Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are working with the White House, environmentalists, and industry to craft comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation, which they plan to unveil on Monday. But Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), both of whom have admitted the threat of global warming, today announced “a narrower competing bill” that resembles the weak legislation passed out of the Senate energy committee last year:

George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana are developing an energy-only bill that would mandate new renewable and nuclear power production without imposing cuts on carbon emissions.

Lugar first unveiled this plan on March 30, which looks like something from the Carter era. This approach, which has also been floated by energy committee members Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Sen. Lisa Murkowksi (R-AK), has been described by Graham as “half-assed.” Voinovich believes that subsidy-based legislation that fails to reduce global warming pollution is more “doable” than comprehensive reform that pays its own way by putting a price on carbon pollution:

I’d like to get something done. But I’m not sure it would meet the standards of the environmental groups or what Sen. Kerry would like to get done. I’d like to do the doable — move it down the field while I can.

More problematically, Voinovich also announced today that climate legislation “must include a comprehensive preemption provision that goes well beyond language included in previous climate bills” to get his support, a poison-pill stance that would derail the progress made by states across the nation to build a green economy.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) have been jockeying for attention with a bill that addresses the other half of energy reform, a climate-only package with weak targets known as the CLEAR Act.

These senators are participating in a complex dance — if President Obama and the public throw their weight behind real action, then these senators can take credit when elements of their bills appear in the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation. However, if momentum stalls under the weight of polluter lobbying and Beltway indifference to the climate crisis, they can instead say they offered a “pragmatic” alternative.

Unfortunately, such political insurance only covers elected politicians, not people living in the real world.

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day seems more relevant than ever because this is the 40th anniversary.

In a 2009 interview last year, our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:

I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.

Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. So if every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:

Read more

On Monday, Senators Graham (R-SC), Kerry (D-MA), and Lieberman (I-CT) will launch the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill.  I’m quite certain there will be something in it to dissatisfy everyone.

On the other hand, has Congress ever passed a significant bill that didn’t dissatisfy everyone, particularly on the environment?  We haven’t had a major piece of clean air legislation for almost exactly two decades now.  The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (EPA history here), which ultimately passed by large margins, put in place a cap-and-trade system for acid rain pollution, but didn’t end the grandfathering of old coal plants.  And so they burn on.

No bill that could pass Congress right now or in the immediate future would be sufficient to put us on the path to stabilizing the world at 2°C. We simply aren’t sufficiently desperate to do what is needed, which is nonstop deployment of a staggering amount of low-carbon energy, including efficiency, for the rest of the century.

And so my criteria for judging the bill focuses on whether it will create the conditions that will allow more desperate policy makers in the not-too-distant future to have a realistic chance of getting on the necessary path.  My new book Straight Up includes one essay on the House’s astonishing yet dissatisfying achievement in passing the Waxman-Markey bill.  It explains that when we are that desperate, probably in the 2020s, we’ll want to already have:

Read more

MSNBC has posted a bunch of Earth Day cartoons by top cartoonists (here).  Lots of focus on global warming.  Here’s “The Quack and the Faker”:

Read more

White House: Climate bill ‘doable’ this year

White House energy adviser Carol Browner said Tuesday she thinks Congress still has time to approve a climate and energy bill this year.

Browner called action on the long-delayed legislation “doable,” because members of Congress increasingly understand the need to develop clean energy that does not emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants blamed for global warming.

Read more

The huge cost of nuclear power means that taxpayers will have to provide nuclear loan guarantees to finance new projects if the president and Congress are serious about building new reactors. The terms of these guarantees must include adequate protections for taxpayers.

That’s from the testimony of CAP Action’s Richard Caperton before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  Below is a summary, and the full testimony is here.

Read more

The dangers of the fossil fuel industry have sadly come into focus again, after an “explosion and fire on an offshore drilling platform” off the coast of Louisiana left “least 12 people missing and seven critically injured.” The explosion on the rig Deepwater Horizon occurred at about 10 PM Tuesday, about 52 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana’s tip. The rig is still “burning pretty good and there’s no estimate on when the fire will be put out,” a Coast Guard official said. The rig is leased by BP Exploration & Production from Transocean, a Houston-based company.

Offshore drilling advocates from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to state Sen. Frank Wagner (R-VA) have repeatedly promoted the false notion that the practice is safe — for its workers and for the environment. The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was a particular booster:

This disaster comes on the heels of the Massey Energy coal mine explosion that took 29 miners’ lives on April 5, and the Tesoro oil refinery explosion in Anacortes, WA, that killed six workers on April 2. It is a tragic fact that fossil fuel extraction in America is not “safe.”

Change.org review: “If you want to be culturally literate about climate change, there are two books that you must read.”

Here’s something you can do to help spread the word about the book and the blog:  Send out an email.  I have some text below that you can make use of, but ideally you’d explain in your own words why you read the blog and why someone should buy the book.

The review on the popular website Change.org says Straight Up is the “most scientifically well-informed book on the scope of and solutions to the problem of climate change there is.”

Read more

In recent months, climate change skeptics have ramped up their efforts in the media and Congress to misrepresent the scientific consensus on global warming….

In response, scientists must communicate their research methods and findings more broadly and more effectively. More than 2,000 economists and scientists recently called on “our nation’s leaders to swiftly establish and implement policies to bring about deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions.” That is a step in the right direction.

But scientists do not have a bully pulpit. President Obama does — and the public desperately needs him to use it.

That’s the opening from a must-read HuffPost piece, “It’s Time for President Obama to Set the Record Straight on Climate Change,” by Dr. James J. McCarthy and Timothy Wirth.  They focus on a crucial point I’ve made many times before — only Obama can move the needle on climate science messaging.

Read more