The Chinese have delivered the most technologically advanced opening ceremonies in Olympic history. And truly staggering stuff aesthetically. A key theme was “harmony” — but sadly the country achieves only a surface harmony, one built on stifling dissidents and on the most carbon-intensive economy in the world.

Surely a country with a 5000-year history, that brought us Confucius and Lao Tzu, that first created many of the core inventions of the modern world, that is capable of such a stunning achievement as these opening ceremonies — surely such a country can develop without destroying both itself and the rest of the planet.

This century’s two great economic powers — China and United States — will either leave the world towards a sustainable, low-carbon that sustains the health and well-being of the next 50 generations or we will be reviled as pariah nations for centuries to come. It really shouldn’t be a hard choice.

What happens when your utility is 68% dependent on coal?

American Electric Power said Thursday it must raise electricity rates 45 percent for its nearly 1.5 million customers in Ohio over the next three years, to cover soaring coal prices and the cost of modernizing its systems to keep them reliable….

AEP executives acknowledge that the increases will be tough on consumers already facing high gas and food prices during a slumping economy.

“The fact is that coal has doubled in cost in the last year alone, dramatically affecting AEP Ohio’s costs,” Joe Hamrock, AEP Ohio president and chief operating officer, said in a statement. “The tools given to us by the State’s new energy plan allow us to phase in those fuel price increases over time so that unlike the spikes Ohioans see in so many products, AEP Ohio’s rate increases are spread out to be made more affordable.”

Note to AEP Ohio — Other than gasoline, what are the “so many products” that Ohio consumers ever see rise 45% in three years? Answer — not bloody many.

Now it is inescapable that under McCain’s energy and climate plans, the entire country’s electricity rates and bills will soar for several reasons:

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Here is a very good article on “Parsing Opinion Polls … and Politics … In Covering Offshore Drilling Campaign Issue.” And I’m not just saying that because the author, environmental journalist John Whibey, cites this blog in his analysis, although I suppose that has influenced my decision to repost this article in its entirety. On the blogosphere, as in life, flattery will get you most everywhere. The piece was published on the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media:

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Our guest blogger is John Wihbey, an environmental journalist writing for the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

Opinion polls are fueling politicians and candidates to push for more U.S. offshore oil drilling, with the media looking on intently. Since the issue became a political focal point in June, polling has been relentless: Zogby. Rasmussen. Field. Gallup. Quinnipiac. CNN. Bloomberg. The list goes on. All point to an increasing public desire to lift a moratorium on more domestic drilling.

It’s a rough reality check for the climate change movement: the American public increasingly seems willing to walk – or drive – away from climate change concerns, as high gas prices trump principle. But as with all polls, the framing is paramount and the media’s interpretation crucial.

Notably, a Gallup poll widely cited by the press beginning in June – precisely the time President Bush, Senator John McCain, and Governor Charlie Crist of Florida all began advocating for more drilling – did not ask respondents to choose from alternatives. It simply asked if they would favor or oppose drilling to “attempt to reduce the price of gasoline.” And 57 percent said they were in favor, a factor alluded to by Crist in his decision to reverse his position and support more drilling. Another influential, and crucially timed, poll by Zogby, released June 20, asserted that 74 percent of Americans favor offshore drilling, but it too did not present options.

Media outlets cite the Gallup and Zogby polls often, and often without qualification, despite Gallup’s note:

The responses to this type of question do not provide information about the relative acceptability of the idea of each of the alternative proposals taken separately, but rather more simply reflect a forced-choice preference.

Some polls, though, do show nuance when they ask multi-part questions. Keith Johnson, a longtime energy reporter who now writes the Environmental Capital blog for The Wall Street Journal, said in an e-mail interview that survey questions should be parsed carefully:

In polls in which the question is something like, “Do you prefer more drilling or more investment in alternative energy?,” alternative energy usually comes out ahead.

For example, a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California showed that 51 percent of state residents support more drilling; but it also showed that 83 percent want more federal funding for wind, solar, and hydrogen technology. A new Quinnipiac poll bolsters that case, polling Ohioans to find that “57 percent call for renewable energy sources” such as solar power, wind power and fuels as the best way to address the energy crisis, but only “20 percent support drilling in Alaska and currently protected offshore sites,” with similar results in Florida and Pennsylvania.

Read more at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

UPDATE: Progress Illinois‘s Josh Kalven notes that in “a July poll by Belden Russonello & Stewart, 76 percent of respondents said that ‘investing in new energy technology including renewable fuels and more efficient automobiles’ was a more important government priority than ‘expanding exploration and drilling for more oil’:

The Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein reviews other polls, noting that 63 percent of the Belden poll respondents said that opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling was “more likely to enrich oil companies than to lower gas prices for American consumers” and that similar numbers blame oil companies for high gas prices. SolveClimate‘s David Sassoon has more.

Science has just published, “Atmospheric Warming and the Amplification of Precipitation Extremes” (subs. req’d). It concludes:

Here, we use satellite observations and model simulations to examine the response of tropical precipitation events to naturally driven changes in surface temperature and atmospheric moisture content. These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. Furthermore, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes is found to be larger than predicted by models, implying that projections of future changes in rainfall extremes due to anthropogenic global warming may be underestimated.

In short, global warming is going to make extreme weather even more extreme than scientists have thought. And this conclusion is based largely on observational evidence:

The study team analyzed satellite images of rainfall over tropical oceans over nearly two decades, from 1988 to 2004….

This is something that climate models had predicted,” [coauthor Richard] Allan said. “But getting the data from observations is very important”….

For every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) rise in global temperature, heavy rain showers became more common, with most intense category jumping 60 percent.

Remember that on our current emissions path, we are headed towards 5°C warming in this century alone (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“), which suggests we are headed for a staggering increase in intense rainfall. This has huge implications for both agriculture and human health:

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