PORT WESTWARD, Ore. -- This 900-acre industrial park features a horseshoe-shaped dock of timber and steel that juts out into the Columbia River, an hour's drive north of Portland. During World War II it shipped bullets and bombs across the Pacific. Now it's providing ammunition for a new battle: whether to export substantial amounts of coal from the western United States to Asia.

"The channel runs deep here. It's self-scouring, so you don't have to dredge it," explained Craig Allison, operations manager for the port, gesturing toward the dark water off the edge of the dock. "That makes this one of the few sites in the Northwest where you can handle oceangoing freight."

SPECIAL SERIES

A series on communities, climate change and the U.S. coal industry's long push to export more coal by hauling it to Northwestern seaports where it can be shipped to Asian buyers.

The site is one of five proposed export terminals for U.S. coal, mined from the inner mountain regions of Wyoming and Montana and bound for markets in energy-hungry Asia.

Taken together, the scattered projects offer a kind of lifeline to a U.S. coal industry being squeezed by low natural gas prices and tougher environmental rules, a combination that has eaten into domestic demand. At least three of the Powder River Basin's largest coal companies -- Peabody Energy Corp., Ambre Energy and Arch Coal Inc. -- have stakes in one or more of the five terminals.

Should all the projects come to completion, their combined shipping capacity of 150 million tons per year could more than double current U.S. coal export levels.

But the scale of the projects has also drawn strong push-back from environmental groups, Northwestern tribes and dozens of communities along the coal's 1,200-mile route to the ocean. Worried about the localized impacts these terminals' traffic could have on their quality of life, these groups have lobbied aggressively for more stringent and comprehensive environmental reviews that could delay the projects by months, even years.

After a year of tumultuous weather extremes, the export terminals raise difficult questions about what exports of carbon-heavy coal would mean for the United States' climate commitments. The country's carbon emissions stabilized last year, thanks primarily to the combined influences of natural gas use and a warm winter -- essentially, because the country is burning less coal.

"If you're just shipping that coal to China, have you really made any gains?" said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper, a member of the Power Past Coal coalition, which opposes the terminals. "There's no doubt that China is going to keep burning coal for the next 30 years, but we're looking past that. The plants they build today in an era of cheap coal will keep them locked in for decades."

High-tonnage routes to the coast

Bulk commodities can reach Port Westward by two routes -- overland by rail or down the Columbia River by barge. Both options are currently under review.

Kinder Morgan, the largest terminal operator in the country, is conducting due diligence on plans to move between 15 million and 30 million tons per year to Port Westward by rail, there to be loaded onto oceangoing vessels.

Australian-owned Ambre Energy, meanwhile, is further along in its plans to move some 8 million tons of coal per year down the Columbia River by barge. After entering the river at the Port of Morrow, that coal would not touch land again until it crossed the Pacific but would be transferred directly onto freight vessels off the dock of Port Westward.

The dock at Port Westward may be about to get busy. Photo by Nathanael Massey.

Aside from the terminals at the Port of Morrow and Port Westward, three more sites are currently passing through various levels of due diligence and permitting. Two are in Washington -- the Gateway Pacific Terminal near Bellingham and the Millennium Bulk Logistics Terminal near Longview -- with one more near Coos Bay, Ore.

Though more modest in scope, Ambre's Port of Morrow project is the furthest along of the five in terms of permitting and could come online as early as 2014, said Ambre Energy spokeswoman Liz Fuller.

"Logistically, most of our infrastructure challenges have been overcome at this point," she said. "We operate a little bit differently out here because culturally, the Northwest has very high standards for environmental safety, and we've incorporated those standards into our design."

The Army Corps of Engineers is currently conducting an environmental assessment for the Port of Morrow site and weighing the need for a lengthier, site-specific environmental impact statement (EIS).

So far, it has resisted calls from environmental groups, U.S. EPA, the governor of Oregon and a host of other environmental and civic groups to conduct a broad-gauge EIS for all five of the proposed projects.

Such a review would consider the combined effects of all five terminals on the Northwest and could even consider the climate impacts of burning U.S. fossil fuels abroad.

Price signals promote exports

This approach is rejected by proponents of the terminals, including the coal companies themselves. "A cumulative EIS would not be in keeping with what the Army Corps has required for similar projects in the past," Fuller said. "It would slow our project down by years."

Time is not something U.S. coal can afford. Thanks to low gas prices and stringent new EPA regulations, coal use in the United States has entered a steady downward trend, and production is following suit. The Energy Information Administration's most recent quarterly coal report puts production at 5.8 percent below the same quarter last year, and 14 percent below the same quarter in 2008.

The declines have been partially offset by a rise in exports, particularly to Europe (ClimateWire, Nov. 8, 2012). That trend may reverse, however, if slumping prices for European carbon credits rally this year, as many analysts expect.

And with many U.S. coal-fired power plants slated to retire over the coming decade, only Asian demand offers the kind of security energy companies need to make long-term investments in infrastructure (ClimateWire, Nov. 13, 2012).

Offshoring emissions?

Yet that reorganization is exactly what environmental groups opposing the coal terminals hope to block. Though proponents of the coal terminals say Asia's consumption is unlikely to be influenced by the absence or presence of additional U.S. supply, opponents insist that the United States has to be held accountable for the carbon it exports as well as the carbon it burns.

"Opening up huge new supplies of coal to China from the Powder River Basin would lead to lower prices -- it's a simple function of supply and demand," said Power Past Coal's VandenHeuvel. "There's the rational economic answer, but there's also a moral consideration: Do we really want to be driving down prices for coal at a moment where we should be trying to phase it out?"

How much an additional 150 million tons of coal per year would shift China's demand is difficult to determine. The country currently burns around 4.8 billion tons of coal per year, 96 percent of which is supplied domestically.

The picture is further complicated because policy, not demand, is the primary driver in setting coal's price in China, said Richard Morse, a partner at the energy consulting firm Supercritical Capital.

"Let's say you grant the argument that 150 million tons can have an influence on a 4-billion-ton market. Then you have to assert that Chinese energy planning is highly sensitive to coal prices," he said. "If you look at Chinese energy targets, or how the power sector is run, you see that it's actually fairly insensitive to power prices."

"China has been losing money on coal plants for years, but it keeps churning them out because that's the political directive from the state-owned energy companies," Morse said. "They don't have a lot of good alternatives."

Where the supply-and-demand argument makes more sense, he said, is in countries like Japan, which is seeking alternatives to nuclear power. The energy-hungry economies of Korea, Taiwan and to a lesser extent India, which rely on less regulated energy markets, will want a share of U.S. coal. These countries have few domestic energy alternatives of their own, Morse added.

Tomorrow: Views along the tracks and the river.

Record-high temperatures in 2012 led to massive droughts and wildfires, but tiny wildflowers like the dwarf dandelion and the shooting star were also affected by the especially warm spring. Their early blooming has the potential to disrupt the ecosystem, scientists say, but perhaps it could be a sign of plants' resilience.

Last year, scientists from Harvard University, Boston University and the University of Wisconsin documented the earliest flowering season on record in the eastern United States. Researchers believe climate change is hastening this sign of spring, according to an observational study published in the Public Library of Science yesterday.

The highbush blueberry in bloom. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Researchers used records dating back to 1852, when writer Henry David Thoreau wandered the land surrounding Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., taking meticulous notes on the wildflowers he found there.

Thoreau noted that the highbush blueberry's small white flowers appeared in mid-May, but in 2012, the highbush blueberry bloomed six weeks earlier, on April 1.

Using Thoreau's journals and records kept by another American icon, conservationist Aldo Leopold, researchers projected that for each rise of 1 degree Celsius in average spring temperatures, plants in temperate regions flower 3.2 days earlier, on average.

"I think sometimes it's hard for people to understand how big of a deal that 1 degree is," said Elizabeth Ellwood of Boston University, the lead author on the study. "But for plants that are going to be flowering four days earlier for every degree of warming, that really can play a large role in that plant's life cycle, and it will influence the rest of the ecosystem, as well."

How long can this go on?

Thanks to Thoreau and Leopold, long-term, reliable records of flowering times for 47 flower species were available at two locations: near Walden Pond and in Wisconsin's Sauk and Dane counties, where Leopold collected material for "A Sand County Almanac."

Later data sets were compiled by other researchers, including Leopold's daughter Nina Leopold Bradley, and compiled to predict flowering times in relation to spring temperatures. Because the data were collected at sites separated by more than 1,000 miles, the researchers believe their observations apply to regions throughout the United States.

The resulting graphs indicated a clear trend: "Spring-flowering plants at both locations ... largely responded to record-breaking warm temperatures as predicted by their historical responses to warming spring temperatures," the study said.

In Concord, the average spring temperature has risen by almost 9 C since Thoreau's time, a result of both global warming and the "heat island" effect of nearby Boston. The mean flowering date shifted from May 15 to May 4. During the spring of 2012, the second warmest on record at 10.7 C on average, plants flowered April 25.

According to Leopold's observations in Wisconsin during the 1930s and '40s, the mean flowering date at that time was May 7. Now, the average spring temperature has risen by almost 2 C, and the flowering date is seven days earlier. In response to 2012's record-high temperatures, plants flowered more than three weeks earlier.

Despite the fact that 2012's flowering time matched up with projected trends, the researchers did not necessarily expect flowers to continue blooming earlier as spring temperatures rose. To grow, plants in temperate regions need both a period of winter cold and sufficient daily exposure to sunlight.

"We were, at some level, not surprised at what we saw but, at other levels, completely stunned," said Charles Davis, a plant evolutionary biologist at Harvard who contributed to the study.

"What it suggests is that there is some built-in resiliency in the way that plant populations are responding to warming springs," he said. "What we still don't really know is whether this is a good or a bad thing."

But at some point, many plant species may no longer be able to adjust to warmer, earlier weather, resulting in a spring with no flowers at all.

"There's these rumblings in the literature that, at some point, this can't keep happening," Ellwood said. "We feel like there's only so much longer that they can keep pace."

What will be the ripple effects?

So far, the researchers haven't seen any fallout from the earlier flowering season.

"There aren't any indicators that this, so far, has caused any dramatic problems," said Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin's Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, who also contributed to the study.

But Temple and his colleagues warned that earlier flowering times have the potential to throw other plant and animal species out of sync. When plants flower, "it's essentially when the ecosystem wakes up in the spring," Temple said. "It really has ripple effects that are very complex."

Insect pollinators and migrating birds that feed on them could be negatively affected, the researchers speculated, and flowering crops like apples are more vulnerable to spring frosts. Plants' flowering times also affect the water cycle, Ellwood said, as well as how the environment stores carbon.

"It could be devastating, really, to different parts of the ecosystem," she said.

The wait for more fuel-efficient gas furnaces just got longer. The Department of Energy has moved to withdraw a new rule that would require consumers in 30 northern states to buy 90-percent-efficient furnaces starting May 1.

The rule would have saved 81 million to 130 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2013 and 2045, according to DOE estimates, as consumers upgraded their furnaces from 80 percent efficiency to 90 percent efficiency systems.

In a joint settlement of a case brought against it by the American Public Gas Association, DOE last week asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to vacate the new rule. The settlement needs to be approved by the court for the rule to be vacated.

APGA had challenged the rule last year. One of its main contentions was that DOE had issued a direct final rule without considering all stakeholders' concerns. DOE can issue a direct final rule, allow a period for public comment, and then consider withdrawing the rule if any comments provide a reasonable basis not to go ahead with it.

"APGA put forward adverse comments, and I know other groups did as well. But despite receiving adverse comments, DOE went ahead with the rule," said David Schryver, APGA's executive vice president.

"We believe that the DOE did the right thing in proposing the direct final rule," said Kit Kennedy, clean energy counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We think that the DOE did the right thing and should have continued to defend the lawsuit."

Kennedy said the rule was formed out of a consensus agreement after DOE consulted manufacturers, trade associations, and environmental and consumer advocates.

APGA also said the new rule would hurt efficiency. The rule would require installing condensing furnaces with additional vents, Schryver said, and the higher cost of venting would drive consumers to lower-efficiency electric furnaces.

Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), said there's no danger of that happening. "I think it's ludicrous. According to EIA, heating with an electric furnace is three times [the price] as compared to gas, and with gas prices declining it's probably four times," he said. "Electric furnaces -- there's no place in the market. They have 5 percent of market share today because they are a really lousy choice in terms of operating costs."

Potential $10.7B in heating savings put on ice

However, DOE concedes that some consumers would find it expensive to upgrade their gas furnaces to the new standard. For these cases, it had proposed a waiver of the 90 percent efficiency rule.

"The rule does mention a potential waiver process, but no waiver process was ever agreed to. We found that the proposed waiver would be unworkable," Schryver said. "If you're living in a cold northern state and the furnace goes out in January, you don't want to have to wait two or three days to get a waiver to have an 80 percent furnace as opposed to a 90 percent furnace."

Schryver said that contractors were not trained to assess waivers, and it was not certain that they have 80 percent furnaces available to install in households that received waivers.

But sticking with the old standard could be the costlier option for regular households. DOE estimates that the 90 percent standard over 30 years would save consumers $10.7 billion taking into account utility bills, equipment costs and gas prices. "Consumer protection organizations like efficiency standards because they save money for consumers," Kennedy said.

If the court accepts the settlement and the gas furnace efficiency standard rule is vacated, DOE will have to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new rule. Kennedy said this sets the stage for even stricter norms. "The law requires that the standard be set at the highest level that is economically feasible," she said. "We will be pushing for the highest possible standard, and that could be higher than the 90 percent level."

DeLaski is less optimistic. He said DOE will now take another year to issue a proposed standard and an additional two years to come up with a new final standard.

"It actually means we'll have to wait another seven years. There's a five-year lag time from when the DOE publishes a standard and when it goes into effect," deLaski said. The new standard will apply only to the installation of new products. "That means that 80 percent units will be installed to run for the next 20 to 40 years," he added.

In a world marked by increasingly irregular weather systems, the United States will need to adopt a more flexible approach to disaster management, according to panelists at the 13th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment.

"Our uncertainty about what the future holds is increasing," said Amy Luers, director of climate change at the Skoll Global Threats Fund. "That's a really hard message to communicate to the public."

She added, "Our instinct is, if you have a high and low projection of what the future will hold, the safe thing is to take the middle road. But with climate, our projections are too wide -- you can't just prepare to adapt to a specific scenario."

The contingency plans of many towns and cities are based on past experience and seasonal weather patterns, she said. As climate change pushes the world's weather systems outside their historical range of variability, new, unforeseen phenomena are likely to emerge with greater frequency.

"Looking at what has happened over the last few decades can't necessarily tell us what the future's going to look like," said Kristie Ebi, a consulting professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. "We have to think about changing our attitudes, our infrastructure, to live in a world that's fundamentally different."

Early warning systems can play a crucial role in that process, she said.

Preparing for the long term

Often, the most accurate warnings come from within effective communities themselves, panelists noted. In the hours before Hurricane Andrew touched land in Florida in 1992, residents in the south of the state had already received warning of the hurricane's path and severity from residents of islands off the coast.

The severe weather events of the past decade -- hurricanes Katrina and Andrew, severe droughts, and a widespread bark beetle epidemic, to name just a few -- have encouraged many communities to integrate the climate question into their disaster planning, said James Murley, executive director of the South Florida Regional Planning Council.

"After being hit by a couple different storms in 2005, we started to understand, to work through how you think about climate in relation to these events," he said. "We started at the state level, which provided the opportunity for other people down the line to start talking about these issues."

That state-level discussion fell apart in Congress, he said. That didn't stop local governments from continuing to pursue the problem, however.

One product of that ongoing discussion is that efforts to restore Florida's everglades, which are highly sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity, have taken on greater urgency, he said.

While the panel primarily focused on adaptive measures to climate change, participants noted that the question of mitigation -- of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to abate future climate impacts -- also has a place in the dialogue.

"For a long time, you couldn't talk about adaptation and mitigation at the same time -- people believed adaptation was a distraction," Luers said. "The fact is, even if we decide today we're going to make a big difference in reductions, it's going to take a while before that comes to bear as change to our weather systems. We need to face up to the reality of passing the 2 degree Celsius mark" that scientists consider a safe level of global warming.

"We do need to think about adaptation because it lets us think of this as a problem of today," she added.

Mark Lynas is not one to shy away from media attention, especially if he thinks it's for a good cause.

The longtime climate change advocate once threw a cream pie in the face of climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg. He served as climate change adviser to the now-deposed Maldives president who held a Cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the looming threat of sea-level rise.

As a young activist, he ripped up fields of genetically modified crops and published opinion pieces on the dangers of genetically engineered agriculture in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper.

Mark Lynas. Photo courtesy of Lynas.

And on Jan. 3, he inflamed the rage of his one-time accomplices in the anti-genetic modification (GM) movement in a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference to announce: "The GM debate is over."

Lynas' speech likened opponents to genetic engineering, in which the DNA of one species is modified with the genes of a different species, to deniers of climate change. The movement is based on fear, not science, he said, along with a "naturalistic fallacy" that natural phenomena are better than advances created in a laboratory.

There is no conclusive evidence that genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, pose significant risks to human health or the environment, said Lynas, and -- although he admits he is no scientist himself -- most scientists would agree with him.

"The sheer gravity of the situation we're in is forcing much of the environmental movement to become more pragmatic," said Lynas in an interview with ClimateWire one week after his speech. "Of course, I don't want to close down legitimate debate, but there comes a point where environmentalists need to respect the scientific consensus which has developed on this issue, just as they do with global warming."

This was hardly the first instance of Lynas' "coming out" in favor of genetic engineering. In his 2011 book "The God Species," he also apologized for his former self, writing, "I personally campaigned against it in the past, and now realize that this was a well-intentioned but ignorant mistake."

The 'naturalistic fallacy'

He described his support for the genetic engineering of crops in a 2010 British television documentary titled "What the Green Movement Got Wrong," alongside other environmentalists who now embrace technologies they once shunned, like nuclear energy and bioengineering.

"It was fundamentally a reactionary campaign about promoting fear, fear of new technology and fear of how the world would work in a modern age," said Lynas about his past. "It's largely based on ignorance and the naturalistic fallacy. It's not a million miles away from taking herbal supplements for cancer."

Lynas is not the only environmentalist who has changed views as time forms a more precise view of science and technology. Stewart Brand, the founder of the "Whole Earth Catalog," has embraced nuclear power, genetic engineering and dense urbanization as ways to avert climate change.

"I was very anti-nuclear; I had strong roots in the environmental movement," said Robert Stone, director of the Oscar-nominated 1987 documentary "Radio Bikini," a film on the early tests on nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.

Stone will premiere his new documentary "Pandora's Promise" tomorrow at the Sundance Film Festival. "Pandora's Promise," which prominently features Lynas, tells the story of the growing support of nuclear power as a green source of electricity.

Nuclear power has near-zero carbon emissions, with the only outputs being heat and radioactive waste. Events like the disaster at Chernobyl in the then-Soviet republic of Ukraine and the more recent Fukushima Daiichi plant meltdown in Japan have stirred fear of radioactive poisoning, but climate activists like Lynas are beginning to pit the costs against the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

"I think the environmental movement has done wonderful things," said Stone. "But they're still using the same toolbox to address pollution control, to address climate change."

British environmental writer George Monbiot changed his views on nuclear energy after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster -- not in opposition, but in vigorous support.

"Coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast," wrote Monbiot in the Guardian. "Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small."

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, are the creators of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that promotes technological advances and development to improve the environment. The institute was formed after Schellenberger and Norhaus wrote "The Death of Environmentalism" in 2004, a controversial paper that embraced technology to forge a new economy and leave the old, dirty past behind. The institute bestowed a paradigm award to Lynas last year.

Building a cleaner environment, said Nordhaus, "is about innovation, and it's about technology, and it's about getting the innovation and the technology as much as you can."

It's not, he added, about consuming less energy, embracing a protected nature that is separate from our daily lives or shying away from scientific advances. Environmentalists like Lynas are shifting away from an idealized view of nature to a more integrated, and useful, one, he said.

"We're not going to put the world back the way it was," he said. "That never really existed."

Friends of the Earth, on the other hand, is an organization that has stuck to its ground, said Eric Hoffman, the food and technology policy campaigner for the organization. Founded in 1969, the organization stands fiercely against nuclear power, genetic engineering and compromising with economic forces that pollute.

"A number of [environmental] groups feel they have to make more deals and be more moderate in their positions," Hoffman said. "Change takes a long time, and we need to hold the hard line to make sure that what our planet needs becomes possible."

Science or anti-science?

In a world where humans must increase food production by 75 percent with less land, water and nutrients by 2050 -- as predicted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization -- roadblocks to agricultural technology are not an option, say promoters of genetic engineering.

Drought-parched cornfields in the Midwest, a disappointing rice harvest in India due to a weak monsoon and a worrisome winter wheat crop in the dusty Great Plains are recent reminders that crops continue to dwindle in inhospitable climates. This scenario is likely to get worse as temperatures rise and weather becomes more erratic. Pest infestations are likely to change patterns along with the climate.

Genetically engineered crops have the potential to decrease the number of pesticide applications and nitrogen fertilizers, said Lynas in his speech, not to mention offer better nutrition to those who need it. It was anti-GM activists in the Irish Green Party who shut down research on a blight-resistant potato, a project backed by a publicly funded scientific institute in Ireland. Public outcry stopped the planting of Bt brinjal -- a type of eggplant genetically engineered with the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis to resist certain pests -- in India.

"The science and public sector is being strangled by the activist fringe," said Lynas.

Lynas' lack of a scientific degrees is an easy target for GM-cautious scientists to question the validity of his claims.

"While he's touting himself as somebody that has tremendous expertise in this, he doesn't have the credentials," said Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist in the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "To try to unilaterally suggest that he has the answer, it's a misunderstanding of what the scientific process is really about."

Although the Union of Concerned Scientists is not against genetic engineering, the organization believes that uncertainties about the safety, ecological benefits and effectiveness of GM crops remain. There are certainly activists who have exaggerated the correlation of risk, but the concerns are real, said Gurian-Sherman.

Herbicide-resistant crops, such as those engineered to withstand weed killers like Monsanto's Roundup, breed with native plants to create "super weeds" that don't die when sprayed. In China, secondary pests have begun attacking GM crops left alone by the primary insects that once feasted on them.

The scientific consensus on climate change is a completely different issue, said Gurian-Sherman. There aren't nearly enough data on the possible long-term safety of GM crops.

Lynas tries to divorce the role and the proper use of genetic engineering within society from the technology itself, said Gurian-Sherman. The "need" is driven by demand. "Their perspective is, and it's a political one, is to let the markets decide," he said. "What he's suggesting is to shut out scientific debate."

Cost barriers for the poor?

Despite his high-tech bent, Lynas is against the proprietary laws that keep technology away from the poor. He calls for public-sector, royalty-free genetically engineered hybrids that farmers can save year after year -- the generic drugs of agriculture.

Private biotechnology companies, with coffers much deeper than those of public research institutions, are the ones driving the technology. Monsanto has completed field trials for drought-tolerant corn and is developing GM wheat and vegetable crops.

Arcadia Biosciences, a small biotech company in Davis, Calif., has successfully developed rice, canola, tobacco and arabidopsis -- a small flowering plant related to cabbage -- with nitrogen-use efficiency technology. Nitrogen is the main element in commercial fertilizer, and its overuse can lead to water pollution and greenhouse gases.

Danielle Niereberg, director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet Initiative and co-founder of Food Tank, is skeptical, as well -- not because of the health or environmental problems GMOs may pose, but because of the relative inaccessibility they will have in the markets in which innovation is most needed.

"I haven't seen the potential that he seems to see," she said.

In discussions on agriculture, said Nierenberg, GMOs "take up all of the oxygen in the room."

They are an exciting prospect, but are expensive and have been promoted at the cost of innovations in agroforestry, rainwater harvesting, improving mobile phone technology or other tools that could have a greater impact on rural farmers in the developing world.

"I'm someone who gets excited by the science of it all," she said. But "it's a risk that we don't invest in the less expensive technologies out there."

Sweetwater Energy has signed a 15-year, $100 million deal with Front Range Energy in Windsor, Colo., to convert the latter's corn ethanol facility to make fuel from crop residues, grasses and wood.

Based in Rochester, N.Y., Sweetwater uses enzymes to produce cellulosic sugars, the building blocks of ethanol that come from agricultural and forest waste, fast-growing energy crops, and other fibrous material that can be broken down to make cellulosic biofuel.

"Supplementing our corn with this sugar allows us to displace some of the volatility of the corn market, with the goal of moving a higher and higher percentage of our production to cellulosic," Dan Sanders Jr., vice president of Front Range Energy, said in a statement.

This is the second deal in two weeks for Sweetwater, which made a similar 16-year agreement with Ace Ethanol in Wisconsin on Jan 4.

During the initial phase, Sweetwater will process about 100 tons of cellulosic material per day to make 60 to 65 tons of sugars. This will produce up to 3.6 million gallons of ethanol per year.

Sweetwater will begin by replacing about 7 percent of the corn and alter the amount of cellulosic sugars as the partnership evolves.

"$100 million is a conservative revenue forecast for the length of the contract," said Arunas Chesonis, chairman and CEO of Sweetwater. The deal allows flexibility for change over 15 years, Chesonis said, in case either party seeks other options.

Corn-sourced refiners begin to switch over

"If they get into higher-range fuels or chemicals, they're not locked into having to make ethanol," he said.

The most likely feedstocks for Front Range's plant will be energy sorghum, switchgrass, corn stover or wheat straw, depending on the price and availability at the time, Chesonis said. The sources will be purchased from sites up to 40 miles away, he added.

Cellulosic fuels are considered to be more sustainable than first-generation corn ethanol, mainly because they come from waste products or low-input grasses and do not compete with food crops.

Front Range Energy and Ace Ethanol are two of several ethanol refineries that decided to convert from making corn ethanol to producing other types of biofuels. To date, 10 ethanol plants have begun or are planning to produce biobutanol, an advanced biofuel made from corn. Green Plains Renewable Energy is building a side project on its ethanol plant in Shenandoah, Iowa, to produce algae-based fuels, in a partnership with BioProcess Algae.

Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent for Sweetwater's pretreatment method to extract sugars from cellulosic feedstocks.

The federal renewable fuels standard calls for the United States to produce 16 billion gallons of cellulosic fuels by 2022, but the industry has yet to make enough cellulosic gallons to sell commercially.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and the Canadian oil sands are far higher than current estimates because of the impact of a byproduct from the oil refining process, according to a new study being released this morning.

The report from Oil Change International, an anti-fossil fuel group, finds that the TransCanada pipeline's projected annual emissions are 13 percent above current projections from the U.S. State Department.

That is because current analyses are not accounting for the carbon dioxide that would be released from burning petroleum coke, a coal-like solid that is produced from refining heavy oil, like that found in Canada and Venezuela.

If fully built from Alberta to Texas, the Keystone XL pipeline would lead to the vproduction of enough carbon-rich petroleum coke to fuel five coal-fired power plants, the analysis says. In total, proven reserves in the Canadian oil sands could produce enough petcoke via the refinery process to fuel 111 U.S. coal plants through 2050, it states.

"Bitumen yields more petroleum coke than any other type of oil," said Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International. "We are saying that these emissions cannot be forgotten with the Keystone XL pipeline."

Fifteen to 30 percent of a barrel of oil sands crude can be turned into petroleum coke, according to the report. That compares to 1 percent or so from many light oils, Stockman said.

Additionally, petroleum coke typically yields more carbon dioxide than coal, he said. Because coke is cheap, it could provide some incentive for some Midwestern power plants to stay economical for a longer period of time, according to the report.

"Petcoke produced in U.S. refineries and Canadian upgraders is increasingly being blended with coal in coal-fired power plants in the U.S. and abroad," the report says.

In anticipation of a greater supply of Canadian oil, refineries on the Gulf Coast invested heavily in equipment to produce petroleum coke over the past decade, Stockman said.

'Act of desperation'?

Petcoke production capacity in the United States grew from less than 90,000 daily tons in 1999 to more than 150,000 tons in 2011, the report states.

Sixty percent of U.S. petcoke is exported, with Asia a growing market. According to an Energy Department analysis, petcoke growth "was a major contributor to the United States becoming a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011 for the first time since 1949."

In the environmental impact statement for the original Keystone XL pipeline proposal in 2011, the State Department concluded that the higher CO2 emissions associated with Keystone XL in comparison to traditional oil essentially were irrelevant, since Canadian oil would be extracted regardless of the construction of the pipeline (ClimateWire, July 25, 2011).

Yesterday, supporters of the oil sands and Keystone XL said the petroleum coke analysis doesn't change that dynamic.

"This is an act of desperation by a group bent on halting all oil and natural gas production while destroying jobs and our economy. They have to keep changing their message and resorting to these kinds of stunts because they lack substance on this issue," said Cindy Schild, senior refinery manager at the American Petroleum Institute.

She said the industry "is not increasing volumes; we are offsetting the imports from places like Venezuela." Another analyst agreed, saying that "the emissions argument is silly, because the petroleum coke would just come from other heavy oils without Keystone XL."

Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada, added that research from two climate scientists last year published in Nature Climate Change found that emissions from the oil sands are small in comparison to those from coal (ClimateWire, Feb. 21, 2012).

Pressure on State Department

Stockman said he did not disagree that oil from Keystone XL could offset other heavy oils. The point, he said, is that the CO2 emission numbers associated with the TransCanada project and the Canadian oil sands are far too low.

Additionally, the building of pipelines like Keystone XL allows the Canadian industry to reach its long-term production goals, he said. Via new proposed pipelines to move crude out of Alberta, the industry is planning for a more than doubling of oil sands production by 2030.

The new pipelines -- if they are not blocked from opposition -- could then lead to much more petroleum coke production down the road via an investment signal, said Stockman. Without the pipelines, the industry could stall, he said.

The analysis is part of a continued environmental push for the State Department to include climate change in an upcoming draft environmental impact statement of the northern segment of the TransCanada project, which would run from Canada to Steele City, Neb., where it could connect to another oil line into the Gulf Coast.

Today, Stockman and representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Canada's Pembina Institute and the University of Toronto will hold a press conference discussing the new research, including an additional paper finding that Canada's oil industry can't grow to its desired 2030 production levels without Keystone XL and several other large, proposed oil projects that are facing strong opposition.

The environmental research comes on top of a second letter sent from prominent climate scientists this week to President Obama, urging him to reject the pipeline because of its climate impact.

The Zayed Future Energy Prize has given $4 million in awards to organizations addressing climate change, including $1.5 million to Ceres, a Boston-based group of institutional investors working to make U.S. insurers more aware of their risks from warming.

The prize provided by Abu Dhabi, the capital of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, awarded recognition or cash prizes to eight applicants, including four high schools that proposed projects to advance renewable energy and other environmental benefits.

Ceres won the category for a nongovernmental organization that "has direct impact on the renewable energy and sustainability industries." The group won for its efforts to push the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to require companies to disclose climate risks, for mobilizing the insurance industry to take action on climate and extreme weather, for supporting regulations through its Investor Network on Climate Risk that helped close coal-fired power plants, and for developing economic analysis to support strong fuel economy standards in the United States.

"In order to tackle the global challenge of climate change, we must expect even bolder action from investors, businesses and policymakers," Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, said in a statement.

"We will use the Prize to expand international investor leadership on clean energy and to grow our ongoing work with leading companies that are striving to integrate sustainability into their operations by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy efficiency and sourcing renewable energy," she added.

Other winners include Siemens LLC; D.light Design, a U.S.-based manufacturer of solar lighting; and Jose Goldemberg, a Brazilian physicist and expert on energy. Siemens, a global company, received recognition for its work on sustainability, while D.Light Design was awarded $1.5 million and Goldemberg received $500,000 as a lifetime achievement prize.

The four high schools, from Mexico, Tanzania, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, received up to $100,000 each.

"The future of energy is one of the greatest challenges facing mankind today, and is a key to defending against one of humanity's greatest threats: serious and irreversible climate change," says a website promoting the prize. "New, innovative energy solutions are urgently needed to meet this challenge, and Abu Dhabi, one of the world's major energy providers, is taking a leadership role in finding the right solutions."

The nation's leading coal lobbyist yesterday said the fossil fuel blamed for much of the world's industrial air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions will remain the backbone of global energy supply as electricity demand continues to rise over the coming decades.

Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, in an address to the U.S. Energy Association's annual State of the Energy Industry Forum, even credited coal for being a vehicle for good in the world.

"For the developing countries, coal is the driving force behind the world's most transformative action -- lifting humanity out of poverty," he told the Washington, D.C., audience, according to a transcript of his comments released by NMA.

Quinn's optimism for coal -- coming amid overall declining burn rates at U.S. electric utilities that have switched to natural gas and other fuels -- was buttressed by data from Wood Mackenzie indicating that coal will surpass oil as the world's leading energy source by no later than 2015.

Such projections are based in part on China's and India's continued voracious appetite for coal to make electricity and steel, along with the development of newer, more efficient and less polluting coal-fired power plants in the United States, Europe and Asia.

"As much as we marvel at the pace of urbanization in China, the growth rates for cities in other countries are equally impressive," Quinn said. For example, he noted that both Germany and Japan are looking to increase coal-fired electricity generation to offset the retirements of nuclear plants and the high costs of alternative fuels like natural gas.

India, meanwhile, is projected to increase its coal-fired power portfolio from today's 65 percent of total generation to as much 80 percent of generation by 2025, he said. "Just bringing the city of Mumbai [population 13 million] to our level of cooling would equal the air conditioning needs of the entire U.S.," he said.

Such geopolitical factors, he said, make U.S. policies that prohibit the construction of new coal plants misguided. "If we want to compete with the fastest-growing economies that are being powered by coal, we better keep all of our energy options on the playing field," he said.

Yet even with U.S. regulatory and economic pressures working against coal, its resilience at home is supported by two factors, Quinn said.

First, a new generation of advanced coal-fired plants will achieve higher output rates with lower overall emissions. Second, as older, less-efficient coal plants are retired, the U.S. power plant fleet will on average become larger and more efficient and run at higher capacity.

That increased capacity at large plants will help recover at least 100 million tons of coal consumption lost to the retirements of older plants, he said.

According to a report by the European Court of Auditors, most of the European Union's energy efficiency spending, totaling €5 billion ($6.6 billion) since 2000, was misspent.

The money was intended to curb fuel use and emissions by funding national investments in energy-saving measures. But after examining spending in the Czech Republic, Italy and Lithuania -- the countries that received the most funding since 2007 -- the court found that the money was put toward public buildings in need of renovation rather than projects with high savings potential.

"None of the projects we looked at had a needs assessment or even an analysis of the energy savings potential in relation to investments," Harald Wögerbauer, the court member responsible for the report, said in a news release. "The Member States were essentially using this money to refurbish public buildings while energy efficiency was, at best, a secondary concern."

Doors and windows were replaced and walls were insulated, but the energy savings didn't add up. Often, the payback time for the investment exceeded the lifetime of the refurbished parts.

The court blamed not only the individual states, but also the European Commission for mismanaging the funding programs. In the future, the court advised that energy efficiency projects should be carefully selected and closely monitored, and the European Commission should limit the payback period (Alessandro Torello, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 14). -- EH

A government official announced Taiwan's completion of a three-year climate science information project Tuesday, providing valuable projection data and climate change models. Plans for a new study on climate change's impact on the nation's agriculture and ecology were also announced.

The Taiwan Climate Change Information Platform, which cost $3 million, was launched by the National Science Council and received help from Taiwanese universities and research institutes. The platform provided models that will help the country's policymakers assess climate change's effect on rainfall and extreme weather events like typhoons.

"Such information is valuable and can help reduce casualties," said Lin Lee-yaw, deputy executive secretary of the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction.

Over the last hundred years, Taiwan's average temperature increased 1.4 degrees Celsius, Lin said. This is consistent with other developing economies but twice the global average of 0.74 C. Lin hopes future research will pinpoint the reasons behind the temperature increase (James Lee, Taiwan Central News Agency, Jan. 15). -- EH

Religious and environmental groups gathered outside the White House on Tuesday to protest what they call the government's inaction toward climate change.

"This gathering today is to affirm that God has gifted us in many ways, one of which is a good mind to figure out how things are going," said Bob Coleman, chief programming minister of the Riverside Church in New York City.

Climate awareness has grown popular among some progressive religious group. According to some, even the skeptics in the group say that something strange is going on.

Given recent storms, hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, some members of the American clergy said human decisions that contribute to these extreme weather events can't be left in the hands of politicians anymore.

"We have to go beyond personal recycling and reducing and reusing of plastic and paper -- and the recycling of the same old politicians and policies," said Johari Abdul-Malik, imam of a mosque in Falls Church, Va. (Jada Smith, New York Times, Jan. 15). -- IP

Yesterday, a coalition of environmental, scientific and religious groups in Pennsylvania launched a plan aimed at encouraging more climate change action.

The "100 days of climate action" plan intends to rattle cages by hosting meetings, town halls and other forms of community engagement to let politicians know citizens care about climate change and want to see action, said Gretchen Alfonso, a policy analyst for the Clean Air Council.

The launch comes on the heels of the federal advisory committee's draft report on the impacts of climate change, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2012 climate summary. Reports agree that climate change impacts are evident and beginning to affect people's lives and health.

According to the Rev. Mitch Hescox, president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, one goal of the campaign is to reframe climate change as an American issue as a whole (Sandy Bauers, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 15). -- IP

How do industry leaders in the United States believe energy policy uncertainty is affecting investments and innovation? During today's OnPoint, Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew's Clean Energy Program, discusses a new report based on roundtable discussions with more than 100 industry leaders pointing to the need for consistent, long-term energy policies. Cuttino also discusses the potential for a clean energy standard under the new Congress. Today's OnPoint will air at 10 a.m. EST.