The leading Republican candidate for Senate from the state that’s Ground Zero for climate change is a flat-out denier of human-caused global warming.  He apparently thinks the term “greenhouse gases” is just a figure of speech (see “10 indicators of a human fingerprint on climate change“).  Hard to believe that anti-EPA Lisa “dirty air” Murkowski is too liberal, too “green” for Alaska.  No worries though — if they keep electing people who oppose action on climate, there won’t be much greenery left between the bark beetles and forest fires.

Think Progress has the story of yet another right-wing flat-Earther, fiery Joe Miller:

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Our guest blogger is Richard W. Caperton, Policy Analyst with the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress.

Nuclear reactor developers have a compelling reason to support a cap on carbon pollution: the effects of climate change could make it to impossible to run nuclear reactors. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has drastically reduced power generation at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant this summer:

The Tennessee Valley Authority has lost nearly $50 million in power generation from its biggest nuclear plant because the Tennessee River in Alabama is too hot.

Browns Ferry is located on the Tennessee River in Alabama and uses river water for cooling. To protect wildlife in the river, TVA is not allowed to raise the river’s temperature above 90 degrees. But this year’s record heat have already raised the river temperature to near 90, so TVA can only use small amounts of water, which limits how much power they can produce. In fact, the air temperature has stayed below 90 only three days since June 9, far above the historical norm. In the 1990s, the TVA decided not to build extra cooling towers because they “estimated that the chance of exceeding the 90-degree temperature limit in the Tennessee River was very rare.”

This situation also gives us a stark reminder of how climate change will take money out of consumers’ pockets. TVA has had to buy more expensive power to make up for the lost production at Browns Ferry. They then pass this new cost onto consumers in the form of a fuel cost adjustment. The new fuel cost adjustment will increase consumer bills by $1 to $3. So, if your utility buys its power from TVA, that’s a $3 loss next month due to warming.

Fortunately, a comprehensive climate bill can fix this problem. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that climate legislation would significantly lower the risk of catastrophic climate change. Now we also know that the nuclear industry’s future depends on putting a cap on carbon.

Every piece of proposed energy legislation we saw this year included incentives for building new nuclear reactors, including loan guarantees, production tax credits, accelerated depreciation rules, and changes to permitting. These would all certainly be helpful, but they ignore the biggest incentive for the nuclear industry: putting a cap on carbon emissions.

Currently, coal-fired generation is less expensive than nuclear power, which adds to the risk of investing in new nuclear reactors. Putting a cap on carbon, however, would make coal-fired power more expensive than nuclear power, making it much more likely that an investment in a nuclear reactor will make money.

This dynamic is at play in Maryland, where Constellation Energy has applied for a loan guarantee for a new reactor from the Department of Energy. According to the Baltimore Sun, Constellation’s project is now at risk, whether or not they get a loan guarantee. Project chairman Michael J. Wallace told the Sun, “When we get the DOE loan guarantee, that certainly is a major step forward for us. We then need to go through calculations on all the other variables to see whether this project can go forward on an economically sound basis. And we have to continue to do that over the next several months.”

That is, a loan guarantee is certainly valuable, and is a critical ingredient in the project moving forward, but it won’t ultimately determine the project’s profitability. The project will sink or swim because nuclear power can compete with coal, which will only happen with a cap on carbon.

I’m very interested in your thoughts on the matter since you are the target audience for the ads that appear here.

Many readers were upset when they saw the BP greenwashing ads on Climate Progress over the weekend — I reprint one well-thought-out email below.  Here’s the story of how they made it back onto CP.

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As part of its response to BP’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration in June issued a 6-month moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling in order to survey drilling safety measures and prevent a similar spill.

As TP explains, while the oil and gas industry went to court to prevent the moratorium from taking effect, Republicans responded by issuing fear-mongering rhetoric.  The moratorium “could kill thousands of Louisiana jobs,” Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) said, while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) called it “a second assault on the Gulf.” Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry, called on Obama to lift the temporary ban and claimed the moratorium would be worse for the Gulf region, economically, than the oil spill itself:

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BBC:  Geoengineering ‘not a solution’ to sea-level rise

Even the most extreme geoengineering approaches will not stop sea levels from rising due to climate change, a study suggests. New research proposes that as many as 150 million people could be affected as ocean levels increases by 30cm to 70cm by the end of this century.

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While on vacation, I missed reposting this Brad Johnson piece from Wonk Room:

In a letter to BP America CEO Lamar McKay, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) are demanding that BP disclose its “spending on corporate advertising and marketing relating to the the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and relief, recovery, and restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.” Their request follows the efforts of Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) to get answers about BP’s massive greenwashing campaign, which includes months of full-page advertisements in national and regional newspapers, radio spots, television commercials, and Internet ads on websites including ThinkProgress.org. Outside estimates of the scope of the greenwashing campaign managed by BP’s public relations firm Mediashare are in the tens of millions of dollars, the Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson reports:

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The economic benefits of climate and clean energy policies, such as California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, or AB 32, are clear.  The Center for American Progress and this blog have reported on the opportunities for growth and job creation from AB 32 several times (see “A California Campaign With Global Consequences” and Economists agree, don’t block AB 32!).  The Stop the Dirty Energy Proposition coalition provides additional background here.

Despite this, the oil-funded campaign to pass Proposition 23 that would repeal AB 32 is continuing to spill misinformation with a new “Fact Sheet: Green Jobs Utopia Is A Myth.”  Aside from the fact that their arguments are nonsense, the “fact sheet” does not include any facts.  There is not a single source or citation on the page.

CAP’s Rebecca Lefton and Sean Pool have the real facts.

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