The National Academies of 13 countries told the leaders of the biggest polluting countries that “immediate large-scale mitigation action is required.”

While objections have been raised by a few people (well, one person anyway) to these leading scientific groups inserting themselves into the climate debate, the rest of us should be glad they are counseling the world — especially their own countries — toward sanity. The statement is clear on what actions will be needed:

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FOXNews Extreme Weather Center

Recently, United States Senate has taken several votes on building a green economy that moves away from fossil fuel dependence, creates new green industry, and addresses global warming. Each time a minority of senators blocked the way. On Friday, 38 senators filibustered mandatory greenhouse gas reduction legislation (S. 3036). This morning, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) joined 41 Republicans to filibuster the Consumer-First Energy Act (S. 3044), which would have given consumers relief by placing a windfall tax on oil companies. Then 44 Republican senators blocked consideration of the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act (H.R. 6049) to extend renewable energy and other tax incentives.

Meanwhile the signs of the looming climate crisis abound. Extreme weather of all kinds — freak snowstorms, extended droughts, heat waves, flash floods — are causing havoc around the nation, and conservative neglect is leaving us unprepared and unable to rebuild:

– On May 25, “the strongest tornado to scour Iowa’s gentle landscape in 32 years” destroyed a third of the town of Parkersburg, killing eight people.

– On May 30, a tornado destroyed 11 homes and left 65,000 people without power in Indiana.

– On June 6, tornadoes, hail and flooding destroyed homes and washed out roads in Minnesota. North Carolina governor Mike Easley declared a state of emergency as extended drought kindled a massive wildfire in the eastern part of the state.

– On June 7, flooding in Indiana killed two people, a man who drowned in his vehicle. Another person was reported missing after falling off a boat. Nearly a third of Indiana’s counties were declared disaster areas today after flood levels rose higher than the The Great Flood of 1913, breaching levees and inundating entire towns.

– On June 8, violent storms killed eight people in Michigan, including two newspaper workers who drowned when their car became submerged in a flood-swollen creek. Two other people were killed by falling trees, one man drowned and a woman died when high winds blew an RV on top of her. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power after storms dumped five inches of rain in six hours. Lightning struck a pavilion at a state park in Connecticut during a violent storm, killing one person and injuring four.

– On June 9, floodwaters breached a dam on Lake Delton, Wisconsin, as Gov. Jim Doyle declared a state of emergency in the southern half of Wisconsin. The “unusual spring heat wave” caused blackouts in Brooklyn and New Jersey. A new crop of thunderstorms knocked out power in Indiana for thousands of Indianapolis-area residents.

– Today, a freak June snowstorm caused whiteout conditions on Oregon roads, forcing truckers to use chains to navigate the five inches of new snow.

Summer officially begins on June 20.

In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that it is “very likely” that manmade global warming will bring an “increase in frequency of hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation.” The panel of scientists and government officials also found:

Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather, together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems.

Part 1 discussed the basic conclusion of the new International Energy Agency report — cutting global emissions in half by 2050 is not costly. In fact, the total shift in investment needed to stabilize at 450 ppm is only about 1.1% of GDP per year, and that is not a “cost” or hit to GDP, because much of that investment goes towards saving expensive fuel.

In this post I will discuss the basic solution IEA is proposing. I will also start to look at how the report is too pessimistic about renewables, and thus it overestimates costs. In their business-as-usual baseline, neither solar thermal nor solar photovoltaics are ever commercially competitive. Part 3 discusses IEA’s very dubious assumptions in the transportation sector. The IEA assumes the price of oil is half of current levels and is frozen at $65 a barrel from 2030 to 2050. I kid you not. That is a key reason their marginal price of CO2 is so absurdly high.

My central argument in recent months has been that stabilizing at 450 ppm requires about 14 wedges – carbon mitigation strategies deployed over a few decades that ultimately each prevent the emission of one billion tons of carbon annually [see "Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution"]. The IEA comes to almost exactly the same conclusion, and has relatively similar wedges, so I view this report largely as a vindication of my analysis.

THE SOLUTION IS SOME 13 WEDGES STARTING BY 2015

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From today’s Congress Daily (subs. req’d):

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You can listen here. [It says live, but it started at the beginning for me.]

At 10 am, Mike is interviewing experts doing a post-mortem on Boxer- Lieberman-Warner, so you may want to tune in now.

The Boston Globe has just published a good op-ed critique of McCain’s energy and climate policy. The piece is by Carol Browner, former EPA administrator, and Bob Sussman, a campaign adviser to Obama, and former EPA deputy administrator. It is reprinted below:

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The key question is — can we pass a serious climate bill next year? Certainly that depends on who we elect president. But the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate contains many clues, which is why I spend so much time blogging on it.

Time magazine has publish their own post-post-post-mortem of the debate here, and while I don’t agree with it entirely, it is certainly worth reading to get a mainstream media view. Her are the final two paragraphs, which should be sobering to anyone hoping the US reassert its leadership on the issue next year:

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