As we enter the 64th day of the nation’s worst environmental disaster, Americans’ opposition to offshore oil drilling continues to grow. CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss has the details.
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
That is the conclusion of an important first-of-its-kind study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Expert credibility in climate change.”
The findings will come as no surprise whatsoever to 97% to 98% of scientists or regular CP readers — but it could theoretically open the eyes of those in the status quo media who keep suggesting the ‘experts’ they cite that keep pushing anti-science disinformation are somehow close to being equal in number, credibility, or expertise to the broad community of climate scientists, thereby implying serious disagreements among mainstream scientists (see here, here, and here).
It’s trendy to be undead these days. Sure sexy teenage vampires get all the media attention. But don’t forget those mad (political) scientists who toil tirelessly in their labs, assembling the best (worst?) parts of corpses, mixing in 100 million gallons of oil, and zapping the finished product with, say, the enormous power furnished by an electric (utility) cap.
I think we might call the resulting assemblage Lugar-Kerry-Lieberman-Graham-Cantwell-Collins-Waxman-Markey-Bingaman. The conventional wisdom for months in this town, as I’ve noted many times, has been that a climate bill is dead, dead, dead. How dead? We’re talking stick a fork in it and eat it with fava beans and a nice chianti!
According to local Louisiana officials, private contractors are deciding how to deal with the black tide of BP’s oil. On Sunday, June 20, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told members of the New Orleans City Council that private contractors are trying to block access to oil-slicked marshes and are keeping pelicans covered in toxic sludge for days before cleaning them. When Nungesser follows the established chain of command to raise concerns, they “never get an answer back.”
Nungesser said that a private contractor blocked Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) entrance to a contaminated area, and tried to do the same with Nungesser and Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA). The contractors hired to run the decontamination of wildlife — possibly the oil-industry-funded International Bird Rescue Research Center — are leaving oiled pelicans to sit in sludge for days before cleaning, Nungesser charged. They’re “making up their own rules,” he said:
We had a meeting here yesterday because the person that BP hired for the animal thing refused David Vitter entrance. He tried to keep me and the governor out with the coach of the LSU Tigers, and I took the chain and said, “Get out of the way. We are coming in.” He just said, you know, they want to keep you out. It is a contractor by BP. What’s happening is they are making up their own rules. I was out there with Anderson Cooper the other night. They let him on the grounds. When I showed up they said, “If we knew he was coming, we would not let you in.” It’s my land. They can’t stop us. It’s the parish land. They’re making up rules, like taking these pelicans, and they’re saying, well we leave them for five days with the oil so they calm down. I’m like, “Show me where that’s a rule, it’s not true.”
Watch at C-SPAN.org.
Nungesser and the members of the New Orleans City Council agreed that the state and federal government needs to take more direct control of BP’s army of contractors, and establish a more responsive command-and-control structure. The Center for American Progress has outlined practical plans for how the government can step up and protect our nation from the BP oilpocalypse.
Transcript: Read more
For some reason, the power used by computers is a source of endless fascination to the public. Most folks think that the power used by computers is a lot more than it actually is, and that it’s growing at incredible rates. Neither one of these beliefs is true, but they reflect a stubborn sense that the economic importance of IT somehow must translate into a large amount of electricity use. That incorrect belief masks an important truth: Information technology has beneficial environmental effects that vastly outweigh the direct environmental impact of the electricity that it consumes.
That’s the start of a guest post from Dr. Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Koomey has been a friend and colleague for more than a decade and a half — and we’ve spent a lot of time debunking mis-analysis in this area (see “Ignore the media hype and keep Googling “” The energy impact of web searches is very LOW“).
TP’s daily Progress Report has a good update on the BP oil disaster, the company’s malfeasance, and its friends in Congress:
New 146 Megawatt Wind Farm in Missouri Reveals the Future Beyond Fossil Fuels
Atchison County, Missouri has just dedicated the new Farmers City Wind Power Project, consisting of 73 turbines that produce 146 megawatts of clean power, enough for 33,000 homes. In stark contrast to the destruction caused by fossil fuel harvesting, the massive renewable energy project will coexist with farmland, which will continue to yield corn and soybeans.
In all the criticism of Obama’s too-weak energy speech last week, not enough attention was paid to a statement that oil-state Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) made. Here is the final paragraph :
Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, appeared before a House committee last week and mostly refused to answer questions. He did, however, receive an apology from Joe Barton of Texas, who characterized the new $20 billion compensation fund for those hurt by the oil disaster as “a shakedown” of BP and “a tragedy.”
But that’s not the way the public feels about this new fund. They approve of it by an overwhelming 82-18 margin in a new CNN poll, as CAP’s public opinion expert Ruy Teixeira explains in this repost.
A new CAP report by Sean Pool presents the “network lifecycle” approach to clean energy innovation. The paper shows how the innovation lifecycle of clean energy technology can be divided into five phases, each involving a different an evolving network of participants with its own challenges and policy needs.
Edited by Joe Romm, we cover climate science, solutions and politics. Columnist Tom Friedman calls us "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named us one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." Newcomers, start here.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.
Joe Romm has pulled together the secrets of the greatest communicators in history to show how you can apply these tools to your writing, speaking, blogging — even your Tweeting.
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