UPDATE:  Here is the video of the speech (courtesy of Clean Skies). It is worth seeing since Wirth does not keep to his text and he is very blunt in the Q&A:

I have been running a multipart series on how new unconventional natural gas supplies may be a game changer for low-cost climate action over the next two decades.  But natural gas may be a game changer for climate politics much sooner.  In fact, if a serious climate bill passes the Senate in the next several months — and I believe it will — then activism by the natural gas industry may prove decisive.

If so, the speech former Colorado senator Tim Wirth gave last week at the Colorado Oil and Gas Association’s huge annual meeting my turn out to have been the turning point.  Wirth, now head of the UN Foundation, sent me the entire speech, which I reprint below.  But you can get the key message from the Denver Business Journal piece, “Wirth delivers ‘extreme words’ on climate change to energy execs at COGA conference.”

The key point of this series is that There appears to be a lot more natural gas than previously thought (Part 1) and therefore unconventional gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet (Part 2), which is great for low-cost climate action, bad for coal (Part 3).  And it always bears repeating, as Part 3 discusses, that natural gas is the critical low-carbon “firming” resource that can enable deep penetration of both windpower and concentrated solar thermal power.

So far, the coal industry has had its way with the climate bill, in part because the single biggest near-term, low-cost, low-carbon baseload alternative to coal power — natural gas (in existing, underutilized natural gas plants) — has sat on the sidelines.  But the fact is many of the key fence-sitting Senators come from states with major unconventional gas reserves, including Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Dakotas.

A well written Senate bill could help accelerate this crucial bridging fuel, while garnering enough support to beat the inevitable, immoral, and ultimately self-destructive conservative filibuster.

Here is the full speech:

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The head of the largest farming lobbyist group believes that the earth is cooling. Bob Stallman, American Farm Bureau Federation, testified today before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the science of man-made climate change isn’t “the whole story,” citing several canards promoted by extremist global warming deniers. Stallman even claimed that “climate models that have gotten so much attention did not predict the cooling that has occurred over the last decade”:

As we have looked at this issue, we have tried to stay grounded in facts, and as someone once said, facts are stubborn things. We also believe very strongly that this issue, like others, ought to be grounded in sound science.

What do the facts and the science tell us about climate change? Number one, data seems clearly to indicate an identifiable warming trend. The data also shows that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing and that man-made emissions have increased for a number of decades.

But those aren’t the only facts, and they don’t tell the whole story. We also know, for instance, that the climate models that have gotten so much attention did not predict the cooling that has occurred over the last decade. We know that there have been times in the earth’s history when carbon concentrations in the atmosphere were greater, when temperatures have been cooler or warmer – in short, there are any number of variables that probably affect the earth’s climate in ways that we simply don’t know. We know that reputable scientists have raised questions about the computer models that are being used.

By denying the very troubling facts about global warming, Stallman is putting the 6 million members of the American Farm Bureau Federation at great risk. In reality, there’s no “cooling trend,” and there is no ambiguity about the role of man-made greenhouse gases. 2005 is the warmest year on record, according to NASA (although 1998 and 2007 were within the margin of error). More importantly, the last ten years have been the warmest decade by far — significantly warmer than the previous decade of 1989-1998, which had been the warmest, itself significantly warmer than 1979-1988, then the warmest decade in the last 150 years:

As the head of the World Meteorological Organization had to explain, after the Washington Post published George Will’s global cooling lies:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

Part 1 looked at an analysis of the House vote by stat master Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com.  Silver “built a logistic regression model that attempted to predict the likelihood of a particular congressman voting for the cap-and-trade bill as the result of a variety of factors.”

Now I’ll look at the same model applied to the Senate vote by Silver, “How Can the Climate Bill Get to 60 Votes?“  Silver’s is not the only analysis out there of swing Senators — I will be looking at others and I definitely have some issues with Silver’s picks.  But he does have the only quantitative analysis, and an impressive track record of picking winners and losers.  Even where you disagree, he makes you say, “Hmmm.”

While Silver’s analysis is first-rate, he often buries the lede.  In this case you have to wade through a staggering amount of data to learn the bottom line:

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Our guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

“Citing a new study by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) at the University of Missouri,” Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) today warned of the “disastrous effect” clean energy legislation would have on Missouri farmers. Using data from CRA International, FAPRI found that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act “will cost the average Missouri farmer an additional $11,000 a year in 2020 and more than $30,000 a year by 2050.” During an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on climate legislation and the agriculture sector, Bond claimed:

Missouri farms will face tens of thousands of dollars each year in new, higher energy costs from the House cap and trade bill.

This study is a classic example of “garbage in, garbage out.” FAPRI itself concedes some of the limitations of its study, which “hinges directly on the energy price effects” predicted by CRA International in its May 2009 study prepared for the National Black Chamber of Commerce, an ExxonMobil-funded offshoot of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sen. Bond specifically pointed FAPRI to the CRA study in his request for an analysis of possible impacts on Missouri farmers.

CRA has a history of flawed work, grossly overestimating the costs of compliance with pollution standards. In 2008 it did an analysis of some of the economic impacts from the Warner-Lieberman climate change bill on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute. Members of the electric utility lobbying group subsequently had to ask for revisions to assumptions used by CRA.

“This report is not a full analysis of the impact of H.R. 2454 on Missouri crop producers,” the FAPRI report’s introduction admits. The FAPRI study does not consider the positive economic impact on Missouri farmers of selling carbon offsets under Waxman-Markey, nor does it include possible gains from biofuels production. Under Waxman-Markey farmers can also take advantage of energy efficiency credits to improve their bottom line.

In the 2009 study used as the basis for the FAPRI report, CRA estimates electricity rates will rise by 16 percent by 2020. An EPA study of Waxman-Markey concluded that consumer utility spending, when the benefits of efficiency measures are included, would be about 7% lower in 2020. A separate analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that Missouri households would save $6.32 a month by 2020 under Waxman-Markey.

In a separate analysis of the impacts of Waxman-Markey on farmers, the head of Iowa State University’s Center for Agricultural and Rural Development wrote that “the negative impacts on agriculture will be relatively small.” According to the Des Moines Register’s Green Fields blog, director Bruce Babcock predicted the production cost increase for soybean and corn farmers would be $4.52 an acre.

The FAPRI study also fails to consider the costs to farmers of inaction on climate change, which numerous studies have shown will be significant.

Last month’s comprehensive report on the impacts of climate change by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, for example, predicted that U.S. farmers will face daunting challenges in a warming world. They include increasing downpours, floods, droughts, and crop damage from insects and diseases:

Even moderate increases in temperature will decrease yields of corn, wheat, sorghum, bean, rice, cotton and peanut crops.

Farmers are already paying some of the costs of climate change. A 2000 study by the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment showed that extreme weather events have “caused severe crop damage and have exacted a significant economic toll for U.S. farmers over the past 20 years.”

Kr¼mmel Accident Puts Question Mark over Germany’s Nuclear Future

The recent accident at the Kr¼mmel nuclear power plant in northern Germany was more serious than was previously known. Anglea Merkel’s Christian Democrats are now finding themselves on the defensive with their plans to extend the life of German nuclear reactors.

Ernst Michael Z¼fle should never sit down at a poker table, at least not when real money is at stake. When asked last Thursday about damage to the reactor of the Kr¼mmel nuclear power plant, Z¼fle, the head of the nuclear division of Swedish energy company Vattenfall, swallowed audibly, nervously rolled his pen between his fingers and avoided making eye contact.

It was already awkward enough for Vattenfall that the accident, which resembled a similar breakdown two years ago, occurred after it had spent ‚¬300 million ($420 million) upgrading the plant. As in the 2007 incident, this time there was also a short circuit in a transformer. The reactor, which had just been started up, quickly had to be shut down again on Saturday, July 4.

Z¼fle was also forced to admit that the accident in the nuclear power plant was more serious than previously known. In addition to the transformer problem, he conceded, there was damage to “perhaps a few fuel elements,” namely the radioactive core of a nuclear power plant. When asked how long the company had known about the problem, he replied, somewhat helplessly: “Please bear with us, because we need time to investigate the incident.” He could have offered more of an explanation.

What began as a minor technical glitch developed into a serious problem within a few days, especially for Vattenfall, the operator of the Kr¼mmel plant. In addition to revealing a troubling degree of carelessness and mismanagement, what happened in the Kr¼mmel reactor shows that the Swedish energy company has hardly improved its communication strategy since the last accident. Once again, the company has withheld important information and, once again, it has been hesitant to come out with the truth.

China Builds High Wall to Guard Clean Energy Industry

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Chamber of Commerce senior vice president Bill Kovacs, under fire for his opposition to the regulation of global warming pollution, has claimed that the Obama administration is suppressing evidence that climate change isn’t really a threat. In a debate with Ceres CEO Mindy Lubber about the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, Kovacs argued that any debate of “the consequences” of greenhouse gas pollution is “ridiculed” by “those who have already decided on a course of action and fear any discussion which may cast doubt on their decision“:

No better example of this can be found than the Environmental Protection Agency’s April finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. It turns out that when the EPA issued their finding about the impact of greenhouse gases, they didn’t tell the whole story. They routinely ignored relevant, credible scientific information that contradicted their findings, including information generated by the agency’s own staff. Cherry-picking only the evidence that bolsters your claim is the opposite of scientific integrity, transparency, and openness. . . The wrong way would be to impose barely debated, ineffective, and burdensome new regulations based on shaky, selective data.

Kovacs is alluding to work of Alan Carlin, an economist for EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics. Carlin had plagiarized arguments from right-wing blogs that the world’s climate scientists are wrong about global warming. The right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute promoted Carlin’s report and the false story that his work was being unfairly suppressed. CBS News and Fox News then pushed Carlin’s tale of woe.

By asserting that the ravings of oil-funded climate deniers like Ken Gregory, Pat Michaels, and Chip Knappenberger are “relevant, credible scientific information,” Kovacs is embarassing himself and the Chamber, supposedly “the world’s largest business federation” and the “voice of business.” This reactionary behavior is leading forward-thinking corporations like Nike and Johnson & Johnson to break with the Chamber, and support Mindy Lubber’s attempt to bring American business into the 21st century.

Memo to Washington Post and editorial page editor Fred Hiatt:  We get it already.

You don’t like clean energy.  You don’t mind publishing unfact-checked articles again and again.  And if somebody wants to publish an op-ed attacking climate legislation focused exclusively on the cost of action while never actually discussing climate change or the cost of inaction, hey, why not?  It’s not like there’s a major study by a leading journalist criticizing the entire media for such biased coverage (see “The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade….  The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.  The press … sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost“).

But running a piece by Sarah Palin, “The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End” that is devoid of original arguments and simply repeats tired myths is a new low.  As Art Brodsky writes in HuffingtonPost,

Is there any sane person left over in the Post management?

Palin is devoid of knowledge on climate (see “McCain VP Palin is a global-warming-denying, Pat Buchanan acolyte” and Palin on CBS: “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.”).  As for energy, simply being a (quitting) governor of an energy state doesn’t make her an expert any more than being able to see Russia from a tall building in Alaska makes her a foreign-policy expert.  Indeed, Palin does not even know basics of Alaska energy.

In fact, Palin is so ignorant of energy, so practiced at repeating falsehoods, that in September, during the campaign, the Washington Post itself gave her its highest (which is to say lowest) rating of “Four Pinocchios” for continuing to “to peddle bogus [energy] statistics three days after the original error was pointed out by independent fact-checkers.“

Amazingly, the Post has published an op-ed on climate change legislation by the governor of the state that is currently the most battered by climate change, without any discussion of climate change or its impacts on that state.  Heck even Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski pointed out in a May 2006 speech on climate change that the tremendous recent warming had opened the door to the “voracious spruce bark beetle,” which devastated over three million acres in Alaska, “providing dry fuel for outbreaks of enormous wild fires.”

In one of the most unintentionally humorous pieces of crap the Post has ever subjected on the public, Palin states:

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I am reprinting a commentary for Bloomberg by Eric Pooley.  Pooley is a former senior editor of both Fortune and Time, who is writing a book about the politics of global warming.  Earlier this year, he documented the media’s mistakes and biases during the Lieberman-Warner debate in a must-read Harvard study [see How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics "” "The media's decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress."]

Warren Buffett carries plenty of weight in any debate — even when he gets it wrong.

So as the Senate digs into the climate-change bill that passed the House of Representatives last month, it’s worth taking a hard look at how Buffett’s views on the bill went off course.

Buffett knows global warming is real and carbon emissions must be cut. But he’s worried that the bill might hurt his electric utility, Des Moines, Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co.

He may be right. But that doesn’t mean this is a bad bill; it may mean MidAmerican made some bad decisions.

On another count, Buffett is simply wrong when he calls the bill a “huge, regressive tax” that would ensure “very poor people are going to pay a lot more for their electricity.” Likewise David Sokol, the chairman of MidAmerican, was wrong when he testified that the cost of buying carbon allowances under the bill would drive up Iowa electricity prices by $110 per month per customer in the first year.

Opponents of the bill have latched onto Buffett and Sokol’s words, trumpeting them on the House floor and in a July 7 Senate hearing. So let’s examine their three basic claims:

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