In the waning days of the Bush presidency, an auction of 130,000 acres of pristine Utah lands near national parks was organized by the Bureau of Land Management as a last-minute gift to the oil and gas industry. Tim DeChristopher, “then a 27-year-old economics student at Utah, walked into the auction and signed up as Bidder 70.” DeChristopher successfully bid for $1.7 million in parcels, breaking up the auction. The Bush leasing plan was found in court to be flawed and has been withdrawn, but DeChristopher faces 10 years in jail for his brave act of non-violent civil disobedience. Furthermore, the judge in charge of DeChristopher’s case is stacking the case against him:
A reasonable person would realize that since the government ruled that the auctions were invalid to begin with – Tim clearly prevented a greater crime from happening. And a reasonable person should also see that the dangerous policies of destroying wild lands to continue our addiction to fossil fuels is a far greater crime than anything Tim might have done. But the judge in this case has blocked attempts by Tim’s lawyers to introduce arguments about the dire threats of climate change, and refused to let the jury hear Tim’s motivations and reasons for doing what he did.
DeChristopher been charged with two felonies: making a false statement, and violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act. Meanwhile, the Obama administration approved the first offshore drilling permit today since the BP disaster, for which no criminal charges have been filed.
Hundreds of smiling protesters marched from Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park to Exchange Place across the street from the federal courthouse this morning, wielding “Bidder 70″ placards and chanting “Free Tim, Free Tim!”
My life as a communist actually began without me knowing it, on Friday evening, when Glenn Beck spent his program explaining about a “communistic” conspiracy that included 10 groups in America. One was 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change that I helped found three years ago. He even put our logo up on his whiteboard – and next to it a hammer and sickle.
Since I don’t actually watch Mr. Beck, I didn’t know about it until e-mails began to arrive, informing me that indeed I was a communist. My first reaction was: I’m not a communist. I’m a Methodist.
But then I reconsidered.
Fellow Eaarthling and sometime CP blogger Bill McKibben offers a light touch in his response to the clown prince of disinformers. Beck is the guy who told William Shatner, “I think there are too many stupid people.” Now that’s humor!
By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 28, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Daniel J. Weiss and Valeri Vasquez in a CAP cross-post.
Political instability in the Middle East over the past month has driven parallel unrest in world oil prices. The drive for political freedom in the Middle East has rightfully captured the world’s attention but it has also roiled oil markets. Governments across the globe are worried that sustained unrest will escalate oil prices past $100 per barrel on their way to $120 or more, choking the struggling economic recovery in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. One entity, however, is almost certain to benefit from this volatility: Big Oil companies.
Environmentalists: Wake up! There is a greater and more urgent threat to the climate than even global warming: the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
Uhh, no.
As someone who spent a lot of time working on issues related to the threat posed by nuclear weapons — I was actually a Congressional science fellow two decades ago for a senior member of the House Armed Services committee — I think everyone should be very worried about nuclear weapons.
I even think that the scenario Time‘s Eben Harrell lays out is plausible:
Fueled by the carbon pollution giant Koch Industries, Tea Party Republicans in New Hampshire are attempting to scuttle the state’s involvement in the region’s successful climate program. Brad Johnson has the story — and one NH legislator’s amazing rationale.
Robocalls from Koch’s Americans for Prosperity group flooded the state last weekend in support of a bill that would repeal participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which has cut greenhouse and other pollution and created 1,130 jobs as a result of energy efficiency benefits. Rep. Sandra Keans (D-Rochester), told the Nashua Telegraph that AFP’s calls were “sleazy” and deliberately false. “I have never seen such a cowardly perpetration pulled on the citizens of New Hampshire,” Keans said.
On Wednesday, the state’s overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives voted to support HB 519 by a nearly party-line vote of 246 to 104 (13 Republicans voted against, two Democrats for). The bill has to pass through the finance committee before a final house vote and consideration by the senate. Gov. John Lynch (D-NH), who has touted the success of RGGI in making the air healthier while increasing economic prosperity, is expected to veto the bill, but Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature. The bill is being championed by extreme climate deniers:
The contribution of Greenland to global sea level change and the mapping of previously unknown basins and mountains beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet are highlighted in a new film released by Cambridge University this morning.
But while unconventional natural gas might be an energy and climate game changer (over the near term) if it can be developed in an environmentally responsible fashion, the NYT piece itself may be a game changer.
Over the past nine months, The Times reviewed more than 30,000 pages of documents obtained through open records requests of state and federal agencies and by visiting various regional offices that oversee drilling in Pennsylvania. Some of the documents were leaked by state or federal officials.
You can find “the most significant documents … with annotations from The Times” by clicking here.
On Sunday, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will decide which documentary deserves this year’s Oscar for best documentary. Contending for the award, among hard-hitting takes on the financial crisis and the Afghanistan war, is Josh Fox’s Gasland, a story of the potentially devastating consequences of the recent explosion of natural gas drilling in the United States. As the industry has developed new drilling technologies that included advanced hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — available reserves of natural gas in the United States have skyrocketed. If this drilling, from Pennsylvania to the Rockies, were safe, then natural gas could be a “clean” alternative to carbon-intense coal, and a “safe” alternative to imported petroleum. A major expansion of natural gas infrastructure has been embraced by everyone from T. Boone Pickens and Halliburton to President Obama. However, as Gasland exposes, fracking is being done without sufficient regulation and with scary results:
The natural gas industry has launched a full-scale PR campaign against the film and efforts to regulate fracking, setting up the front group Energy in Depth to attack the film and the congressional FRAC Act.
For comprehensive reviews of the documentary, the industry responses, and the underlying facts, read these critical reports from DeSmogBlog and GreenWire, both of which find that natural gas drilling is contaminating groundwater and communities with secret chemical stews. About the only point of real contention is that the contamination often comes from shoddy wells rather than the fracking process itself.
Now, however, a special investigation by the New York Times reveals that the real fault of Gasland may be that it fails to explore enough of the threat of fracking:
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.
The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.
But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.
In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water taken in by all these plants is safe.
“This has experts worried,” Times reporter Ian Urbina concludes with fine understatement.
Update
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, responds:
These disturbing revelations raise the prospect that natural gas production has turned our rivers and streams into this generation’s “Love Canals.” The natural gas industry has repeatedly claimed that fracking can be done safely. We now know we need a full investigation into exactly how fracking is done and what it does to our drinking water and our environment. Americans should not have to consume radioactive materials from their drinking water as a byproduct of natural gas production.
Update
,Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-PA), the co-author of the FRAC Act, responds:
Congress must take action to untie the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency, allowing it to assert proper oversight of the full life-cycle of the hydraulic fracturing process by repealing the egregious exemptions that this industry enjoys from our nation’s most important environmental safeguards. I will be introducing legislation in the near future to do just that.
Hinchey also called on EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to take immediate action.
By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 27, 2011 at 10:53 am
You have to be pretty extreme for centrist WashPost columnist Dana Milbank to label you a “A hooligan governor.” But that’s the headline in his column today on Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI).
By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 27, 2011 at 9:10 am
On February 21st the EPA released the final Clean Air Act toxic pollution limits for industrial boilers and incinerators. The protections represent a change from the EPA’s original April 2010 proposal, which was modified after regulated businesses raised cost concerns during the public comment period.
The newly streamlined standards will still significantly reduce toxic air pollution while halving the compliance price tag. CAP’s Lee Hamill has the details.
Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and, like most climate hawks, better informed than 98% of policymakers and the media on climate science and likely impacts. Still, I don’t do any of the things he does — nor would I recommend them:
By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 26, 2011 at 8:47 am
The normally semi-rational USA Todaythinks a good response to higher gasoline prices due to MidEast unrest is more domestic drilling, even though that would have no noticeable impact on U.S. gasoline prices — ever! — according to the US Energy Information Administration (see “EIA: New offshore drilling will lower gasoline prices in 2030 a few pennies a gallon).
Unrest in Libya and Egypt is driving up oil prices, stirring concerns that gasoline could hit $5 a gallon by summer. Like a smoker’s persistent cough, it’s another warning to change our ways. America sends nearly $1 billion daily overseas to purchase oil, which is nearly half the trade deficit. Nearly 20% of our oil imports come from the Persian Gulf, where instability causes roller coaster prices.
“Drill, baby, drill” won’t get us out of this mess.
Fueled by the carbon pollution giant Koch Industries, Tea Party Republicans in New Hampshire are attempting to scuttle the state’s involvement in the region’s successful climate program. Robocalls from Koch’s Americans for Prosperity group flooded the state over the weekend in support of a bill that would repeal participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which has cut greenhouse and other pollution and created 1,130 jobs as a result of energy efficiency benefits. Rep. Sandra Keans (D-Rochester), told the Nashua Telegraph that AFP’s calls were “sleazy” and deliberately false. “I have never seen such a cowardly perpetration pulled on the citizens of New Hampshire,” Keans said.
On Wednesday, the state’s overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives voted to support HB 519 by a nearly party-line vote of 246 to 104 (13 Republicans voted against, two Democrats for). The bill has to pass through the finance committee before a final house vote and consideration by the senate. Gov. John Lynch (D-NH), who has touted the success of RGGI in making the air healthier while increasing economic prosperity, is expected to veto the bill, but Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature. The bill is being championed by extreme climate deniers:
Deputy Majority Leader Shawn Jasper (R-Hudson) explained his vote: “Neither man nor cow is responsible for global warming.”
Rep. James Garrity (R-Atkinson), chairman of the House’s Science Technology and Energy Committee, claimed that RGGI relies on “shaky climate science.”
Rep. Frank Holden (R-Lyndeboro), vice chairman of the House’s Science, Technology and Energy Committee, wrote in the majority committee report that the “science of climate change is far from clear.”
In reality, with greenhouse pollution from fossil fuels building up in the atmosphere at an increasing rate, the world is now hotter than it has ever been in recorded history. New England is unambiguously warming. Fueled by the warmer world, catastrophic rainfall is rising, as “exemplified by the ’100-year’ floods that have occurred in southern New Hampshire in 2005, 2006, 2007.”
Americans for Prosperity operatives gleefully praised the vote for pollution and global warming denial:
AFP VP for Policy Phil Kerpen hopes the vote “could deal the death blow to cap and trade both regionally and nationally.”
AFP-NH Executive Director Corey Lewandowski: “We’re delighted by the strong House vote for consumers.”
Koch Industries and the politicians it supports have been making the argument that limits on carbon pollution have “always been about the money” and a plot to “collect some money from all of us to redistribute that wealth to a few of us.”
Of course, they fail to mention that by letting Koch Industries profit from billions of tons of carbon pollution for free, the government has actually allowed the Koch brothers to “collect some money from all of us to redistribute that wealth to a few of us” — namely themselves — while the lives of everyone else are put at risk. For the Kochs, it has “always been about the money.” For the rest of us, it’s simply about respect for science and the health of our planet.
Inspector General’s Review of Stolen Emails Confirms No Evidence of Wrong-Doing by NOAA Climate Scientists
Report is the latest independent analysis to clear climate scientists of allegations of mishandling of climate information
Another day, another independent review finds that emails of climate science do nothing to undermine the overwhelming data-driven understanding that humans are changing the climate and that if we keep listening to the deniers, unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will bring multiple catastrophes to countless future generations.
By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 25, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Top medical and health experts came together Thursday to say climate change is hurting Americans now — and if we don’t act now its effects will only get worse. CAP’s Susan Lyon and Lee Hamill have the story (and audio).
The following top health and medical experts came together Thursday to alert us of the serious health threats posed by carbon pollution and to remind us of the necessity of the EPA in protecting our air, water, and health, on a briefing call hosted by the American Public Health Association (APHA):
USA Today’s excellent science reporter Dan Vergano wrote an extensive overview of geoengineering, but failed to clearly explain the risk of intentionally poisoning our atmosphere to mitigate the effects of global warming pollution. Geoengineering describes a wide array of concepts to alter how planetary systems deal with greenhouse gas pollution, but Vergano fails to clearly distinguish reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations from radical experiments to transform the planet. He cites several interviewees who depict extreme geoengineering in colorless, amoral economic policy language:
“We’re moving into a different kind of world,” says environmental economist Scott Barrett of Columbia University. “Better we turn to asking if ‘geoengineering’ could work, than waiting until it becomes a necessity.”
“That’s where geoengineering comes in,” says international relations expert David Victor of the University of California-San Diego. “Research into geoengineering creates another option for the public.”
“Geoengineering is no longer a taboo topic at scientific meetings. They are looking at it as one more policy prescription,” says Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch, author of Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope — Or Worst Nightmare — For Averting Climate Catastrophe. “But it is yet to become a household word.”
Although Vergano attempts to describe the risks of, say, pumping millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere (“consigning hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet in Africa and Asia to recurring drought”), he has failed to accurately interpret the scientific literature. The only risks he has depicted — ones that involve the potential deaths of millions if not billions of people — are the “known” ones, the ones easily modeled by imperfect simulations of experiments never conducted before by humanity. The risks of geoengineering, particularly the ones that emulate the effects of a nuclear winter to dim the amount of sun reaching the earth, are practically unbounded. Depicting the known risks, as Vergano did, as the only risks of geoengineering, is astoundingly optimistic.
The only reason that serious climate scientists (other than Dr. Strangelovian extremists) are discussing geoengineering is that they fear the possibility of humanity’s extinction — or merely the utter collapse of human civilization — from unchecked fossil fuel pollution is significant enough to consider doomsday survival scenarios. “We should avoid geoengineering if possible,” Dr. Ken Caldeira, one of the climate scientists who has explored geoengineering scenarios, “but we need it in our toolbox in case of catastrophe.”
Simply put, there are plausible scenarios in which global temperatures could begin rising so fast that they could be impossible to stop. This could be because frozen methane begins leaking into the atmosphere, thus promoting more warming, or because ice melts and stops reflecting light back into space (allowing dark rocks to absorb more heat). Given how slowly society is moving towards carbon emission reductions, the only way to avert these catastrophic feedbacks might be a carefully planned and targeted phase of geoengineering, in concert with aggressive emissions reductions.
But by injecting geoengineering into the public discourse before we’ve set ourselves on that emissions-reducing course, journalists and scientists risk introducing confusion about what geoengineering can possibly do. At most, it’s a stopgap to cover the inevitable lags between emissions reductions and a decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide. On its own, it won’t stop global warming. Without emissions reductions, we’d be, as Vergano puts it elegantly “addicted to sky-borne sulfates to keep the cooling on track.” And that, too, would have harmful effects on the global climate and on life on earth, some predictable, and others that we can’t yet imagine.
A ThinkProgress cross-post. See also the Center for American Progress (CAP) post“How the United States Can Respond as Tripoli Heats Up,”
As Col. Muammar Qaddafi begins to lose control of his country to anti-government protesters, the Libyan dictator announced this week that he won’t go down without a fight. In a rambling speech on Tuesday, Qaddafi vowed to track down and kill protesters “house by house.” “I will fight on to the last drop of my blood,” he said. In fact, forces loyal to Qaddafi launched a counter offensive yesterday, and to date, the unrest has already claimed hundreds “” if not thousands “” of lives.
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.
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.
In the waning days of the Bush presidency, an auction of 130,000 acres of pristine Utah lands near national parks was organized by the Bureau of Land Management as a last-minute gift to the oil and gas industry. Tim DeChristopher, “then a 27-year-old economics student at Utah, walked into the auction and signed up as Bidder 70.” DeChristopher successfully bid for $1.7 million in parcels, breaking up the auction. The Bush leasing plan was found in court to be flawed and has been withdrawn, but DeChristopher faces 10 years in jail for his brave act of non-violent civil disobedience. Furthermore, the judge in charge of DeChristopher’s case is stacking the case against him:
You have to be pretty extreme for centrist WashPost columnist Dana Milbank to label you a “
As Col. Muammar Qaddafi begins to lose control of his country to anti-government protesters, the Libyan dictator announced this week that he won’t go down without a fight. In a rambling speech on Tuesday, Qaddafi vowed to track down and kill protesters “
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
