House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton is sponsoring a bill to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to reduce carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

It appears, however, that Upton might have trouble rallying support.

“The bottom line is now clearer than ever: Democrats, Republicans and Independents across America want politicians to protect the health of America’s children rather than the profit-driven agenda of big polluters” said Pete Altman, Climate Campaign director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Chairman Upton and other members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will now be hard-pressed to ignore the fact that their constituents want Congress to let the EPA do its job of safeguarding the health of American families.”

What would this mean for Boulder?

Bo Shaffer pours dry ice on the frozen body of "Grandpa" Bredo Morstoel in Nederland in 2006. Grandpa Bredo died in 1989, in Norway.

In the last several years, the city and county of Boulder have been working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s possible they’ve forgotten one significant source of carbon: the frozen dead guy who’s kept in a Tuff Shed in Nederland.

As most Boulderites — and anyone who’s ever headed up the hill to Frozen Dead Guy Days — probably knows, the body of “Grandpa” Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian who died of a heart condition in 1989, has been kept at the International Cryonics Institute and Center for Life Extension, or ICICLE (aka the Tuff Shed), since the mid 1990s. (Before that, he was briefly put in a deep freeze at a cryonics joint in Oakland.)

Grandpa Bredo is being kept on ice at the behest of his family, who apparently believe that, at some point in the future, medical technology will advance to the point that Grandpa can be rewarmed, and therefore, “reanimated.”

But until he is, a Boulder County man who was hired by the family, Bo Shaffer, drives up to the Tuff Shed once a month with 1,600 pounds of dry ice in his truck to keep Grandpa cold.

A story in today’s Daily Camera advancing this year’s Frozen Dead Guy Days noted the 1,600 pounds number, and one astute commenter (Moran_Bunrift) wrote this at the end of the article:

1600 pounds of dry ice per *month* for 15 years….. Ya know what “dry ice” is kiddies? Frozen carbon dioxide.

This guy has left a 270,000+ pound carbon footprint since he DIED, boys and girls. And there’s no end in sight.

Ironic, isn’t it?

So should Boulder County be ringing the environmental alarm on Grandpa Bredo? Well, it’s true, dry ice is essentially carbon dioxide in its solid form. And 1600 pounds of dry ice is about the same amount of carbon dioxide that the average car emits into the atmosphere when it’s driven for 2,726 miles.

But here’s the thing, the carbon dioxide gas that is turned into carbon dioxide solids (i.e. dry ice) probably already existed in the atmosphere. In most cases, the carbon dioxide that’s used is a byproduct of another process, such as producing ammonia from nitrogen and natural gas, or large-scale fermentation. So, if the carbon dioxide didn’t become dry ice (that ultimately ended up melting in Grandpa Bredo’s sarcophagus), it would have just been floating around in the atmosphere anyway.

That doesn’t mean, however, that there’s no added carbon footprint associated with keeping a frozen dead guy in Ned. First of all, it takes energy to turn carbon dioxide gas into dry ice (first it’s compressed to a liquid, and then its allowed to expand, turning the liquid into the solid that we know as dry ice). And secondly, Bo Shaffer puts some serious miles on his truck bringing the dry ice up from Denver every month.

So, from a global perspective, we at BigGreenBoulder aren’t convinced thatGrandpa Bredo will push global warming to the tipping point. But we want to know what you think. Leave us a note in the comments section below!

Kevin Trenberth gives a talk on climate change at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, has been particularly hard hit for this e-mail:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low….

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

While the climategate controversy seems to be winding down — or at least quieting down — on the national stage, Trenberth’s comments are still being bandied about in the editorial section of the Daily Camera.

Today, Trenberth responds to columns by both Bob Greenlee and Charlie Danaher with his own guest opinion in the Camera, where among other things, he explains what he meant in the above e-mail.

Two Sundays in a row ill-informed columns about carbon dioxide and climate have appeared in the Camera. The first by Bob Greenlee (Jan. 3) and the second by Charlie Danaher (Jan. 10). Both misrepresent me and my work, and in particular, quote from one of my e-mails that was illegally stolen: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The quote has been taken out of context. It relates to our ability to track energy flow through the climate system. We can do this very well from 1992 to 2003, when large warming occurred, but not from 2004 to 2008. The quote refers to our observation system which is inadequate to observe Earth’s energy flows at the accuracy needed to understand small fluctuations in climate; it does not mean there is no global warming, as is often interpreted by the likes of Danaher. What is does mean is that our observing system is not adequate to fully track the energy in ways that allow us to understand and make best statements about the effects of natural climate variability: the La Niña of 2007-2008, and the current El Niño, for instance.

Read Trenberth’s full editorial at DailyCamera.com.

Xcel Energy's new coal-burning unit at its Comanche Station outside of Pueblo is scheduled to crank up this fall.

Greenies are fighting a proposed expansion of coal mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, which would feed new coal-burning power plants like the one planned by Xcel Energy outside of Pueblo.

This out today from the Associated Press:

Environmentalists are urging people to oppose the proposed expansion of Wyoming coal mines. They say the mines are the primary source of large amounts of greenhouse gas.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management estimates that nearly 14 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions originates from coal mined from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

Wyoming produces more coal than any other state by far. Most is burned in power plants and scientists say such plants contribute to climate change by releasing carbon dioxide.

Xcel Energy is planning to crank up a new coal-burning generator at its Comanche power plant outside of Pueblo. The new unit — which is four times the size of Boulder’s Valmont coal plant — will burn about 2 million tons of Powder River coal every year.

Boulder’s Leslie Glustrom, founder of Clean Energy Action, has been fighting the Comanche expansion tooth and nail. Check out the fact sheet she made up on the new coal-burning unit at CleanEnergyAction.org.

Cooking chicken poop sans oxygen could help fight global warming.

Charring chicken poop probably won’t save the planet on its own, but some people think charring fowl manure along with beetle-killed pine trees, corn husks and other organic matter might be an important weapon in the war on greenhouse gases. And a lot of the people who think that are hanging around Boulder this week.

Wednesday wraps up the first-ever North American Biochar Conference, which was hosted by the University of Colorado’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security.

Biochar — a fancy name for charcoal, more or less — is what’s left when organic matter is burned in a low-oxygen environment. And when you don’t have oxygen, you can’t make carbon dioxide. So after the burn, you’re left with biochar, which stays stable for a thousand years, locking up that pesky globe-warming carbon in a big black chunk. And as a bonus, the biochar makes an excellent fertilizer when added to agricultural fields.

“Humble biochar has uncharted potential for capturing and storing carbon dioxide, while simultaneously improving soil fertility and agricultural productivity,” Lakshman Guruswamy, head of CU’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security, said in a news release.

Check out Laura Snider’s story on the nation’s first biochar conference, check out the Web site for the International Biochar Initiative here, or read about the nice things Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had to say about the biochar conference.

Xcel Energy's Valmont Station as seen from Legion Park. Photo by Mara Auster, Daily Camera.

BOULDER, Colo. — In January 1923, when Western Light and Power company announced plans to spend $4 million to build a coal-burning power plant on the shores of what was then Weisenhorn Lake east of Boulder, locals were delighted.

The Daily Camera called the decision to construct the Valmont power plant “the greatest thing for Boulder that has happened in years,” as it would bring good jobs and ensure that the town would not be overlooked as Colorado continued to grow.

Today the brick walls of the 85-year-old building are covered with creeping ivy, tall trees quietly line the power station’s drive — and Boulder residents are decidedly less delighted about having a coal plant in their back yard.

Four of the plant’s five coal-fired generators were retired in the mid-1980s, but one boiler stays lit, eating through a trainload of coal a week. When running full tilt, it delivers 186 megawatts of electricity to the grid — enough to power about 186,000 Colorado homes, according to the Governor’s Energy Office.

Lately, opposition to Valmont’s surviving coal-powered boiler, now owned by Xcel Energy, has heated up, stoked by concerns over global warming, toxic air pollutants and Boulder’s ability to meet its greenhouse gas-reduction goals.

“I feel as though the whole movement to go beyond coal has taken a giant leap forward in the last six months,” said Micah Parkin, who leads Boulder’s Beyond Coal Coalition, which is helping lead the fight to shut down Valmont. “Several things are all culminating to shake people up, to make people realize that something has got to be done.”

Even so, Xcel has been steadfast in its decision to keep Valmont running, pointing out that the plant is its most efficient in Colorado– meaning it turns a greater percentage of the energy trapped in coal into energy delivered to the grid than the company’s other coal plants. Valmont also has an excellent record of compliance with environmental regulations, officials say, and Xcel is already planning to retire two of its dirtier Colorado coal plants in the next five years.

But Boulder’s anti-coal activists are not deterred, and their attack on Valmont has taken many forms, including greater pressure on city officials to play hardball in their franchise negotiations with Xcel, demanding more electricity from renewable sources.

Most recently, opponents of Valmont are trying a new tactic, striking the power plant in what may prove to be its Achilles’ heel: its air permit, which is now up for renewal.

What was once a relatively routine process — if a coal plant was meeting its prescribed limits for air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, then the permit was renewed — has become a new battleground for environmentalists, who now see air permits as a chance to battle carbon dioxide without waiting for lawmakers to actually do something, or at the least, as an opportunity to rally public opposition.

“These air permits used to be given out without much comment or fanfare, but the public and organizations like ours have realized that this is an opportunity to draw attention to carbon and other pollutants that are being emitted in such large numbers,” said Roger Singer, regional representative for the Sierra Club. “We are using the opportunity of the air permit renewal to increase public awareness and education about the effects of coal plants. People are showing up in droves to what used to be a largely procedural meeting.”

Packing the permit hearings

The strategy seems to be working in Boulder.

In mid-July, hundreds of locals packed the third floor of the county courthouse, some waiting hours for the chance to deliver their three-minute opinions on Valmont before the state’s Air Quality Control Commission, which is now deliberating whether to renew the power plant’s Title V air permit.

During the four-hour meeting — which was only held at the request of several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, and which was originally scheduled by the state for a Friday night — just a single person spoke favorably about the plant.

The others gave the commissioners an earful. Valmont belches toxins, inflames asthma and creates a haze of ozone, they said. Others proclaimed that the plant’scarbon dioxide emissions, which top 1 million tons a year, are contributing to sea-level rise, droughts, hurricanes and a host of other devastating global warming consequences.

Valmont doesn’t belong in eco-friendly Boulder, where citizens voted to tax themselves on their own carbon emissions, the public continued. It’s a relic of the old energy economy.

But while these comments may well be a sign of dwindling local support for Valmont — and the increased public awareness that the Sierra Club was looking for — they’re not the comments most likely to cause immediate headaches for Xcel Energy.

It’s this one: “In proposing to issue the Title V Permit, it appears that the division has failed to assess whether carbon dioxide is subject to regulation in accordance with Prevention of Significant Deterioration requirements.”

Written by Jeremy Nichols of the local activist group WildEarth Guardians, the statement isn’t sexy — or even all that comprehensible to most people — but it suggests the possibility of a new reality that’s feared by coal supporters and celebrated by environmentalists.

In light of recent decisions by both federal and state courts and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — and depending how one reads existing Colorado law — Nichols argues that carbon dioxide must now be regulated under the existing Clean Air Act.

Master of the mundane

Nichols is only 29, but he’s already a veteran of bringing big polluters in Boulder County to task. He’s soft-spoken at public meetings and not particularly prone to rhetoric.

Instead his weapon in the battle for clean air is an unflappable dedication to even the most mundane detail and the willingness to comb through hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of permit filings, deciphering the legalese to find the weak points — places where the state or the federal government might have failed to enforce some section of some code buried somewhere.

In Colorado, air permits that ensure big emitters, like Valmont, are in compliance with the federal Clean Air Act, are issued by the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment. But since the state is enforcing a federal law, the EPA must approve any state-issued air permit.

And, if the EPA approves a state’s permit, any citizen may then appeal that ruling to the EPA administrator. This is where Nichols shines.

In May, Nichols got word that the EPA had sided with him — at least in part — in a lawsuit he filed in 2008 appealing an air permit given to the Cemex cement plant, claiming that the state did not ensure that the Lyons facility had installed the required, up-to-date pollution controls.

In March,, Nichols, in his role as climate and energy director at WildEarth Guardians, filed another appeal, this time to challenge an air permit recently issued for Xcel’s coal-fired plant in Hayden, west of Steamboat Springs. The appeal takes issue with how Xcel has monitored particulate pollution at the plant, but it also makes the case that Xcel must show how it plans to control carbon at the plant in order to comply with the Clean Air Act.

If the Air Quality Control Commission approves Valmont’s air permit — as many activists expect it will — Nichols will likely file a similar appeal. As with Hayden, Nichols has some concerns about how particulates are monitored at Valmont, but he also promises to bring up the carbon question again.

“We’re making progress,” he said. “We’re slowly but surely laying the groundwork for a very comprehensive interpretation for the Clean Air Act.”

Getting good marks

Mark Fox, manager of Xcel’s Valmont Station, runs a tight ship. He has a reverence for the importance of his job, the task of providing reliable power to the people. He can recall, without pausing, the seemingly endless string of numbers that goes along with that — boiler temperatures, bag house efficiencies, the coal supply’s sulfur content, emission standards, tons of lime for the scrubbers, percentage of necessary spinning reserves.

His power plant is neat and orderly, and in the little room where emissions are tracked, a record of the plant’s compliance is found by the computer, printed in almost unnaturally neat handwriting.

In 2007, the one still-working smokestack at Valmont emitted 143 tons of particulates, 2,374 tons of nitrogen oxides, 788 tons of sulfur dioxide, 143 tons of carbon monoxide and 17 tons of volatile organic compounds. And while Valmont’s opponents offer a frightening list of ways these pollutants combine to negatively affect the health of people living downwind, the reality is that those emissions do not come close to exceeding the limits placed on Valmont by the state.

Valmont’s actual particulate emissions, for example, make up only 4 percent of what the plant is allowed to emit, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Fox has made sure, in other words, that the plant exceeds the rules set by the state. So for Nichols and his activistcolleagues, the issue is less about whether Xcel is following the rules and more about whether the rules should be changed.

“With Valmont, we’re not talking about a chronic clean air violator,” Nichols said. “What we’re talking about are more fundamental questions: Are they going to take seriously their responsibility to keep their carbon dioxide emissions in check?”

The opportunity of uncertainty

Carbon dioxide is not regulated under the Clean Air Act, but in the last few years, the door to capping greenhouse gases under that law has been cracked open.

First, in April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Massachusetts vs. EPA that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of air pollutant.” Then, last November, EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board — in response to a request to build a small coal plant in eastern Utah — ruled that the EPA must consider carbon dioxide when issuing air permits.

The board, however, did not say carbon dioxide must be regulated, just that the EPA must evaluate whether it should be.

In response, the outgoing administrator of the EPA, Bush administration-appointee Stephen Johnson, issued a memo in December that directed the agency not to regulate carbon dioxide, only to monitor it.

But in February, the new EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, issued her own memo saying that the EPA would reconsider Johnson’s stance.

In the interim, while states wait for a definitive carbon policy from the EPA, and the agency, apparently, waits for Johnson’s memo to be reviewed, environmental groups have seized the uncertainty as opportunity, working to cast doubt on the validity of any air permit that doesn’t address greenhouse gasses. And they’re making progress.

In February, for example, the EPA’s Environmental Board of Review responded to an appeal challenging the permit for a new coal plant at Northern Michigan University by sending the permit back to the state, saying that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality must address whether carbon dioxide was a regulated pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

In June, the university cancelled its plans for the 10-megawatt plant.

And last summer, after environmental groups sued, Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia became the first state court to revoke an air permit for a coal plant because the judge argued that carbon dioxide must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

But reflecting general doubt about the scope of the Clean Air Act, this summer, the Georgia Appeals Court overturned the lower court’s decision.

In April, the EPA, also seemingly uncertain about the purview of the Clean Air Act, voluntarily remanded the air permit it issued just last summer for the widely criticized Desert Rock coal plant proposed in northern New Mexico, saying it needed to consider whether the plant should have to use best-available technologies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Asking for a visionary move

Xcel is not unaware that coal plant projects across the country have become mired in air-permit challenges.

Almost two years ago, when Xcel filed its Colorado Resource Plan with the state, the company included an attachment listing 16 coal plants — from Arizona to Kentucky — with air permit issues. Many of the projects have since been cancelled.

And in anticipation of some kind of carbon regulation — be it a tax or emission limits — Xcel has padded the costs used for future resource plans, estimating that new carbon constraints will cost the company in the neighborhood of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide.

Gary Magno, who works on environmental issues for Xcel, said that he doesn’t believe that the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission has the power to deny Valmont its air permit based on concerns over carbon. But he’s quick to add that Xcel will comply with any new rules for carbon dioxide when they’re made, as they do now for all environmental regulations.

Anti-coal activists in Boulder disagree about the air commission’s powers, saying that they can — and should — take a visionary stand that allows Colorado to lead the way into a new energy future.

And, they say, even if the commission cannot bring itself to interpret what should or should not be regulated under the Clean Air Act independently of the EPA, they need only reread Colorado’s own air quality rules to find the authority to deny the permit based on greenhouse gases.

The state’s laws define air pollutants as “any fume, smoke, particulate matter, vapor, gas or any combination thereof that is emitted into or otherwise enters the atmosphere,” which would seem to include the 1.3 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted by Valmont each year, environmentalists say.

But even if the commission approves the permit — and if the appeals that are almost certain to follow are unsuccessful — Boulder environmentalists say they’re hardly ready to give up the fight.

“It’s important for the citizens to do what they’re doing, to help politicians know they have the support of the people to stand up against coal,” said tireless Xcel watchdog Leslie Glustrom, founder of Boulder’s Clean Energy Action group. “We’re going to keep building the citizen movement and we’re going to demand that Colorado starts to build the energy infrastructure for this century; one that we believe is not only cleaner, but more reliable.”