Category Archives: Policy & Regulation

Governor Crist’s Serve to Preserve Summit

Posted on by

June 24, 2008

Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be attending the Governor’s 2nd “Serve to Preserve” Summit in Miami. The occasion will be highlighted by Governor Crist’s signing of Florida’s new energy bill, HB 7135, into law.

It’s a mammoth bill by Florida standards, 287 pages in all, with something for many people. Third Planet’s interests lie in community-level sustainable development and energy planning so we’ll be taking this up as a necessary process.

We had thought that the forum for this discussion could be, in part, the Florida Energy Commission in the Office of Legislative Services. The work and recommendations of the Commission appear very prominently in HB 7135. However, under the new bill, the Commission now transfers to the new Florida Energy and Climate Commission in the Executive Office of the Governor.

On the sustainable development and energy planning front, local comprehensive plans are not affected by the new bill but the Governor is now authorized to include goals, objectives, and policies related to energy and global climate change in the state comprehensive plan.

So the Summit is setting up for an interesting time for Third Planet as we look to find allies and partners for our future-thinking planning efforts. Please revisit us again soon and consider supporting our continuing activities with your financial contribution. THANK YOU!


The Everglades and Sustainable Energy Development

Posted on by
Reply

January 14, 2008

Last weekend I moderated a Breakout Session Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Development in the Everglades at the 2008 Everglades Coalition Annual Meeting on Captiva Island. While the panel addressed some key energy and climate change issues of interest to an Everglades audience I was personally surprised that the audience wanted to know more about renewable energy related to their homes rather than exploring further the relationship of sustainable energy development to the Greater Everglades Eco-System. Fortunately for me there were people at the main conference, including ‘Rock’ Salt, my friend and Energy Advisory Committee colleague from the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida (1996-97), with whom to share my questions.

What of the relationship between long-term sea level rise, new power plant siting, and restoring water flow to the Everglades, the latter also functioning as a climate change adaptation measure to protect our drinking water from saltwater intrusion. Modeling even 6″ of sea level rise and setting up monitoring stations at the pressure points would help us understand the rate at which change is taking place. Monitoring sea level changes at this time would be analogous to a Hurricane watch, albeit over much longer times, as a precursor to going to a sea level warning. This information has to be invaluable to the Corps of Engineers. Given that over 30% of the Everglades are less than 1 foot above sea level even a 6″ increase would be calamitous. Who is the lead agency for this kind of measurement and monitoring? Is it NOAA, USGS, USACE, someone else? Continue reading →

New biofuels studies raise serious questions

Posted on by

Originally published September 2007, in Third Planet’s newsletter.

As if long-term energy planning and climate change mitigation were not difficult enough, along come two startling biofuel research reports from Europe in the past two weeks that serve to remind us of the need for constant vigilance and rational decision-making by government, especially with regard to the scientific process, long-term energy planning, and capital investments in a very uncertain future.

Worse than CO2 emissions?

In the first study (PDF), a team of research scientists from Britain, the U.S. and Germany led by acclaimed atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen re-examined the amount of nitrous-oxide (N2O) emissions from biofuel production. They found that when the emissions are calculated in “CO2-equivalent” global warming terms, many biofuels contribute as much or more to global warming through N2O emissions than by using fossil fuels alone.

There can’t be that much N2O emissions compared to CO2, you say. But N2O is a greenhouse gas with a 100-year average global warming potential (GWP) 296 times larger than an equal mass of CO2. That reason alone validates the study.

The team has published its findings for open review in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and, just like the science of climate change, their findings promise to be a hotbed of scientific debate in the months to come.

What makes the study resonate in particular is that Prof. Crutzen is no stranger to success in environmental science. In 1995 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland “for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone”. It was their Nobel Prize work that became the underlying basis for the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer. Continue reading →

Fossil Carbon Emissions and Mitigation

Posted on by

April 2007

On April 14, 2007, I was the moderator of the Step It Up 2007: Jacksonville Public Forum on Climate Change.

I also made a presentation on “Fossil Carbon Emissions and Mitigation” at the event. My presentation is available as a PDF by right-clicking this link.


Third Planet makes recommendations to the Florida Energy Commission

Posted on by

News Release

St. Augustine, FL,  March 26, 2007 — At the recent Jacksonville meeting of the Florida Energy Commission’s Climate Change Advisory Group and again at the Orlando meeting of the full Florida Energy Commission, Robert Farmer, a St. Augustine-based energy engineer and climate change specialist, presented recommendations to establish official State public communications on the climate change issue. Mr. Farmer is president of Third Planet, a non-profit organization focusing climate change education and president of Concept Communiqués, Inc., a public relations and corporate communications agency with a particular focus on communications related to climate change.

Citing growing public awareness of the effects of climate change, Mr. Farmer pointed out the public is becoming increasingly concerned and feeling quite isolated and helpless because they have so few avenues for addressing the problem, “short of changing light bulbs.”

“This year the urgency has ramped up considerably with the release of the science report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February, and I can confidently predict that it will rise several more notches with the IPCC report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability to be released in less than 3 weeks (April 2-5, Brussels). This report will have particular resonance for Florida. Continue reading →