CNN’s senior business correspondent, Ali Velshi, is a one-man public relations team for the polluters that advertise on his network. In response to rising energy prices, Velshi has spent months promoting the Nazi-era technology of liquid coal. On CNN’s American Morning, Ali Velshi previewed his weeklong tribute to another disastrous and dirty boondoggle, the Alberta tar sands — or “oil sands” among its backers.

After showing off his “equipment” — a Calgary Stampede belt buckle — Velshi described the sands as “the largest reserves of oil in the entire world,” where “oil workers make $100,000, $120,000 to start.” Velshi conceded that “it’s doing something to the land.”

Watch it:

The Athabasca Oil Sands development, now producing 1.3 million barrels of oil a day, is an ecological disaster. The bitumen-drenched sands — essentially the same composition as asphalt pavement — lie a few hundred feet below the surface in a region of northeastern Alberta the size of Wisconsin. Like “oil shale,” tar sands are millions of years away from being true oil deposits — there are no gushing oil wells here. To produce usable crude oil from the sands, man has to shortcut the geological processes at huge expense of energy, water, and land. The result leaves an industrial moonscape in Alberta and a tremendous global warming footprint. Here’s how:

Four Tons Of Material Are Required Per Barrel Of Oil. Tar sands oil production chews up the earth at a prodigious rate. After the hundreds of feet of “overfill” (read: the living habitat of Alberta’s boreal forest) are bulldozed, enormous trucks haul out tons of tar sands to the natural-gas fueled production plants. After extracting one barrel of bitumen for every two tons of tar sands and two more tons of mined rock, the remaining toxic sludge and sand is dumped as “tailings.” [The Pembina Institute, 11/05]

Tar Sands Plants Use Two To Four Barrels of Water Per Barrel Of Oil. “Currently, the water consumption is enough to sustain a city of two million people every year. And after it’s been through the process, the water is toxic with contaminants, so it cannot be released into the environment. Some of it is reused, but vast amounts of it are pumped into enormous settlement ponds to be retained as toxic waste.” [Energy & Capital, 9/07]

Tar Sands Generates Two To Four Times The Greenhouse Pollution Per Barrel Of Conventional Oil. A 2005 Pembina Institute report found that a barrel of tar sands oil had 2.98 times the greenhouse gas intensity of a barrel of conventional oil. Production of oil from bituminous sands also generates twice the nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide pollution as conventional oil. [The Pembina Institute, 11/05]

Tar Sands Are A Double Climate Disaster For Canada. Global warming has already decreased the flow of the Athabasca River by 20 percent in fifty years, even as its water is increasingly used for oil sands production. Greenhouse gas emissions from bituminous sands production are “projected to reach 45-50 MT by 2010,” half of Canada’s increase above 1990 levels, further hastening the climate change threatening the region. [WWF, 11/05]

At current production rates, the Alberta tar sands exploitation chews up four million metric tons of earth, a billion cubic feet of natural gas, and 400 million gallons of water and produces 100 thousand metric tons of greenhouse gases a day. A three-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel economy for the United States fleet would eliminate the entire need for the 1.3 million barrels of oil synthesized each day from the tar sands.

Velshi’s “Energy Hunt” is one of desperation, where oil companies profit only because they don’t have to pay the costs of their pollution. Instead, they keep the money and the rest of the planet pays the price.

Read the transcript.

The Phone Call — based on a true story

Major cable network: What do you think of T. Boone Pickens’ latest energy plan ?

Climate Progress: Half of it is great, the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20% of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal….

Major cable network: I was hoping you liked the whole plan. That way we could use you on the show…. You don’t have any ideas of who might like the whole thing?

Climate Progress [Long pause, crickets chirp, the wind sighs, sea levels rise a few meters]: No. The people who will like the renewables part probably won’t be thrilled about the fossil fuel part, and vice versa.

Major cable network: Thanks. I’m sure we will find some reason to use you soon.

I am thinking about working that into a screenplay about a mild-mannered blogger for a great metropolitan progressive think tank who sacrifices his chance to be on television because he refuses to endorse an inane idea. I was looking at Matt Damon to play me, especially now that he has put on a little weight.

Seriously, though, it’s great that gazillionaire TBP is talking up peak oil and joining the wind power bandwagon (see “Wind Power — A core climate solution“). And it’s great he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars pushing this idea and delivering the mesage that $15 billion dollars for the wind production tax credit is peanuts compared to the $700 billion this country is going to spend on foreign oil this year.

But if you want to displace oil, the obvious thing to do is use of the wind power to charge plug-in hybrids (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core climate solution“), multiple models of which will be introduced into the US car market in two years. Indeed, with electric utilities controlling the charging of the plug-ins, they can make optimum use of variable windpower, which is mostly available at night time. That would be win-win-win.

The Pickens Plan, however, is based on the utterly impractical idea that “Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel.”

Uhh, never gonna happen, T. Boone. Never. The most obvious reason is the gross inefficiency of the entire plan.

Right now, “We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity.” Most of that electricity comes from gas burned in combined cycle gas turbines at an overall efficiency of up to 60%. Why in the world would the federal government — or anyone else — spend billions and billion of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles in order to burn the gas with an efficiency of 15% to 20%? Natural gas is simply too useful and expensive to squander in such a fashion.

And then there’s global warming. Read more

Last fall, as the Environmental Protection Agency worked to satisfy its Supreme Court mandate to protect the American public from the threat of greenhouse gases, White House officials took steps to prevent such action. In a letter responding to questions by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, former EPA official Jason K. Burnett implicated the Office of the Vice President, Dick Cheney, as well as the White House Council on Environmental Quality for censoring “any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change” in testimony to Congress.

Although Burnett refused to assist in the efforts, the October testimony of Dr. Julie Geberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was “eviscerated,” with ten pages detailing the specific health threats of global warming — ranging from heat waves to floods — eliminated. After initial denials of White House interference, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino later claimed that the Office of Management and Budget had redacted testimony that contained “broad characterizations about climate change science that didn’t align with the IPCC.”

In fact, Burnett tells Sen. Boxer that the reason for the cuts was to “keep options open” for the EPA to avoid making an endangerment finding for global warming pollution, which would trigger immediate consequences for polluters. He writes:

On December 5th, under the direction of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, Burnett emailed a formal endangerment finding to the White House Office of Management and Budget, but received a “phone call from the White House” that asked Burnett “to send a follow-up note saying that the email had been sent in error.” He declined to retract the email, which remained unread. Two weeks later, on December 19, Johnson put an end to EPA’s work on global warming regulations and rejected California’s petition to regulate tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions.

This May, Burnett resigned from the EPA. In June, President Bush asserted executive privilege to block investigation of his involvement. Boxer has called Burnett to testify before her committee on July 22, in a hearing on “the most recent evidence of the serious danger posed by global warming.” In a statement today, Boxer said:

History will judge this Bush Administration harshly for recklessly covering up a real threat to the people they are supposed to protect.

Read Dr. Gerberding’s unredacted testimony here.

Read Sen. Boxer’s letter to Jason Burnett, and his letter in response.

T. Boone Pickens, the “legendary Texas oilman, corporate raider, shareholder-rights crusader, philanthropist and deep-pocketed moneyman for conservative politicians and causes” is becoming wind power’s most prominent booster. Believing that “cheap and easy oil is gone,” he is “bankrolling what his aides say will be the biggest public policy ad campaign ever” to promote the Pickens Plan for “cutting the USA’s demand for foreign oil by more than a third in less than a decade.” Pickens, now constructing the largest wind farm in the world in the Texas panhandle, wants the United States “to produce enough wind power within 10 years to divert 20% of the natural gas now used to fuel power plants for use in cars and trucks.”

Watch Pickens describe his plan:

Pickens’ 4,000-megawatt wind farm, the equivalent of four coal-fired plants, will go online by 2011. His “out-of-the-box thinking” has garnered praise from Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, who wrote in the Huffington Post, “To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America.” John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, writes:

The Pickens Plan calls on America to invest in a new clean energy infrastructure. It will cost $1 trillion dollars to build the turbines we need to provide 20 percent of our energy from wind, and another $200 billion for new electrical transmission. But at the price of less than two years of imported oil, that sounds like a bargain for a lifetime of carbon-free energy.

In contrast, an American Petroleum Institute spokesperson “hopes the plan pushes politicians to open more areas to oil and natural gas drilling.”

In testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month, Pickens called on Congress to assist the rapid deployment of a national
network of high-voltage transmission lines tied to wind and solar power. The nation’s electric grid, “the source of one-third of U.S. global warming emissions,” needs to be modernized for both the large-scale projects favored by Pickens as well as the “millions of distributed energy devices such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and smart appliances” that represent a clean
energy future.

Read Podesta’s full statement on the Pickens Plan here.

UPDATE: At Climate Progress Joe Romm writes:

Half of it is great, the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20% of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal

In a world of complete knowledge, we could measure annual temperatures around the globe and then factor out all of the short-term changes not driven by human emissions. What’s left would be the anthropogenic or human-caused global warming trend.

In the real world, however, we don’t measure temperatures everywhere — we interpolate between temperature stations. And we don’t know the exact magnitude of all the short-term natural variability. That leaves plenty of room for global warming deniers and delayers to intermittently push their siren song of “global cooling” (see “Media enable denier spin: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming“). And siren song it is (see “Hadley Center to delayers: We’re warming, not cooling” and “Hansen throws cold water on cooling climate claim” and “Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!“).

In this post, I will examine some of the factors that have affected recent temperature records (including changes in solar irradiation) to understand what is really going on. First, RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt has extracted the the El Ni±o – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal from the global temperature data (both NASA’s and Hadley’s):

Gosh, it’s warming. Who would have thunk it?

[For more on the ENSO factor, time series smoothing, and global warming, read "Has the world cooled since 1998?" (pp. 141-148).]

You may wonder why NASA shows more warming in recent years than the Hadley Center. The answer is quite important to this discussion. As Schmidt explains, the Arctic Ocean has no temperature station coverage:

[Hadley] does not extrapolate past the coast, while [NASA] extrapolates from the circum-Arctic stations — the former implies that the Arctic is warming at the same rate as the rest of the globe, while the latter assumes that the Arctic is warming as fast as the highest measured latitudes.

Since the Arctic appears to be warming up at an alarming rate — far faster than the rest of the globe, as the literature had predicted — I find the NASA data more compelling. Indeed, if anything, even the NASA dataset probably underestimates the recent warming, since the temperature above an ice-covered Arctic Ocean can get very, very low (many tens of degrees below 0ºC), whereas the temperature above open ocean (or thin ice) is close to 0ºC).

Significantly, The ENSO is not the only ocean-based source of temperature fluctuation:

Read more

Ronald Wilson Reagan is the “culprit in chief” when it comes to the “current energy debacle” explains Richard Cohen in “Wish Upon a Pump.” I could not agree more.

Reagan is a key reason we have only about one-sixth of the soaring global market for windpower — an industry we once dominated: “President Reagan cut the renewable energy R&D budget 85% after he took office and eliminated the wind investment tax credit in 1986. This was pretty much the death of most of the US wind industry” (see “Anti-wind McCain delivers climate remarks at foreign wind company“).

Reagan gutted Carter’s entire multi-billion dollar clean energy and energy efficiency effort. He opposed and then rolled back fuel economy standards. Reagan turned all such commonsense strategies into “liberal” policies that must be opposed by any true conservative, a position embraced all too consistently by conservative leaders from Gingrich to Bush/Cheney and now to John McCain.

The only real difference between Reagan and Bush/McCain is that the latter have embraced the Frank Luntz strategy for conservatives, in which they claim rhetorically that they support clean energy technologies while actually promoting anti-technology policies (see “Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah.” That is why anti-wind McCain goes to a wind company to talk about climate.

The media was oblivious to what the Teflon president did in the 1980s, and they continue to lap up phony rhetoric of the anti-clean-energy conservatives today (see “Slate and the Post are suckered by anti-environmentalist Newt Gingrich” and “NYT’s Andy Revkin and E. O. Wilson get suckered by Newt Gingrich’s phony techno-optimism“). Well, not all of the media. Cohen gets it right in his terrific op-ed, most of which I reprint below:

Read more

Our guest blogger is Charles Territo, Director of Communications for the Auto Alliance.

Last Thursday’s Progress Report took a few shots at the auto industry over our views on fuel standards and environmental policy. We asked for a chance to respond and the Center for American Progress Action Fund was kind enough to give us this opportunity to explain our view on policy.

When President Bush signed into law the landmark Energy Independence and Security Act, environmentalists and automakers both applauded its 40% increase in fuel economy standards and corresponding 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emission. In fact, the Auto Alliance didn’t just support the legislation after it passed – we threw our support behind the legislation to increase CAFE standards and actually helped to push for the increase.

The question is not whether we support higher standards – we do – but what mechanisms are most efficient and effective at getting us from here to there.

Since the beginning of the CAFE program in 1975, the auto industry has been the only carbon constrained industry in the United States. Automakers have acknowledged our responsibility in helping to enhance energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, we also understand that meeting these challenging standards will be very difficult if consumers are not made part of the equation.

That is the message we have been explaining to policymakers over the past year. We believe the recent rise in gas prices has vindicated our argument.

Consumers are responding by purchasing smaller vehicles and changing their driving habits. Fleet wide fuel economy is increasing and greenhouse emissions from the auto sector are falling. The market is working.

Meeting higher CAFE standards remains a challenge, but the rise in gas prices allows automakers to swim with, rather than against the current. As a result of gas prices, fuel efficient auto sales are increasing and there have been significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Read more

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Commander-in-Chief and the leaders of the world’s most powerful military force began to think of climate change as an issue vital to national security?

Ponder the implications: Investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, distributed generation and zero-carbon buildings might become a critical part of our national defense budgets. Solar collectors would become as important as M-16 rifles; plug-in hybrids as vital as M-1 tanks. Our arsenal would include weapons of mass mitigation.

If that seems far-fetched, consider what’s just happened in the defense and intelligence communities. Over the last two weeks, climate change has graduated officially from an environmental to a full-fledged national security issue. Now, any candidate who isn’t gung-ho about reversing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions should be considered soft on national defense.

In case you missed them, here is a recap of the latest developments. At the end of June, the National Intelligence Council completed the first-ever National Intelligence Assessment of climate change. Its contents are classified, but the chairman of the Council, Dr. Thomas Fingar, summarized key findings before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on June 25.

Read more