that money will be a front-and-center issue for the Obama administration this year, with the State Department planning a high-level meeting before spring.

Kotchen also serves as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined Yale in 2009 and has held previous and visiting positions at Williams College; the University of California at both Santa Barbara and Berkeley; Stanford University; and Resources for the Future. He serves on EPA's Science Advisory Board.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that Matthew Kotchen's review of proposed carbon pollution standards made a distinction between online power plants and planned plants.

The World Bank could prove to be an important partner in getting some of the world's first dedicated aviation biofuel refineries off the ground, as the airline industry eagerly looks for alternatives to petroleum.

Fuel is currently the aviation sector's single greatest expense. Many carriers have already adopted energy-efficient technologies and new operating strategies to reduce fuel burn, but industry experts acknowledge that biofuels are the only effective way to reduce emissions and shield the sector from volatile oil prices (Greenwire, Jan. 14).

Commercial airlines have flown safely on biofuels in thousands of test flights. But ramping up adoption has been slow, since only a trickle of fuel has made it to the market to date. Lufthansa German Airlines had to end its biofuel program early last year after running out of available fuel supplies.

Launching dedicated renewable jet fuel refineries in strategic locations across the globe would help secure sources of the low-carbon fuel for the airlines to buy. But finding financing for the facilities has proven to be a major barrier.

Charles Schlumberger, lead air transport specialist at the World Bank, said yesterday at the Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting that his institution could be a source of funding.

The International Finance Corp., a World Bank Group member, already supports a number of biofuel facilities that are not dedicated to jet fuel in countries such as Peru, India and Nicaragua. It also already offers support for a few jet fuel projects in the private sector.

"We finance jet fuel, we finance biofuel. ... If we would need projects with positive greenhouse gas reductions, then I would say that's something international organizations can look at [as a source of financing]," Schlumberger said.

Help needed for first refinery

More and more biofuel refineries are making renewable jet fuel, but in a piecemeal fashion, said Bruno Miller, alternative fuels expert at Metron Aviation Inc. "What we need is to finance the first [dedicated] plant ... then the second one will be easier," he said.

"Airlines don't really have the muscle to finance one of these facilities on their own," he added.

But securing funds from the World Bank comes with a number of caveats.

First of all, any World Bank project that involves alternative fuels must be focused on building a policy framework for developing countries, not on propping up a mature industry, said Schlumberger. "We are not going out to finance for Delta Air Lines," he said.

A World Bank project must also result in less greenhouse gas emissions. Ensuring that a biofuel does indeed reduce emissions is the main challenge in making the case for biofuels at the World Bank, said Schlumberger.

Based on a life-cycle analysis, some types of jet fuel are more or less polluting than others. A hydroprocessed renewable jet fuel made from palm oil, for instance, burns with about the same carbon intensity as most other biofuels but has a far greater overall impact on emissions because it requires a major amount of land-use change.

"The World Bank Group will be very limited to finance biofuel projects that result in no greenhouse gas reductions or even in an increase. So if we look at the production of biofuels -- in general, not just in aviation -- that is a very important aspect," Schlumberger said.

Another challenge is finding biofuel projects that don't compete with food crops or deplete water resources; otherwise, it could raise issues on a global scale, he added.

Using a biofuel made only from jatropha to meet the global aviation industry's current fuel needs would require farming the entire country of Argentina, he said. Producing the same amount of fuel from camelina would take up the area of Mexico, while making jet fuel from algae -- a promising but nascent pathway -- would take up the area of Ireland.

Despite these hurdles, the World Bank continues to explore opportunities to finance sustainable liquid alternative fuels in developing countries as part of its energy strategy, said Schlumberger, which means it could soon get on board with renewable jet fuel, too.

Cutting emissions enough to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century could block up to 65 percent of extreme climate-change-related impacts, a new study shows.

Researchers from institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany examined a range of emissions reduction scenarios and their possible outcomes. According to their findings, published in Nature Climate Change, sharp emissions cuts now would lead to less severe impacts in flooding, crop productivity, drought, water availability and average sea-level rise by 2100.

"Reducing greenhouse gas emissions won't avoid the impacts of climate change altogether, of course, but our research shows it will buy time to make things like buildings, transport systems and agriculture more resilient to climate change," said Nigel Arnell, director of the University of Reading's Walker Institute, which led the study.

In their strictest scenario -- keeping global temperature rise to 2 degrees -- emissions would peak in 2016 and then decline at an annual rate of 5 percent to 2050.

About 190 nations are aiming to sign a deal by 2015 legally binding countries to make ambitious emissions cuts, but not before 2020.

Current emissions reduction targets are estimated to lead to a temperature rise of 4 degrees or more by 2100 (Nina Chestney, Reuters, Jan. 13). -- IP

China, Mexico and other developing countries have taken the lead in the fight against climate change, the Globe International alliance of lawmakers said.

A study of energy and climate laws in 33 countries showed that 18 made progress in 2012 by enacting laws to cut their carbon footprints and promote energy efficiency, Globe said.

"The clean revolution we need is being carried forward by legislation," U.N. diplomat Christiana Figueres said in a Globe statement. "Domestic legislation is critical because it is the linchpin between action on the ground and the international agreement."

The alliance -- formed by lawmakers from 70 nations -- met in London to discuss ways for governments to contribute to international efforts against climate change.

Mexico took over as last year's "standout country" after it enacted a climate law aiming for a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. Other emerging economies such as China, South Korea and India also made considerable progress with their own legislation in 2012, while countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy showed no significant change, according to the alliance.

"This is a game-changing development, driven by emerging economies," said John Gummer, president of the group and member of the United Kingdom's House of Lords (Alex Morales, Bloomberg, Jan. 13). -- IP

Artificial leaves created by the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) in Berkeley, Calif., promise to provide a carbon-neutral alternative to fossil fuels. Made from a silicon-based material, the prototype leaves can convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into hydrogen fuel, similarly to how plants undergo photosynthesis.

The leaves absorb light, tipping off a series of chemical reactions. Iridium oxide catalysts split water into oxygen and protons, and those protons are separated out by a membrane. Then platinum catalysts convert the protons into hydrogen.

Solar energy is a vast resource that is mostly untapped -- in one hour, the sun projects more energy on the Earth than the entire human population can use in a year. But efficiently capturing and storing energy from the sun is difficult. Biofuels store less than 1 percent of the sun's energy that touches them, and energy from simple solar panels isn't easily stored.

Artificial photosynthesis has the potential to retain a larger amount of the sun's energy in a portable form, which could be used as clean fuel for planes, ships and automobiles.

Funded by a five-year, $122 million grant from the Department of Energy, JCAP envisions a plan to blanket millions of acres of nonarable land with the artificial leaf material. This could completely offset all the energy consumed by U.S. transportation, said Heinz Frei, acting director of the JCAP lab.

But artificial photosynthesis technology is, at this point, extremely costly, and the hydrogen fuel that is currently being produced is inefficient.

"I would not be surprised to learn that one day this will be done on a practical scale, at a reasonable cost," said Sally Benson, director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. "But we are very far from that point" (James Temple, Houston Chronicle/Fuel Fix, Jan. 14). -- EH

The pod of 11 killer whales trapped in the Hudson Bay's ice last week may have been confused by the effects of climate change, researchers said.

This was the first time a pod of killer whales was found locked in by the frozen bay, said Petah Inukpuk, mayor of Inukjuak, an Inuit village in Quebec close to where the whales were trapped. The whales, which took turns breathing out of a small hole in the ice, were able to escape Wednesday night or Thursday morning as currents broke a path in the ice, Inukpuk said.

The Hudson Bay typically freezes over in late November or early December, so killer whales are usually found in the Hudson Strait or the North Atlantic at this time of year, said Lyne Morissette, a marine researcher with the St. Lawrence Global Observatory in Quebec.

"If food changes and temperatures are changing in the Arctic, they don't have the same kind of sensors or indicators that it's time for them to leave," Morissette said. "In this case, with climate change, we know that the whole environment is changing quite a lot, so it might be because their sensors or the things that indicate to them that it is time to do a certain part of their life cycle is not tuned to their biology right now because everything is changing so fast."

She said it's "definitely a direct effect, a good example of what climate change can do" (Miranda Leitsinger, NBC News, Jan. 11). -- EH

In a recent open letter to President Obama, the Clean Air Task Force highlighted a series of climate policy recommendations that could help the United States achieve its 2020 emissions reduction goals without the need for congressional intervention. During today's OnPoint, Conrad Schneider, advocacy director at the Clean Air Task Force, discusses the letter and explains what he believes should be done in the transportation sector, on innovation and in the exploration of natural gas to further the United States' climate goals. Today's OnPoint will air at 10 a.m EST.