Read the Wonk Room’s series of reports from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

Opposition to global action on climate pollution has created strange bedfellows, with the radical right in the United States joining the radical left in Bolivia against the rest of the world. The negotiations to deal with global warming in Cancun, Mexico, came to a successful conclusion, with 193 of 194 nations adopting a framework for both reducting greenhouse pollution and dealing with its deadly impacts. At the end of the conference, the Plurinational State of Bolivia stood alone in its failed attempt to veto the agreement.

Bolivian President Evo Morales used the conference as a stage to solidify his position with the populist left in Latin America. On Thursday, Morales came to Cancun and rallied with representatives of the world’s indigenous peoples and the peasant movement Via Campesina, a global coalition representing 150 million small farmers, who fear the United Nations’ market-based approach to solving global warming. Bolivia’s posturing against international agreement included a passionate defense of small island states and African nations, who are most threatened by global warming — even though those nations unanimously supported the Cancun agreements. Bolivia’s position that no progress is better than insufficient progress rang false to those who had the most at stake.

Back in the United States, the Republican Party and conservative ideologues attacked the climate negotiations, using similarly extreme arguments. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) led a group of Republican senators attacking the scientific basis for protecting the most vulnerable people in the world from global warming. Fox News, owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, ran multiple segments arguing the United Nations wants to destroy free-market capitalism in the name of climate change. The Koch Industries tea-party group Americans For Prosperity claimed climate scientists “never met a regulation on mankind they didn’t like.”

Bolivia offered its own submission for what the negotiators in Cancun should accept, an eight-page document calling for an end to the “activities of warfare” and a demand that “ecological functions of Mother Earth will not be commodified in order to guarantee the rights of nature.” While the end of war is an admirable goal and respect for nature an important value, they can’t be mandated by a United Nations convention on global warming pollution. This juvenile approach to international politics resembled nothing so much as a speech by Sarah Palin, whose pronouncements on climate change and energy policy call for “true free market approach to energy independence that allowed us to finally drill” and “the right to tap into the hungry markets flowing our resources flowing into those hungry markets.”

In the United States, Republican officials, conservative groups, and industrial polluters have launched a series of legal assaults on climate policy, hoping to reverse the progress made under the Obama administration. Today, Bolivia announced it would attempt to reverse the Cancun accords in international court.

Bolivia’s hardline left-wing ideology, rejecting anything that had to do with capitalism or compromise in the name of “Mother Earth,” ends up being eerily similar to the right-wing propaganda of American conservatives. Both purport to represent disaffected people — whether the peasant farmer or the Tea Party conservative. Both string together emotionally laden catchphrases that merge fact with belief in order to satisfy a foregone conclusion that nothing should be done to fight global warming pollution. Both have put their pursuit of power ahead of the interests of human civilization. Both are willing to sacrifice progress for politics. The Republican Party has become an organ of political ideologues, and like the Bolivian government, now has little to offer when it comes to actually addressing the very real challenges that face our world.

That bold statement may seem like hyperbole, but there is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.

The great cryo-scientist Lonnie Thompson has a must-read paper, “Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options.”  Thompson has been the Paul Revere of glacier melt.

I wrote about his important 2008 work “Mass loss on Himalayan glacier endangers water resources” (see Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated”).  It concluded ominously:

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Clean-tech manufacturing needs 2 cents for every $ in tax cuts for rich

By CAPAF’s Daniel J. Weiss.

This afternoon the Senate overwhelmingly approved ending debate on the “Obama-McConnell” compromise tax package by a vote of 83-15.   This limits debate to no more than thirty hours, and makes likely the final passage of the bill on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The tax bill, H.R. 4853, would extend tax cuts for both middle class and wealthy taxpayers, as well as extend unemployment insurance and cut social security payroll taxes.  Its provisions would create over two million jobs.  The bill extends a critical renewable electricity job creator, while ignoring a lapsed provision that would create clean tech manufacturing jobs despite strong public support for boosting manufacturing.

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Scientists have been predicting for decades that increased greenhouse gas emissions would lead to an increase in many kinds of extreme weather events, especially more intense precipitation and more brutual heat waves.  So it’s not a big shock that what is likely to be the hottest year on record has witnessed so many blow-out extreme weather events from Nashville to Moscow to Pakistan — see NASA’s Hansen: Would recent extreme “events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” The “appropriate answer” is “almost certainly not.”

Indeed, “The first nine months of the year have seen the highest number of weather-related events since Munich Re started keeping records,” according to Dr. Peter Hoeppe, Head of the Geo Risks Research Department at Munich Re.  He said “that a clear pattern of continuing global warming was contributing to the natural disasters.”

Recently, some December precipitation records have been falling — in Seattle and Portland, Oregon.  These weren’t the 1000-year extremes that I typically write about — or the statistical aggregation of U.S. record highs vs. record lows — but I merely point them out because the anti-science crowd, led by discredited former TV weatherman Anthony Watts, persists in shouting about precipitation primarily when it comes down in solid form, even when it isn’t record-breaking.  Snowstorms are pretty much all the disinformers have left to shout about now, at least to those who don’t pay close attention to the science.

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EPA Could Eliminate 55 GW of Coal Power with Regulations

By far the greatest threat coal poses is to future climate. But even regulations that only seek to reduce its more immediate health threats could cut coal plants in the US by 20%, according to a report from coal industry consulting firm The Brattle Group, via Electricity Forum. Even aside from regulations specifically to lower greenhouse gas emissions, if the EPA mandates further reductions in sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulates, mercury and other harmful emissions by 2015, 40 to 55 Gigawatts will likely be retired.

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Last Monday I notes that Politico reported Energy Secretary Steven Chu intends to stay. In a Platts Energy Week interview broadcast yesterday, Chu said that he will stay “as long as the president will have me” and “as long as I think I’m doing good things, as long as I see progress.”

Here’s the video of the interview, where Chu also talks about the nuclear loan guarantee program and what to do about the possibility of an oil price sprike:
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Dr. Paul Epstein sent me the following commentary on Cancun and financing the Green Climate Fund.  Epstein is associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

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Part 1 – Canada’s Fight to Stop States From Lowering Fuel Carbon Levels

Part 2 – Make Americans Love Alberta’s Oil Sands

The Tyee, an “independent daily online magazine” based in British Columbia, Canada has a two-part series on how Canada is trying to push their dirty tar sands oil and  block US regulations to clean up our fuels.  It  is reprinted below with their permission.  See also “Tar sands: Still dirty after all these years.”

Geoff Dembicki’s first story reveals how Alberta, Ottawa and oil sands corporations are teaming to oppose climate change laws across America.

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