The NY Times (finally) goes apocalyptic on climate change. Here’s the cover image of their big Sunday Review piece, “Is This The End?”

The sub-hed of the print story is “Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there is a good chance New York City will sink beneath the sea.” The story begins:

WE’D seen it before: the Piazza San Marco in Venice submerged by the acqua alta; New Orleans underwater in the aftermath of Katrina; the wreckage-strewn beaches of Indonesia left behind by the tsunami of 2004. We just hadn’t seen it here. (Last summer’s Hurricane Irene did a lot of damage on the East Coast, but New York City was spared the worst.) “Fear death by water,” T. S. Eliot intoned in “The Waste Land.” We do now.

There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. “In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,” said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?

Yes, there is a strain of fatalism in this piece. The media often treat global warming like a progressive illness whose ever-worsening symptoms have been ignored too long — which, of course, they share culpability for (see “Silence of the Lambs 2: Media Herd’s Coverage of Climate Change Drops Sharply — Again“).

A companion piece, “Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines,” does a better job of spelling out the choices:

There are two basic ways to protect ourselves from sea level rise: reduce it by cutting pollution, or prepare for it by defense and retreat. To do the job, we must do both. We have lost our chance for complete prevention; and preparation alone, without slowing emissions, would — sooner or later — turn our coastal cities into so many Atlantises.

Precisely. And the Times includes an excellent interactive graphic of the nation’s major cities with 5 feet, 12 feet and 25 feet of warming, “What Could Disappear.”

Still, the fatalism in the main piece is over the top:

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by Ryan Matley, via Rocky Mountain Institute

George W. Bush, the Queen of England, Sir Elton John, and Sir Richard Branson probably don’t have much in common, but they all have installed ground source heat pumps. And it’s not just a technology for the rich and famous. Habitat for Humanity installed heat pumps in its Oklahoma City development, Hope Crossing, because the low operating costs would help future residents save on their utility bills.

Sixteen percent of America’s 18.8 million barrel per day oil consumption is burned to heat our homes and businesses, and two-thirds of that demand is in the Northeast (New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania). Swapping out oil consumption for electric ground source heat pumps offers a low cost, low pollution heating source that can generate $20 billion in savings and is a crucial step to achieving RMI’s Reinventing Fire vision in the Northeast.

The region spends over $14 billion every year on fuel oil—consisting of both distillate fuel oil, which is nearly identical to diesel fuel, and residual fuel oil, which is a heavy, viscous fuel also called “bunker fuel.” That means the six million residential and 450,000 commercial customers who use oil spend an annual average of $1,700 and $8,900, respectively, to heat their homes and businesses.

Along with the economic drag from using this high-priced fuel, 43,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 69,000 tons of sulfur oxides, and 57 million tons of CO2 are added to our atmosphere every year, negatively impacting our health, air, water, and climate.

If residents and business owners in the Northeast switch entirely from oil to heat pumps they could save a total of $5.5 billion per year in heating costs, which is more than the healthcare expenditures of the entire state of Vermont. Over the lifetime of a heat pump system, each resident in the state could save $3,000 (present value), and each business could save $50,000 (present value). Emissions of NOx, SOx and CO2 would be reduced by 81 percent, 66 percent, and 81 percent, respectively. Those CO2 emissions reductions alone are equivalent to taking 8.2 million cars off the road.

How Does it Work?

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by Mary Anne Hitt, via the Sierra Club

Now that the presidential election is over, the people of Ohio are facing another important choice — whether their state will embrace clean energy measures that will save money and lives, or continue wasting energy from polluting coal plants. To help get the message out far and wide, the Ohio Sierra Club is launching new billboards that are taking energy efficiency to the street. There’s a big question mark hanging over the state’s energy direction. Will the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio choose a future of unnecessary and expensive coal and gas generating plants that make people sick or, instead, a twenty-first century path that reduces energy waste and creates jobs?

To help steer Ohio toward clean energy, the billboards call out one particular utility that keeps trying to take the dirtiest path possible: FirstEnergy, which serves more than 2 million Ohioans.

We’ve placed three billboards in Akron and two in Columbus, with one near the offices of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. The Commission will decide next month whether FirstEnergy’s plan to meet the state’s energy efficiency goals is sufficient. The Sierra Club and our allies have shown them that it is nowhere near that.

FirstEnergy’s plan is just like its track record on renewable energy. Unlike Ohio’s other energy companies, FirstEnergy discourages its customers to save energy and lower their electric bills. For example, earlier this year, an audit of FirstEnergy found that they had paid nearly 15 times a reasonable price for renewable energy to its subsidiary company, FirstEnergy Solutions. The confidential audit report is being released for further review to get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, when FirstEnergy retired coal plants earlier this year and had the opportunity to support its workforce by transitioning to clean-energy projects, it did nothing. FirstEnergy’s record with efficiency programs is no different. 

And right now, FirstEnergy is trying to eliminate energy savings from efficiency programs by lobbying for a removal of the state’s energy efficiency savings targets. But this is not the first attempt by FirstEnergy:

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by Michael Conathan

On November 7 the American people woke up to a post-election Washington, D.C., that looks an awful lot like pre-election Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama earned a four-year extension on his lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and his Democratic colleagues retained their hold on the Senate, and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) and his Republican colleagues still control the agenda in the House of Representatives.

Despite historically bad approval ratings for Congress, which actually dipped down into the single digits as recently as last month, 21 of the 22 senators seeking re-election held onto their offices in general elections—10 others retired, and one incumbent lost in a primary election. And with four House seats still awaiting decisions as of this writing, only 25 of the 382 incumbent representatives in general elections lost their races—40 others retired, and 13 were beaten in primary elections—and five of them were running against other incumbents as a result of redistricting changes.

Yet even with the outward appearance of status quo, a deeper look inside the results of last week’s elections shows that when a few key seats change hands, the effects on our oceans and coasts may be striking. There are some new obstacles to overcome, as well as some great opportunities to cultivate new leaders who will prioritize these issues in the 113th Congress.

The president of the United States

On November 6 all eyes gravitated to the Obama/Romney ticket-topping tilt-a-whirl. Coming as a surprise to no one, oceans—besides former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s mockery of their rise at the Republican national convention in Tampa and a brief rebuttal from President Obama in Charlotte—were absent from the campaign trail. Aside from this one brief thrust-and-parry neither candidate bothered to talk much about climate change at all.

Now, however, following President Obama’s surge to victory in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, climate change is gaining prominence in the national political dialogue. A new Rasmussen poll released the week of the election showed that 68 percent of Americans now view climate change as a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, up from just 46 percent in 2009, continuing a trend that has been emerging in other recent polling showing greater awareness and belief that climate change is a contributing factor to the recent uptick in extreme weather events.

While the two presidential candidates spoke little about climate change during the race, their positions differed greatly. The White House website’s climate change page touts the president’s efforts to combat the problem through efforts including international negotiations, reduction of emissions through a commitment to clean energy, and Environmental Protection Agency regulatory overhauls. By contrast, Gov. Romney’s efforts to downplay the seriousness of the problem came back to bite him in the closing days of the campaign as voters watched dire predictions about the vulnerability of infrastructure in New York City and New Jersey come true with tragic results.

In addition to climate change, President Obama’s re-election means that there is life for his National Ocean Policy—an effort launched by executive order and designed to bring a semblance of cohesiveness to the multitude of federal agencies that have a role in the management of issues that affect our oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes. Despite the policy’s intention to streamline and reduce redundancy in government activity and enhance states’ rights by providing support for individual states and regions that opt to manage their coasts according to the policy’s core set of principles, many Republicans, particularly on the House Natural Resources Committee, lambast the policy as another example of “job killing regulations” handed down by the White House. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It was widely anticipated that under a Romney administration, the policy and the National Ocean Council established to support it would have been shelved. With President Obama still in the White House, the policy’s supporters have at least another four years to prove the value of its underlying principles, primarily comprehensive ocean planning.

The Senate

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