“I claim that I did invent the driving Pipe and drive it and without that they could not bore on bottom land when the earth is full of water.  And I claim to have bored the first well that ever was bored for Petroleum in America and can show the well.”

So wrote Edwin Draka aka Colonel Drake, who is “popularly credited with being the first to drill for oil in the United States” on August 27, 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania.  His methods were quickly copied by others and “By 1871, the entire area was producing 5.8 million barrels a year.”

As Daniel Yergin wrote in his still must-read Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power (where I found Drake’s quote):

Drake’s discovery would, in due course, bequeath mobility and power to the world’s population, play a central role in the rise and fall of nations and empires, and become a major element in the transformation of human society.

Combined with Henry Ford’s mass production and moving assembly line, the oil boom ushered in the American Century.  For two world wars, America was not just the arsenal of democracy, we were the engine fuel of democracy.  As late as the mid-1950s, we still produced roughly half of all the world’s oil — twice as much oil as the Middle Eastern and North African states combined.

But our drain-America-first policy — coupled with the gross inefficiency of our oil consumption and successful conservative efforts to block an energy policy built around efficiency and alternatives — caused U.S. production to peak decades ago.  And now world oil consumption is peaking, even as the nation’s and the world’s fossil fuel consumption are driving us toward catastrophic climate impacts, Hell and High Water, which would outlast the oil age by a thousand years.

The U.S. oil industry, going back to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, has long been guilty of the most anti-competitive tactics.  Originally, those harsh tactics focused on competitors, with the worst impact for most Americans being higher prices than they might otherwise have experienced.  “The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that antitrust law required Standard Oil to be broken into smaller, independent companies,” but “ExxonMobil, however, does represent a substantial part of the original company.”

ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute are still guilty of harsh, anti-competitive tactics, but the worst impacts of their massively funded disinformation campaign will be to ruin a livable climate for the next 100 billion people to walk the planet.  If we don’t overcome that campaign and reverse emissions trends quickly, then long after an oil-driven economy is a distant memory, future generations will curse the industry for engaging in the most despicable act in human history — persuading just enough Americans, opinion makers, and politicians to delay or weaken efforts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

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Much of the fate of the U.N. climate treaty talks now rests in the U.S. Senate, according to a leading E.U. official, who says China would “lose its last reason” not to support an international pact if the United States passes a cap-and-trade bill.

“I know for the American Senate it’s absolutely crucial to know that China will sign the treaty,” said Sweden’s environment minister, Andreas Carlgren, whose country currently holds the European Union’s rotating presidency. “I understand that. We fully support that. We have the same expectations.”

“The difference is that we [Europeans] have done so many things already, and the Senate is still deciding on cap and trade,” Carlgren said yesterday in an interview at the Swedish embassy. “If the Senate would pass it, there would be no reason for China not to sign up.”

The pressure is building on those swing Senators, as E&E News PM (subs. req’d) makes clear in its reporting tonight.  It is increasingly clear that a handful of senators — maybe 3 to 5 (see “Epic Battle 3: Who are the swing Senators?“) — hold in their hand not just the fate of domestic climate action, but the fate of an international climate deal.

China is pushing hard to become the clean energy leader and is strongly considering major emissions commitments (see “Peaking Duck: Beijing’s Growing Appetite for Climate Action“).  Europe is obviously prepared to make a stronger climate commitment than the United States.  We are the linchpin.

Interestingly, Carlgren makes clear that the Waxman-Markey bill contains elements that make up for its relatively weak 2020 target — so it will be crucial for the Senate to keep those pieces:

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The United States has an historic opportunity to enhance its national security by reducing its dependence on oil. Policies to accomplish this goal, including more efficient fuel economy standards, investments in hybrid and electric vehicles, development of natural gas-fueled heavy duty vehicles, and production of advanced biofuels would also create jobs and reduce global warming pollution.  This piece, by CAP’s Christopher Beddor, Winny Chen, Rudy deLeon, Shiyong Park, and Daniel J. Weiss, was first posted here.  It summarizes the findings of their 21-page report (pdf).

On June 26 the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACESA. The bill would cap greenhouse gas emissions, boost investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy such as wind and solar, and jumpstart the transition to a clean-energy economy. These new investments in clean-energy technologies would slash global warming pollution and reduce foreign oil use while creating jobs and increasing our economic competitiveness with China and other nations.

But in the lead up to the ACESA vote and in the weeks since House passage, conservative opponents of clean, domestic energy have wildly misrepresented the bill’s content and cost, while resorting to scare tactics and half-truths in service of the status quo. On the contrary, America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels instead of clean, domestic sources of energy has long been costly to our economy, our environment, and our national security”” and will become even more so if we fail to act now.

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Yesterday, hate-radio talk show host Neal Boortz mocked President Obama’s pledge to rebuild New Orleans, calling the victims of Hurricane Katrina human trash. This weekend, President Barack Obama told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he “remains focused on rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” and anything less “would be a betrayal of who we are as a country.” Boortz responded on Twitter by attacking the “debris that Katrina chased out“:

Boortz, who regularly mocks Latinos, women and the poor — even calling Rep. Cynthia McKinney a “ghetto slut” — made an expansive case that the combined natural and human disaster of Hurricane Katrina actually helped the city of New Orleans on his June 24, 2009 radio show. Although Katrina’s devastation cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people, Boortz believes “Katrina cleansed New Orleans“:

Katrina cleansed New Orleans. It just washed out a lot of debris, including human debris.

Boortz has also called the overwhelmingly black and poor victims of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans “human parasites” and “deadbeats,” even suggesting that a victim of Hurricane Katrina consider prostitution instead of “sucking off taxpayers.”

Boortz is nationally syndicated from Atlanta’s WSB, part of the Cox Enterprises empire, whose billionaire heiress Anne Cox Chambers is the richest person in Georgia and a million-dollar tax evader.

A guy who has been wrong on oil prices longer than most has managed to convince the New York Times to give him some of their precious op-ed space to issue yet another sure-to-be-wrong prediction.  That would be energy consultant Michael Lynch, with his remarkably content-free piece, ” ‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy,” asserting:

Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward….

Here’s my bet to Lynch.  Let’s take the average price of oil from 2010 to 2015.  For every $1 a barrel it is below $40, I’ll pay you $200, if you pay me a mere $100 for every $1 a barrel it is above $40.

That should be a no-brainer since I am giving him 2-to-1 and spotting him $10 a barrel off of what he says the right price is.

I wasn’t going to post on this since I have blogged endlessly on the painfully obvious reality that we are at or near the peak (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“).  It is so obvious that the International Energy Agency, which until recently had been a bastion of relatively staid and conservative and hence useless energy prognostication, has begun desperately trying to warn people of what is happening — see World’s top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery, urges immediate action: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us.” Heck, half of the most cautious “show me the money” people in the entire energy business agree (see “Half of oil & gas CFOs say we are peaking“).

But one of the congressional staffers who reads this blog sent me something I didn’t know existed — an online transcript of a 1996 Congressional hearing “U.S. energy outlook and implications for energy R&D : hearing before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, second session, March 14, 1996″ (hard to read HTML here, massive PDF here).  I was Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, at DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the House GOP were basically putting me on trial for

1. Predicting that oil prices were going to rise in the future because of our growing reliance on oil from unstable regions and
2. Using that as an argument for why we needed to dramatically increase funding for clean energy R&D.

That prediction and argument were published at length the next month in my Atlantic Monthly piece (coauthored with Deputy Secretary Charles Curtis), “Mideast oil forever: Congressional budget-cutters threaten to end America’s leadership in new energy technologies that could generate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, reduce damage to the environment, and limit our costly, dangerous dependency on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region” (see also here).

And who did the Republicans drag in as their witness to rebut me — one “Michael C. Lynch, Research Affiliate, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”  Even back then, in the good old days of $17 oil (1995 average nominal price or $24 in 2008 inflation-adjusted dollars), Lynch was predicting flat oil prices for decades:

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U.S. Chamber of Commerce Petition for EPA to Conduct Its Endangerment Finding Proceeding on the Record, August 25, 2009 (download).

Calling for the “Scopes trial of the 21st century,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has delivered a petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a public hearing on the EPA’s proposed global warming endangerment finding. The petition, acquired by the Wonk Room, claims that scientific research demonstrates global warming has stopped, the oceans aren’t acidifying or warming, sea level isn’t rising, extreme weather events aren’t increasing, tropical diseases aren’t spreading, wildfires aren’t increasing — but even if the planet were getting warmer, then U.S. citizens will be healthier, air pollution will decrease, and U.S. agriculture will benefit. The petition, authored by corporate legal titan Kirkland & Ellis LLP, attacks the “insupportable claims about the impacts of climate change on public health and welfare,” and goes on to argue that a show trial must be held to “eliminate the taint“:

Only such a neutral, record-based and science-based process can hope to eliminate the taint that has now infected the proposed endangerment finding process.

The Chamber concludes that if there is not a public proceeding, the EPA must “withdraw the endangerment proposal entirely”:

The current state of the EPA docket presents the Agency with only two choices. One is to grant the Chamber’s petition, and convert this proceeding to one based solely on the record, so that questions of scientific uncertainty can be narrowed, questions of conflicting scientific views can be resolved, and certain scientifically-indefensible assertions can be put to rest, all with transparency and scientific integrity. The other option is for EPA to withdraw the endangerment proposal entirely.

The Chamber argues that “none of the claims that climate change will cause extreme weather events that could injure the population of the United States appear to have any support in peer-reviewed studies that examine issues of causation” and that “there is no scientific basis to link allergic disorders in any significant way to climate change.”

The Chamber’s petition relies on the work of oil-fueled ideologues, little of it published in peer-reviewed form, to challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is damaging the public health. The bloggers Chip Knappenberger and Anthony Watts are cited, as are the oil-funded scientists Pat Michaels, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and Richard Lindzen, alongside the docket submissions of the National Mining Association, American Farm Bureau, American Petroleum Institute, American Energy Alliance/Institute for Energy Research, and the North American Coal Corporation.

Download the petition here.

Alaska senator hosting climate-change tour

ANCHORAGE, Alaska “” Sen. Mark Begich says he’ll host four other senators on a “climate change” tour this weekend in Alaska.

The senators will see retreating glaciers, forests damaged by invasive species, and drying wetlands. They’ll also visit the North Slope to see the Prudhoe Bay oilfield.

The senators are Barbara Boxer of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. Three of the senators are members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and Boxer is the chair.

Begich recently introduced a package of seven bills dealing with the impacts of climate change in America’s Arctic.

A Solar-Powered Oil Field?

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Kennedy, the last surviving brother in a unique American political dynasty and one of the most influential senators in history, died late Tuesday night at his summer home on Cape Cod after a 15-month battle with brain cancer. He was 77.

He was a great champion of progressive causes, and his death is a great loss, particularly for health care reform.  You can read read his staggering list of accomplishments here.

His legacy on “Protecting the Environment and Promoting Energy Efficiency” is below.  How many Senators would even mention “energy efficiency” among their achievements?

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We’re starting to see more and more work on the health impacts of global warming (see “The Lancet’s landmark Health Commission: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century” and “Climate change helps spread dengue fever in 28 states“).

One source of those impacts, hellish heat waves, will become commonplace in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon, as the figure above makes clear (see “Definitive NOAA-led report 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 “” and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!“).  By 2090, it’ll be above 90°F some 120 days a year in Kansas “” more than the entire summer. Much of Florida and Texas will be above 90°F for half the year.  These won’t be called heat waves anymore.  It’ll just be the “normal” climate.

Based on two recent studies:  By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year. Much of Arizona would be subjected to temperatures of 105°F or more for 98 days out of the year-14 full weeks.

Coincidentally, the WSJ reports today, “Austin on Monday recorded its 64th day of 100-plus degree weather since June 1.”  That won’t be news at all in a few decades on our current emissions path.

The Hadley Center notes one related impact, “By the 2090s close to one-fifth of the world’s population will be exposed to ozone levels well above the World Health Organization recommended safe-health level.”

The rest of this post is a reposted guest blog from Brad Johnson on a new Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) report, “More Extreme Heat Waves: Global Warming’s Wake Up Call”:

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