Matthew Berger's Climate Chronicles

After formally committing the nation as a whole to a 17 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2020 via the Copenhagen Accord, President Barack Obama announced Friday morning that the federal government itself would seek to cut its emissions even more — by 28 percent over that same time period.

The federal government's agencies and departments, taken together, are the single largest energy user in the country. By pursuing the announced targets, which use 2008 emissions as a baseline year, it will lead the charge on the U.S.'s progress toward lowering the country's emissions.

The White House expects these targets will eventually create jobs in the private sector by stimulating growth in the clean energy sector. The announcement builds on goals Obama laid out in Wednesday's State of the Union address, a main focus of which was job creation.

The targets embody the increased role for the government in both promoting a shift to cleaner energy and creating jobs.

“As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient,” the president said in announcing the goals today.

It came in the face of criticism from some climate action advocates who had been critical of the president for categorizing "clean" coal, expanded nuclear and offshore drilling as “clean energy” solutions in his address to the nation earlier this week.

After years of pressure from investors, environmental organizations and public interest groups, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to require publicly traded companies to disclose information regarding business risks and opportunities related to climate change.

Some companies already take climate issues into account and disclose their findings to investors, but the "interpretative guidance" issued by the SEC will require all public firms to do so.

This is the first economy-wide requirement that companies disclose their exposure to climate-related risks, according to Ceres, an NGO that has been leading the effort to pressure the SEC to adopt such requirements.

On the day after the standards were released, opinion was divided over the impact the new standards would have, with some critics complaining that they were unnecessary. Others saw it as the start of a broader transformation that would put new pressure on major polluting industries.

With Royal Dutch Shell announcing Monday that it would scale back the pace at which it develops projects in the oil sands of Alberta, discussion has revolved around whether this decision is more a product of environmental pressure or economic realism — or both — and what this means for the industry's involvement in environmentally and economically costly projects more broadly.

Peter Voser, CEO of Shell, told the Financial Times in London that unconventional resources such as the oil sands will be "developed but at a much slower pace."

California is often commended in renewable energy circles for its goal of getting 30 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020. But the first stage of that goal — 20 percent by 2010 — has yet to be reached, and some experts say the state is simply running in place.

Craig Lewis pointed to one reason for this at a briefing on Capitol Hill. Lewis is the head of the FIT Coalition, a group that hopes to lead California toward implementing a feed-in tariff that will increase the market share of renewable energy in the state. He says California's current strategy for increasing renewables' share, relying on renewable portfolio standards, is stalling progress.

As Haiti recovers from last week's earthquake and its aftershocks, a group of scientists says the region may be in the path of greater disasters by the end of the coming century.

Warming ocean temperatures in the Atlantic are projected to almost double the number of the strongest hurricanes over the next 80 years, particularly in the waters off Hispaniola, Cuba and Florida, says a study in today's issue of the journal Science.

While the overall number of hurricanes will decrease, Category 4 and 5 storms — those with sustained winds of 131 miles per hour and above — will nearly double in frequency, according to the study's projections. The most intense of these will more than triple.

After a flood of wet coal ash swept from a power plant containment pond in December 2008, contaminating a river and covering 300 acres of eastern Tennessee, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would decide whether to issue new coal ash regulations by the end of 2009.

As that deadline approached last month, however, the agency admitted its findings would be delayed "due to the complexity of the analysis."

If it were simply a question of how best to protect the public, the decision would have been made weeks ago, health and environmental advocates say. But it appears cost has become as significant a factor as protection.

After a year of hope, 2010 is starting out with proponents of action on climate change facing an uphill battle.

In 2009, a new president moved into the White House, Congress inched toward passing a bill to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the Copenhagen climate summit waited as a hopeful coda to a year of climate action. It ended up being a year of mixed results, however, and the prospects for climate action this year appear equally mixed.

Congress gets back into full swing next week, and several senators have made assurances that climate change will be one of the first issues they discuss.

For Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), that means a new attempt to block greenhouse gas regulation by the EPA.

As the U.S. energy industry faces down what promises to be a critical decade in determining the shape of its future, the opinions of industry representatives seem as diverse as the energy sources they represent.

"What we do this decade will shape the electricity future of 2050," Michael Howard, senior vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute, told the U.S. Energy Association’s Sixth Annual State of the Energy Industry forum in Washington.

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Our actions on issues like climate change will not be enough to "rescue humanity from unacceptably hazardous environmental and climate risks" without a cultural transformation, the Worldwatch Institute says in its 2010 State of the World report.

In its report, the research organization tries to chart a path away from the consumerist culture that has arisen in the past 50 years and has been a major factor in the planet’s environmental and social problems.

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emerges from a dark eight years under the Bush administration, it is consciously and relatively successfully trying to base its decisions on science. That is why its decision last week to not object to a permit for a mountaintop mine in West Virginia seems so odd now.

A comprehensive study in Friday's issue of the journal Science points to a striking lack of attention to the science in the agency's handling of mountaintop mining practices in Appalachia.