Enabling safe, clean energy that will never run out is a key to averting catastrophic climate change.  Roughly half the “solution” to global warming is solar and wind [see "How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm"].  Of course, many U.S. concentrated solar plants will use low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage.  In the longer term, plug-in hybrids and electric cars are likely to play a key role in storage, if issues surrounding battery life can be solved and/or battery leasing strategies pan out (which would also create a large aftermarket for batteries that utilities could use).  Another strategy for grid integration is natural gas.  In this repost, guest blogger Craig A. Severance discusses what he learned about available technology from interviews with leading storage firms.  Severance is co-author of “The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power” (Praeger 1976) and a former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.

As the world meets this December to set plans to halt global warming, it is expected America and other industrial nations will commit to a daunting task: reduce CO2 emissions 80% by 2050.  In just 40 years, a complete revolution in how we use and supply our power must happen, or the world will face catastrophic effects of runaway climate changes.

As a new power plant typically lasts 40-50 years, many scientists are now arguing we must simply stop building new power systems that use significant amounts of fossil fuels.  They argue we must move to a high reliance on the wind and the sun for our electricity.

Abundant Power. The U.S. has enormous wind resources, capable of generating over 20% of U.S. electricity from wind by 2030, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The sunlight  falling on our deserts, parking lots, and rooftops has even more power  – enough to supply 69% of U.S. electricity by 2050 according to published studies.

Other renewable power sources — such as geothermal energy, municipal waste-to-energy, and biomass – will also play a role, but they pale in size compared to the gargantuan resources of wind and sunlight.

How We Use Energy vs. How Nature Provides. Though nature provides all the energy we may need, there is a problem.  We demand power literally “at the flick of a switch”, not just when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

This basic fact about how we use power versus how nature supplies clean energy has caused many to discount the idea that wind or solar power can ever supply more than a small fraction of our electricity.  Critics of renewable electricity call it “intermittent” and “unreliable”.  They say we can’t “catch the wind”, nor can we command the sun to always shine.

These critics see two possible choices for the future. We can develop more stable supplies of renewable energy by coupling wind and solar projects with storage.  Failing that, they argue we should give up on renewables as a primary source of electricity, and instead build more nuclear power.

The flaw in the nuclear path, beyond its tremendous cost, long lead times, and imported fuel, is that nuclear is not actually “dispatchable” power.  Nuclear plants are designed to run all the time at fairly steady output — meaning nuclear power cannot provide the “peaking power” now provided by gas turbines.  Thus, a nuclear path would still rely heavily on fossil fuel power plants to “ramp up” on a daily basis to provide the power needed during these daily swings.

A truly dispatchable system providing over 80% reductions in carbon emissions, therefore, must rely on some form of energy storage.  The energy storage can allow us to fully utilize wind and sunlight as our main power sources – supplying both “base load” power and dispatchable daily peaking power with energy from these inexhaustible supplies.

Energy Storage and Today’s Grid.

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A Spanish paper that claimed support for green jobs “may destroy two jobs for every one created” has been debunked by an official publication of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The paper’s conclusions — led by Exxon-funded libertarian Gabriel Calzada — have been cited by GOP leaders, Fox News, right-wing columnists, conservative think tanks, and Big Oil front groups to attack President Obama’s green economic agenda. However, the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) finds that the Spanish authors’ claim that renewable support kills jobs “is not supported by their work“:

The analysis by the authors from King Juan Carlos University represents a significant divergence from traditional methodologies used to estimate employment impacts from renewable energy. In fact, the methodology does not reflect an employment impact analysis. Accordingly, the primary conclusion made by the authors – policy support of renewable energy results in net jobs losses – is not supported by their work.

NREL reveals that what Republicans have called a “50-page empirical study” could have been written by ten-year-olds. All the study does is calculate two ratios of Spanish economic figures — renewable subsidies vs. private capital and subsidies vs. average productivity — and then draw extravagant conclusions not only about the Spanish economy, but project them onto the United States. Here are a few of the fundamental limitations, technical errors, and false assumptions drawn from NREL’s takedown of Calzada’s work of pseudo-economics:

The metrics used in the Spanish study are not jobs impact estimates. The primary conclusion of the report is that the Spanish economy has experienced job loss as a result of its RE installations. However, comparing the RE subsidy per job with the Spanish economy’s average capital per job and average productivity per job is not a measure of job loss.

The report lacks transparency and supporting statistics. It is striking that the authors’ calculations with two very different economic metrics generate the same result. The authors claim this increases their confidence in their result. However, because there is no statistical analysis, it does not seem reasonable to draw conclusions regarding confidence in either result. The authors also fail to justify their chosen methodology or cite others who have applied a similar methodology.

The authors assume that a dollar spent by the government is less efficient than a dollar spent by private industry and that it crowds out private investment. Government spending may be more or less efficient than private investment. To the extent that government spending is a correction for market failures (e.g., existing fossil fuel subsidies, environmental externalities), it is less likely to represent an inefficient allocation of resources. Furthermore, there is no justification given for the assumption that government spending (e.g., tax credits or subsidies) would force out private investment. This assumption is fundamental to the conclusion that Spain’s renewable energy policy has resulted in job loss.

Calzada also “fails to account for technology export potential,” “relies on jobs estimates that were developed in 2003 and do not reflect Spain’s RE industries in 2009,” and “relies on jobs as the sole metric to assess the value of renewable energy.” NREL’s Suzanne Tegen, a Ph.D. energy market analyst, and Eric Lantz conclude with a summary of what serious economic analysis of the impact of renewable energy investments has found:

In general, comprehensive analyses show that net employment impacts are sensitive to assumptions regarding future energy prices, strategies for addressing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, and the capacity to export technology. With increased awareness of potential energy price scenarios, recent research has found that it is only when conventional energy prices are forecast to be very low that net employment impacts from RE investments are negative.

In other words, unless you live in a world where global warming and oil spills don’t exist, and fossil fuels remain cheap forever, government investment in renewable energy creates jobs — just what our nation needs now.

(H/T Pete Altman)

UPDATE:  A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Jim Manley, just released the following statement:  “Senator Reid appreciates the leadership of Senators Boxer and Kerry as they shepherd this important legislation through their respective committees.  They are working diligently to craft a well-balanced bill and Senator Reid fully expects the Senate to have ample time to consider this comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation before the end of the year.”

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) have just released a joint statement:

The Kerry-Boxer bill is moving along well and we are looking forward to introducing legislation that will create millions of clean energy jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and ensure American leadership in the clean energy economy.

Because of Senator Kennedy’s recent passing, Senator Kerry’s August hip surgery, and the intensive work on health care legislation particularly on the Finance Committee where Sen. Kerry serves, Majority Leader Reid has agreed to provide some additional time to work on the final details of our bill, and to reach out to colleagues and important stakeholders.  We have told the Majority Leader that our goal is to introduce our bill later in September.

This delay from the planned Sept. 8 rollout for climate bill strikes me as a good idea.  A month ago I had written “Looks like no Senate vote on climate and clean energy bill until at least November “” thank goodness!“  I have said many times “Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010” “” although that is true only if he and Congress have a coherent strategy to do just that, which at this point, they don’t (see below).  The reality is that given conservatives’ immoral intransigence and progressives’ generally lame messaging, my statement should be revised to “Obama can get a climate bill — but only in 2010.”

To the extent Boxer and Kerry are taking this time to develop a better bill and a coherent messaging/outreach strategy, that is all to the good, because it’s increasingly clear we are going to get precisely one shot at this.  I had written in July:

Since the CBO has made clear that health care reform is tougher than climate action (also see here) and since conservatives see blood in the water (see TP’s Inhofe: If GOP Can ‘Stall’ Or ‘Block’ Health Care Reform, It Will Be ‘A Huge Gain’ For The 2010 Elections) and since the  Senate will try to do health care first and since tortoise-like Senate floor debates are a lot longer than hare-like House debates, it is all but impossible to imagine the Senate vote on a climate bill before November.

Now it is officially impossible to imagine a Senate vote before November.  And I’d say it’s now at most 50-50 the vote isn’t until December or January, which would put a final bill, conferenced and passed again by both House and Senate, on Obama’s desk maybe in March.  That should not be a surprise to CP readers.

I’ll update my July 4-part analysis below:

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Who would ape the Luddite U.S. Chamber of Commerce in their call for “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” on global warming?  Why the monkey-see, monkey do deniers at Planet Gore and the office of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL).

Inhofe’s office actually quoted me:

Joe Romm, of the Center for American Progress, asks the board members of the Chamber “to declare whether they are evolved members of humanity or dedicated to our self-destruction.” This scathing, ad hominem response brings to mind John Stuart Mill, who, in his renowned essay “On Liberty,” discussed the practical implications of stifling opinions thought to be incorrect or misguided.

Note:  If you aren’t evolved, then my attack wouldn’t be ad hominem.  Ad simian, maybe.

In any case, my fact-based critique quotes at length from the major court case already held on climate science (see here), in which the witness for the deniers, John Christy, essentially agreed with the witness for climate science, NASA’s James Hansen on the key points, and where he didn’t, the judge explained that “it appears that the bulk of scientific opinion opposes Christy’s position” and that Christy’s view “does not fall within the mainstream of climate scientists.”

What is truly bizarre is that Inhofe staffer David Lungren quotes Mill:

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

So many things are wrong with this argument.  We’re not talking about an “opinion.”  Climate science is … science.  There have been innumerable “hearings,” including the Vermont court case, but far more importantly, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process in which every single member government — including the Bush Administration, China, and Saudi Arabia — got to “hear” every single word of the scientific conclusions of the hundreds of scientists who have reviewed thousands of articles (articles which themselves were subject to a scientific “hearing” in the peer review process).  The IPCC summaries are agreed to word for word by every government (which is one reason they tend to be watered down).  The results of the hearings can be found here and are summarzied here, “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly.”

The deniers just don’t like the facts that they hear, so they stick their fingers in their ears and yell “La la la la la la la” over and over again or is that “ooh ooh, ee ee, ah ah” (see “Can you PROVE to me that global warming is being caused by mankind?”*).

I am filing this under humor in part because it is unintentionally hilarious that Inhofe’s staffer quotes Mill, a man who understood the difference between science and opinion — a man who was one of the early proponents of the argument that unlimited growth was unsustainable!  Indeed, on that final point, Wikipedia’s entry on Mill notes:

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Can Push for Climate Bill Forge a Lasting Labor-Enviro Alliance?

The push for climate legislation has bolstered an alliance of unions and environmentalists, raising the hopes of liberal activists who have long sought a lasting and influential relationship between green groups and labor.

The Blue Green Alliance — a collaboration of six unions and two environmental groups — arrives after decades of intermittent cooperation and some major disputes.

“Both of these movements have realized they really need each other to get what they want,” said J. Timmons Roberts, a Brown University sociologist who has written on labor-environmental coalitions.

The Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers, after years of work together, formally launched the alliance in 2006. The effort expanded in 2008 and 2009, adding the Natural Resources Defense Council and several unions — the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, Utility Workers Union of America, Laborers’ International Union of North America, and the American Federation of Teachers.

The alliance has focused largely on supporting legislation that would impose national curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and boost deployment of low-carbon energy sources that both groups say will create scores of new “green jobs.”

… the alliance is booming, with a combined membership of partner groups of 8 million and a budget that has grown sixfold over three years to roughly $6 million this year, said David Foster, the alliance’s executive director and a former Steelworkers official.

About 60 percent of the coalition’s funding comes from foundations and the balance from the member groups, he said. Its paid staff has grown considerably, and last month it registered federal lobbyists for the first time.

The alliance is active in several states to rally support for the climate bill and has brought members to Washington to lobby on Capitol Hill. Last week, it kicked off a national tour with former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection that will make the case for the bill in several manufacturing-heavy states.

“I think we represent an extremely potent educational force in the country by being able to reach out through those 8 million members and pull them together around a common vision of how we use environmental investments to improve our economic opportunities,” Foster said.

Stop the Teabaggers, Give Them Green Jobs: Lessons From the Coalfields of West Virginia

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I was quoted on the front page of the Washington Post today in a very questionable story, “Environmentalists Slow to Adjust in Climate Debate:  Opponents Seize Initiative as Senate Bill Nears,” by staff writer, “David A. Fahrenthold”:

“Progressives and clean-energy types . . . made a mistake and slacked off” after the House of Representatives passed its version of a climate-change bill in June, said Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who blogs on climate issues. “And the other side really kept making its case.”

Now, my poor choice of words “slacked off” aside — many of my friends have never worked harder in their lives — this story and Fahrenthold’s use of my quote is seriously flawed:

1. On the specific issue of the effort of “progressives and clean-energy types,” I was quite clear to Fahrenthold that I was talking about the period immediately after the House vote.  I explained that by the end of July, progressives and clean-energy types, had gotten their organizational act together (and that the other side is pushing disinformation).  Now this in retrospect turned out not to be the narrative Fahrenthold wanted to push.  But I think it is wrong for a reporter to interview a subject and then use one quote from the person that fits the reporter’s narrative when the reporter knows that the interviewee disagrees with that narrative.
2. The fact that Fahrenthold’s narrative and conclusion is, ultimately, wrong comes from his paper’s own polling — see Yet another major poll [by WashPost] finds “broad support” for clean energy and climate bill: “Support for the plan among independents has increased slightly.” It’s downright absurd for the Washington Post to argue in a piece today, Monday, that industry groups are winning the messaging war when on Friday they published the results of a survey that demonstrates the opposite.  Heck, that piece’s headline was “On Energy, Obama Finds Broad Support.”
3. When the political reporters treat this as just another political horse-race story, treating the industry falsehoods as equivalent to the accurate statements of climate action advocates, they play into the hands of the right-wing disinformers (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”).  You’d never know from this story that the Post has actually done some very good reporting on the dire nature of the climate problem (see, for instance, this 2006 Juliet Eilperin story, “Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change:  Some Experts on Global Warming Foresee ‘Tipping Point’ When It Is Too Late to Act” or this 2008 story on the dangers to this country of our current do-nothing path).

Let me elaborate on the second point before coming back to the larger question of how the climate action advocates are doing.  Fahrenthold himself is forced to concede:
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I don’t have time to debunk Bjorn Lomborg every time he writes a disinformation-filled WSJ op-ed [and yes, that is redundant].  I’ve debunked him enough [see "Lomborg skewers the facts, again" and "Debunking Lomborg "” Part III and "Voodoo Economists 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates"].  But I’m happy to feature the work of guest debunkers (see “Lomborg’s main argument has collapsed).”  Today’s guest debunker is the uber-accomplished Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, in a post first published on his Green Grok blog.

Bjorn Lomborg is at it again on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. (See previous Lomborg posts here and here.) No action on climate change, he argues, because it’s too hard *and* too easy. Cool argument.

I woke up this morning to find one of my favorite columnists in the journal’s op-ed pages. In “Technology Can Fight Global Warming” (Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2009) Lomborg outdoes himself in his sleight-of-hand pseudo-logic arguing against imposing emission reduction targets through a global climate agreement. In Lomborg’s worldview, the whole climate problem will go away if we just throw a few dollars at the problem and stand back. Actually, I thought that’s exactly what we’ve been doing over the last two decades or so, and look where that’s gotten us.

Misinformation

A Lomborg piece would not be a Lomborg piece without a healthy supply of misinformation, and his latest does not disappoint:

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Q:  Would any GOP Senator today get the kind of funeral and remembrance that Edward Kennedy has?

A:  That is increasingly unlikely.

Certainly all GOP Senators who vote against the upcoming climate and clean energy bill will be consigning themselves to be dustbin of history.  Given how rapidly climate impacts are accelerating, by the 2020s the entire country — even most Republicans — will realize how tragically mistaken were those who blocked serious action and who demagogued against those trying to avert catastrophe.  Those conservatives who want to be fondly eulogized by the status quo media and centrist opinionmakers have maybe a decade left.

Dick Cheney himself may live long enough to be seen by even his last 3 or 4 remaining admirers as a leading agent of humanity’s self-destruction (see “Has anyone in U.S. history made more Americans less safe than Dick Cheney?“).  And I can’t even imagine the kind of funeral President George W. Bush will get if he lives to, say, the 2030s, when the consequences of his all-out effort to stop domestic and international action on climate change have initiated the grim time in American history I’ve labeled “Planetary Purgatory.”

But there are also important lessons for Democrats here, too.  Although an indisputable liberal lion, Kennedy repeatedly reached across the aisle to achieve what was achievable.  As the Post reported this weekend in, many Democrats say

… what made Kennedy successful was knowing when to compromise, when to agree to terms that fell short of expectations but left room for later gains. “He had this unerring sense of what was the critical bottom line for the people most in need — what the key goal was you were making progress on and why you were at the table to begin with,” said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster and strategist has brief but must-read op-ed, “Where’s the GOP’s Ted Kennedy?“:

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For only the second time in postwar history, Japanese voters cast out the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party in elections on Sunday, handing a landslide victory to an untested opposition that must tackle severe economic problems and point Japan in a new direction.

Voters flocked to the main opposition Democratic Party, a broad coalition of former socialists and ruling party defectors who promised to ease Japan’s growing social inequalities and reduce its traditional dependency on Washington.

However, the victory seemed less an embrace of the opposition and its policies than a resounding rejection of the conservative incumbents, whom voters blame for this former economic superpower’s stubborn decline and increasingly cloudy future.

The big news for climate science realists is that the Democratic Party of Japan has a much stronger target than the one the ruling conservative center-right LDP had.  The DPJ “aims to lower the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels,” whereas the LDP only proposed an 8% cut.

[I can't imagine the climate target played much of a role in the election, given how badly the economy was doing, but I'd welcome any comments from people who know Japanese politics.]

Bloomberg News has the backstory, from a late July story, “DPJ to Raise Target for Japan’s Greenhouse-Gas Cuts” on one of the party leaders, Katsuya Okada (pictured above):

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Bottles of perfume and cologne are shown in New York. Several organizations, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, are questioning the safety of chemicals used in fragrances.  This CAP guest post was first published here.

Perfume fragrances are considered trade secrets, so companies don’t have to reveal what’s in them””which could be any number of synthetic chemical compounds. Even “unscented” products may contain masking fragrances, which are chemicals used to cover up the odor of other chemicals. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration isn’t required to review cosmetics for safety before they’re sold in stores, but organizations such as Consumer Reports and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics are trying to uncover what’s behind these mystery fragrances.

One of the trade secrets in perfumes and colognes is phthalates. Phthalates are used to help fragrances linger in perfumes, lotions, and other products, and they take the stiffness out of hairspray. But these chemicals could pose dangerous side effects. A recent Center for American Progress report shows that phthalates are linked to reproductive problems in men and women, including premature births, genital abnormalities in boys, and reduced sperm count.

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As the risks of climate change and the difficulty of effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions become increasingly obvious, potential geoengineering solutions are widely discussed. For example, in a recent report, Blackstock et al. explore the feasibility, potential impact, and dangers of shortwave climate engineering, which aims to reduce the incoming solar radiation and thereby reduce climate warming. Proposed geoengineering solutions tend to be controversial among climate scientists and attract considerable media attention.  However, by focusing on limiting warming, the debate creates a false sense of certainty and downplays the impacts of geoengineering solutions.

So begins, “Risks of Climate Engineering” (subs. req’d), an important piece in Science this month by Gabriele Hegerl and Susan Solomon.  Hegerl was a coordinating lead author for the Fourth Assessment Report.  Solomon is an atmospheric chemist working for NOAA and “one of the first to propose CFCs as the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole.”

Solomon was lead author of the even more important February PNAS paper, “Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions,” which, as I noted at the time, gives the lie to the notion that it is a moral choice not to do everything humanly possible to prevent this tragedy, a lie to the notion that we can “adapt” to climate change, unless by “adapt” you mean “force the next 50 generations to endure endless misery because we were too damn greedy to give up 0.1% of our GDP each year” (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).  No surprise, then, that she co-authored a paper skeptical of geoengineering.

I remain dubious of geo-engineering (see Geo-engineering remains a bad idea” and “Geo-Engineering is NOT the Answer” and British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming, which includes an excellent analysis by Prof. Alan Robock).  Science advisor John Holdren told me in April that he stands by his critique:

“The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.”

The new analysis by Hegerl and Solomon is sufficiently significant — Science itself featured it early in Science Express — that I’ll excerpt it below:

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I’m updating this post from August 29, 2007, along with pieces of the adaptation trap “” Part 1 and Part 2 from March 2008.

The L.A. Times has brought to prominence (and fallen for) what I call the “adaptation trap”:

The adaptation trap is the belief that 1) “it would be easier and cheaper to adapt than fight climate change” [as the Times puts it in the sub-head] and/or 2) “adaptation” to climate change is possible in any meaningful sense of the word absent an intense mitigation effort starting now to keep carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 ppm.

G. Gordon Liddy’s daughter repeated that standard denier/delayer line in our debate: Humans are very adaptable “” we’ve adapted to climate changes in the past and will do so in the future.

We know that fighting climate change — stabilizing below 450 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide — has a low cost, according to IEA, IPCC, McKinsey and every major independent economic analysis (see “Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar“).

What is the cost of “adaptation”?  It is almost incalculable.  The word is a virtually meaningless euphemism in the context of catastrophic global warming.  That is what the deniers and delayers simply don’t understand. On our current emissions path, the country and the world faces faces multiple catastrophes, including:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land “” some 10°F over much of the United States
• Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Permanent Dust Bowls over the U.S. SW and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
• Massive species loss on land and sea “” 50% or more of all life
• Unexpected impacts “” the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• More severe hurricanes “” especially in the Gulf

I think Hurricane Katrina gives the lie to the adaptation myth. No, I’m not saying humans are not adaptable. Nor am I saying global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, although warming probably did make it a more intense. But on the four-year anniversary of Katrina “” and the three year anniversary of Climate Progress’s initial launch “” I’m saying Katrina showed the limitations of adaptation as a response to climate change, for several reasons.

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An electric utility in southern Illinois is frightening thousands of its customers by spreading misinformation about President Obama’s clean energy reform agenda. The Wayne-White Counties Electric Cooperative has joined the American Petroleum Institute’s “Energy Citizens” propaganda campaign, telling its members to oppose the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Wayne-White is even “organizing a bus trip” to the state capital to join an API rally on September 1:

Wayne-White encourages concerned citizens to participate in the free bus trip and rally in Springfield. The co-op recently mailed out nearly 10,000 informational letters and signature forms to enable concerned citizens to help themselves by speaking out and opposing this issue. As of Monday, more than 4,000 postcards had been returned to the co-op office which will be hand-delivered to Burris and Durbin at their Springfield offices, the Wayne-White news release said.

Wayne-White’s CEO Daryl Donjon has claimed that the legislation, which would spur a clean-energy economy by capping pollution and supporting renewable energy and efficiency, “is an unfair tax to the Midwest and would raise electric rates by 80 percent.” In the letter sent to Wayne-White’s captive audience, the utility claims “Cap & Trade” will “lead to the transfer of wealth from the midwestern states to the coastal states” and is “scary.”

Donjon is repeating the fearmongering about clean energy reform promoted by conservatives from Newt Gingrich to Wayne-White representative John Shimkus (R-IL), who have been repeatedly debunked. In reality, the EPA has found that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act would lower electricity bills, not raise them.

Scientific models project that Illinois is one of the top ten states most at risk of rising temperatures due to global warming in the coming decades — science that Daryl Donjon rejects.

On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed 175 miles southeast of Nassau. By the next day, it had grown into tropical storm Katrina and was intensifying rapidly. Early in the evening on August 25, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near North Miami Beach. Even though it was only a Category 1 storm, with sustained wind speeds of about 80 miles per hour, it caused significant damage and flooding, and took 14 lives.

The hurricane’s quick nighttime trip across Florida barely fazed the storm. Entering the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters quickly kicked Katrina into overdrive, like a supercharged engine on high-octane fuel. Hurricanes fuel themselves by continually sucking in and spinning up warm, moist air.

On August 28, Katrina reached Category 5 status, with sustained wind speeds of 160 mph and a pressure of 908 millibars. A few hours later, wind speeds hit 175 mph, which they maintained until the afternoon.

At 4:00 pm, the National Hurricane Center warned that local storm surges could hit 28 feet, and “Some levees in the Greater New Orleans Area could be overtopped,” a warning that was tragically ignored by federal, state, and local emergency officials. Over the next 14 hours, Katrina’s strength dropped steadily. When the hurricane’s center made landfall Monday morning, it was a strong Category 3, battering coastal Louisiana with wind speeds of about 127 mph. The central pressure of 920 millibars was the third lowest pressure every recorded for a storm hitting the U.S. mainland.

The devastation to the Gulf region was biblical. The death toll exceeded 1300. The damage exceeded $100 billion. [Combined with the effects of Hurricane Rita] two million people were forced to leave their homes, more than were displaced during the 1930′s Dust Bowl. One of the nation’s great cities was devastated.

About 20 miles to the west of the second Gulf landfall was the small town named Pass Christian, Mississippi, where my brother lived with his wife and son.

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Millions in Nepal Facing Hunger as Climate Changes

Millions of people in Nepal face severe food shortages because global climate change has disrupted weather patterns and slashed crop yields in the Himalayan nation, an international aid agency warned Friday.

Changing weather patterns have dramatically affected crop production in Nepal, leaving farmers unable to properly feed themselves and pushing them into debt, Oxfam International said in a report released in Katmandu.

The British aid agency described the situation as ”deeply worrying.”

”Communities told us crop production is roughly half that of previous years … Last year many could only grow enough (food) for one month’s consumption,” said Oxfam’s Wayne Gum, adding that less precipitation has been forecast this winter, which will make the situation worse.

More extreme temperatures, drier winters and delays in summer monsoons have all compounded the situation, the report said.

More than 3.4 million people in Nepal are estimated to require food assistance, and food stocks in farming communities will last only a few months, it warned.

Oxfam said Nepal will likely suffer more frequent droughts because of climate change. River levels will decline due to the reduced rainfall and glacial retreat, making it harder to irrigate crops and provide water for livestock.

Here is the report, Even the Himalayas Have Stopped Smiling:  Climate Change, Poverty and Adaptation in Nepal.

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I’m reposting this piece by Ryan Grim, which was on the front page of Huffington Post yesterday.  This is a new analysis from The Nature Conservancy of the temperature and precipitation impact on the country of staying on our current emissions path.  The darkest red on the map is where average annual warming greater than 10°F.  The results are very similar to “Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year.“  I changed the HuffPost headline since this is really just a map of where warming will be the greatest.  Where “climate change” (including all the impacts) will hit the hardest is a tougher to say, but Florida and Louisiana probably top that list.  To bad three of the four senators from those states are also likely to vote for inaction and hence inundation.

Note:  If you want to see how the deniers mock one more warning of what’s to come, read “Exclusive Weekly Standard Climate Change Projection.”

The politics of climate change are difficult in the Senate, it’s often said, because it’s a regional issue: coal state senators are afraid their economies will be driven under if the price of dirty energy rises too quickly.

Climate change is, in fact, a regional issue, but not in the short-term way that the coal senators think, according to new analysis from The Nature Conservancy. The environmental group finds that rural Midwestern states will face the greatest consequences of climate change. The three that will face the steepest rise in temperature — Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa — are farm states whose soil will be significantly less productive as temperatures rise more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit there by 2100.

The rise by by 2050 — only 41 years from now — is also projected to be substantial. (Click here for an interactive map of the analysis.)

The two Republican senators from Kansas, which will be most ravaged by climate change, are unlikely to support legislation addressing it.

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My key takeaway from the new ABC-WashPost poll:  A lot of people understand energy prices are going up if we do nothing. In fact, 36% of 1001 voters polled believe “the proposed changes to U.S. energy policy” won’t make much of a difference on energy costs and 16% it will decrease them.  And this in spite of relentless negative messaging to the contrary from the disinformers.

Many Americans understand the “do nothing” energy tax, since they saw that annual energy costs under President Bush jumped over $1000 (see here).  Americans understand that our rising dependence on oil and our inaction on climate change are untenable.  And they really, really believe in clean energy and understand that oil companies and Republicans have been blocking action for a long time.

The Post piece on the poll, “On Energy, Obama Finds Broad Support” has a great quote:

“Something definitely has to be done,” said Marian Eldridge, a former legal secretary from East Windsor, N.J., who participated in the survey. “Anything’s worth a try at this point.” She said she tries to “ignore the politics; you get discouraged.” But she said that higher energy costs were “inevitable” and that “we’re too dependent on other countries.”

The fact that American — especially likely voters — support climate and clean energy action should not be a surprise:

• Zogby: 71% of likely voters support House climate bill
• Public opinion snapshot: Public backs key elements of global warming bill
• Mark Mellman must read on climate messaging: “A strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global warming, as well as on the need for federal action” “” ecoAmerica “could hardly be more wrong”
• Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 2: Opposing clean energy hurts GOP “” Mellman

Here’s more on what the new poll finds:

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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

No, I’m not operating under the misimpression that my writing can be compared with George Orwell’s.  I know of no essayists today who come close to matching his skill in writing.  On top of that, bloggers simply lack the time necessary for consistently first-rate efforts.  I’ve written some two million words since launching this blog three years ago this week.  Perfection isn’t an option.

But operating under the dictum, “if you want to be a better writer, read better writers,” I took on vacation Facing Unpleasant Facts, a collection of Orwell’s brilliant narrative essays.  My life has been almost the exact opposite of Orwell’s.  Indeed, if you think you had a rough childhood, trying reading, “Such, such were the joys.”  Compared to Orwell, we’ve all been raised by Mary Poppins.

Orwell does have the soul of a blogger, as we’ll see.  He is solipsistic almost to a fault, but with a brutal honesty that puts even the best modern memoirist to shame.

Read about how his headmaster cured his bedwetting with a beating, a double caning with a riding crop in fact, after he foolishly announced that the first one “didn’t hurt.”  Or read “Shooting an Elephant,” with its gut-punching first line, “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people “” the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

Second, he has “a power of facing unpleasant facts,” which I think is perhaps the primary quality I aspire for here.

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts — see “What if the MSM simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction?” and “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress” and dozens more examples here.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I didn’t want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation 20,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay ten times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many, many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his master class of essay writing, argues in “Why I write“:

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A new “grassroots” fossil fuel front group, FACES of Coal, is employing a shadowy Republican-staffed company to spread its message. The Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security — a new pro-mountaintop removal campaign that refuses to reveal its “grassroots” members — is employing a GOP Beltway shop to promote its work. At the group’s initial press conference in Charleston, West Virginia, the West Virginia Coal Association’s Bryan Brown complained about “outsiders” who don’t “appreciate America’s reliance on coal”:

Many outsiders are putting pressure here in West Virginia and nationally. We feel they don’t understand and appreciate America’s reliance on coal and the economic impact coal has on our communities, our state and our nation.

The West Virginia Coal Association and the County Commissioners Association of West Virginia are the only organizations to publicly admit being part of FACES. However, as the DeSmog Project first reported, they’re willing to rely on “outsiders” to do their actual work: The FACES website, which includes no contact information, is registered to the Adfero Group, a K-Street public relations firm. Adfero’s online communications arm was spun off as Fireside 21. Adfero and Fireside21 serve predominantly Republican and corporate clients:

Ken Ward, Fireside21 CEO, Is A Former Richard Pombo Staffer. Kenneth Ward, the CEO of Fireside21, served as a Legislative Assistant and Deputy Press Secretary to the extreme anti-environmentalist Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) until 2004. [Fireside21, Legistorm]

Jeff Mascott, Fireside21 President And Adfero Group Managing Director, Built The GOP.gov Website. Jeff Mascott, the managing director of the Adfero Group and the president of Fireside 21, “designed the original GOP.gov web site” as the “primary online communications consultant at the House Republican Conference under former Chairman U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, Jr. (R-OK).” He is married to a former staffer for Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Rep. Anne Northrup (R-KY). [Adfero, Innovative Advocacy, Legistorm]

Fireside21′s Congressional Clients Are Predominantly Republican. Fireside21 claims the record of building the websites for 150 members of Congress. Of the 38 members listed publicly on their site as clients, 28 are Republicans, from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-GA) to Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Only 10 clients are Democrats, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). [Fireside21: CMF Awards, Website Launches]

Adfero Is Behind Numerous Big Oil Astroturf Campaigns. Working for the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, Adfero’s “Fuel For America” campaign whitewashed price-gouging by its clients following Hurricane Katrina. Adfero’s “ChamberGrassroots,” “Vote For Business” and “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace” campaigns fight labor reforms including card-check. “Californians Against Higher Taxes” killed a clean energy reform ballot measure in 2006. Other clients include the American Tort Reform Association, the National Pork Producers Council, and the Independent Petroleum Association of America. [Adfero]

What do the FACES of Coal really look like? The same inside-the-Beltway, fossil-funded conservative lobbyists behind the other “grassroots” efforts to demonize clean energy reform.

Update

At Appalachian Voices’ Front Porch Blog, JW Randolph reveals that the “FACES of Coal” are actually iStockPhotos:

Given the silly sniping at this small, wildly successful program, I feel obliged to update my last post.

BusinessWeek’s Auto Beat whines, “They say the program was effective in selling cars, but the boost won’t last long enough to really help the car industry for very long.”  Ya think?  It’s a friggin’ stimulus, and a tiny one at that — $3 billion.

And then we have the academics — UC Davis’s Christopher R. Knittel actually did a study on “The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide under the Cash for Clunkers Program,” which got lots of media attention like “Cash for Clunkers Pays Ten Times Market Rate for Greenhouse Gas Reduction.”  I could have saved them a lot of trouble had they bothered to read my May post, which noted “As a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this “cash for clunkers” deal is probably among the least cost-effective uses of federal dollars one could imagine.”

Memo to media:  It ain’t “Cash for carbon.”

I was not a big fan of the final version of “Cash for Clunkers” because its mileage improvement requirements were so inadequate, as Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) explained here.

But in the real world, the public has mostly turned in gas-guzzlers in exchange for fuel-efficient cars “” which perhaps should not have been a total surprise since oil prices are rising, gas guzzlers remain a tough resell in the used car market, and most fuel-efficient cars are much cheaper than SUVs.  So as a stimulus that saves oil while cutting CO2 for free “” it has turned out to be a slam dunk, far better than I had expected.

You can read the government’s final report on Cash for Clunkers aka Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) here.  The economic bottom line, “According to a preliminary analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the CARS program” will:

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