Tobis: Denyosphere Jumps the Shark

Comparative traffic rankings are always dicey — certainly Alexa.com is unreliable.  Compete.com is considered perhaps the best available.  Click on image for  larger figure of ranking over 12 months, which shows the rise and fall of the anti-science crowd.

Back on March 26, Watts wrote, “Traffic has slowed from about half of what it was during the heady days of Climategate and Copenhagen in December, but I note that this is not unique to WUWT, as other climate blogs have also experienced similar drops since then” (see Hits charade: WattsUpWithThat hypes itself with dubious webstats, while lowballing other blogs).

That may be true of his fellow anti-science bloggers, but it’s not true of Climate Progress.   ClimateAudit’s numbers are now apparently so low that Compete offers this disclaimer:

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The above tweet appeared from Joe Barton (GOBP-TX) today.  It seemed to retract the apology for Barton’s apology to BP, which had saved Barton’s job (see “Who’s sorry now?“).  It was quickly removed and then Barton’s press secretary fell on his sword to protect his boss.  TP has the story:

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TP reports, “Speaking from the White House Rose Garden this afternoon, President Obama announced that he has accepted Gen. Stanley McChrystal resignation as head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, following the four-star general’s unprofessional remarks in a Rolling Stone interview.”

Okay, this decision is only indirectly connected to clean energy, although the Pentagon very much wants us to understand that Afghanistan is “the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” an element that will be crucial to electrifying the transportation system in this country and the world (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars “” a core climate solution“).

But if it signals that the Obama is going to assert himself more as President this summer, than this could be a leading indicator that he is finally prepared to put some muscle behind comprehensive energy and climate legislation.

You be the judge:

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UPDATE:  Full speech is here and below.

John Podesta, the head of an influential center-left think tank here in DC,  whose many alumni populate the Obama administration, gave a keynote speech at a forum this morning about the “Greening the Oil Sands” put on by Canada 2020. Podesta said that he didn’t want to be the “skunk” at the party, but he still managed to drop quite a stink-bomb into a gathering otherwise focused on promoting the environmental measures underway in Alberta.

That’s how Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine covered the speech.

The subject is timely because of the role of one particularly dirty and reckless oil company (see BP stand for “back to petroleum” “” oil giant shuts clean energy HQ, slashes renewables budget up to $900 million this year, dives into tar sands).   Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has more on the speech in this repost:

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On the 65th day of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, new setbacks and accidents in the struggling effort to contain the unending gusher have taken place. Two of the 35,000 members of BP’s cleanup contractor army died in accidents, and the oil containment cap was removed after methane rose through an injection pipe. Admiral Thad Allen, the National Incident Commander, told reporters in the mid-day briefing about these tragic developments. TPM’s Rachel Slajda reports on what little is known about the two deaths:

One died in what Allen only described as a “swimming pool incident.” The other was the operator of a so-called “vessel of opportunity” — that is, a private boat volunteered to help out in the response — in Gulf Shores, MS. Allen said the Gulf Shores Police Department is investigating.

The engineers on Transocean’s Discoverer Enterprise drilling rig removed the containment cap that had been siphoning hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil to the surface from the listing riser structure after “gas rose through the vent that carries warm water down” to discourage the formation of methane hydrates. Although it is “unclear how the gas came to be in the warm water line,” Allen said “initial suspicions centered on the possibility that a robot vehicle working near the top hat had accidentally bumped it and closed one of the vents through which the crude continues to escape.” If hydrates have now formed within the containment cap or the pipeline, a new line will have to be run to the cap before collection can restart.

The secondary collection pipe connected from the blowout preventer to the Helix Q4000 ship has not been affected. The Q4000 has no oil storage or processing capability, so its captured oil and gas is burned off at the surface.

Meanwhile, currents and southerly winds have spread the vast oil slick onto the Florida coastline and Mississippi’s barrier islands. Radar satellite imagery shows oil slick tendrils five miles from Petit Bois Island, MS at 6 am EDT (5 am CDT).

On June 6, BP CEO Tony Hayward said they would be capturing “the majority – probably the vast majority” of the gushing oil. On June 8, BP COO Doug Suttles predicted the capture efforts would decrease the uncollected flow to “a relative trickle.” In his press conference on June 15, President Obama said he expected BP’s efforts “should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well” in the coming weeks.

Where will Republican votes for an energy bill that contains some carbon pricing mechanism come from?

Lindsey Graham remains as incoherent as ever.  On the one hand he has said he is open to a cap on emissions from utilities (see “It’s alive!“), but on the other he has said he wants to push it “next year.”  Ma±ana, ma±ana, ma±ana.

I’m still scoring him as a “yes,” if a bill actually comes up for a vote.

The next two likeliest Republicans to support some sort of cap are the Maine Senators — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.  Both have spoken out strongly about the need for climate action.  Indeed, Snowe cochaired an international Task Force that endorsed a 2°C target back in 2005 (see “Meeting the Climate Challenge“).

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Center for American Progress president John Podesta brought a dose of reality to a tar sands public relations session organized by Canada for Washington policymakers. At the Canada 2020 conference “Greening the Oil Sands,” Podesta responded to Canadian ambassador Gary Doer, who accused Americans of a “holier than thou” hypocrisy about Canada’s high-pollution synthetic petroleum production from Alberta’s bituminic deposits. Podesta also debunked the rosy picture painted by a cavalcade of industry officials, who spoke of their progress in “greening” tar sands production:

Oil extraction from tar sands is polluting, destructive, expensive, and energy-intensive. These things are facts. I think suggesting this process can come close to approximating being “greened” is largely misleading, or far too optimistic, or perhaps both. It stands alongside clean coal and error-free deepwater drilling as more PR than reality.

“Unconventional sources of fossil fuels cannot be our energy future,” Podesta explained bluntly. “There are no leapfrogging technologies on the horizon that suggest with any plausibility that this could be otherwise. There are no silver bullets waiting to be fired.” The BP Gulf of Mexico disaster is “one in a long line of wake-up calls, and we ignore it at our peril.”

“Beyond Petroleum is an ironic slogan, but not a real strategy,” Podesta noted. He criticized the oil industry for using clean energy for public relations instead of investment, citing research by the Center for American Progress that the big five oil companies invested only 1.7 percent of profits in clean-energy R&D, “because the corporate culture and core competence of oil companies favor large, centralized investment opportunities, like the unconventional resources in Canada and or deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The U.S., Canada, and the rest of the world are “absurdly trying to ride two horses galloping in opposite directions,” as “we have to keep global temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic climate change” but continue to pump investment and planning into a fossil-fuel future. “The oil industry is extracting oil from sources that are harder and riskier to access, and where a one-in-a-million failure, even if that is an accurate risk assessment, nevertheless has huge, unaffordable consequences.”

During the Q&A that followed, Gary Mar, Alberta’s representative in Washington, thanked Podesta for his talk which was “valuable,” Mar said, because it “compels the Alberta government to sharpen its case for the oil sands.”

Guest blogger Shirley Siluk Gregory, who lives on Florida’s Gulf coast, shares her findings from conversations with officials in the National Park Service in Pensacola, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alabama. This is a repost from the Gulf Oil Monitor.

For the folks in charge of protecting the wildlife and natural resources along the Florida Gulf Coast, the oil from BP’s blown-out Macondo well looms like a deadly disease, with few symptoms yet visible but a diagnosis that suggests things could get much, much worse.

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The Smart Grid Via White Space, Courtesy of Google

While the debate continues about what network standards are best to run smart grids, here’s a wireless tech that you don’t often hear about: white space, the spectrum vacated by the switch from analog televisions to digital. Today Google and startup Spectrum Bridge are announcing that they have created the first ever smart grid deployment over white space, working with the utility Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative & Telecommunications in the tiny county of Plumas-Sierra in Northern California.

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Plus GOBP apologists say the darndest things!

“House Republican leaders moved to keep Rep. Joe Barton atop the Energy and Commerce committee a week after he apologized to BP’s chief executive,” the Politico just reported.  Ironically, House GOBP Leader John Boehner said:

“Joe has done the right thing by apologizing – it’s time to move on.”

• UT GOP Candidate Mike Lee Wants Low Liability Cap For Oil Companies, Even If It Places ‘Taxpayers On The Hook’
• Coburn Refuses To Disagree With Rush’s Defense Of Joe Barton’s Apology To BP: ‘Oh, I Don’t Know’

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The GOP is still addicted to Deepwater exploratory drilling — and like many addicts, they pursue the next fix even knowing the dangers.  TP has the story:

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