Policymakers and advocates in New Jersey are calling on Governor Chris Christie to return $65 million he diverted from a carbon-trading fund designed to help the state’s ratepayers reduce their energy bills. After announcing last Thursday that he was pulling his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), calling the program a “tax” and a “failure,” Christie has shown no intentions of giving back the tens of millions of dollars he took from the fund to help close a budget gap.

Last year, Governor Christie raided a RGGI fund set aside for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that brings back $3 to $4 in value to ratepayers for every $1 invested. Now, some members of the New Jersey assembly are calling on Christie to return those “taxes” to the businesses and homeowners who benefit from those investments.
Read more

The megacity of Sao Paulo, Brazil

In 2005, the former mayor of London, Ken Livingston, founded the C20, comprised of twenty of the largest multi-million-person cities in the world, He recognized that where national governments were not doing enough, cities could do a lot more, especially the mayors of large cities who have statutory powers outside of national government. As the group has met — 2005 in London, 2007 in New York City, 2009 in Seoul, and now in Sao Paulo, the group has grown into the C40, with affiliated cities like Portland that are climate leaders.

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress Green, the manager of the C40 Climate Leadership Group, Simon Reddy explained how the group works together:

All cities are different, but a lot of the solutions and the problems are similar. There isn’t one large city in the world that doesn’t have traffic problems, that couldn’t be more efficient in its use of electricity, that isn’t trying to improve its waste systems. The leaders come together to share ideas on waste, bus transit systems, travel demand management.

The amount of practical decision-making power that these mega-mayors have over energy, waste, and transit can be immense. There are usually a huge number of public buildings, bus systems, train systems, and an independent city budget. London has introduced congestion pricing to reduce vehicular traffic and pollution. Tokyo has introduced policies on energy, waste, and transit. Sao Paulo is one of the leading cities to use landfill gas capture and energy generation.

In the six years of this global mayoral initiative, 4,700 climate-related actions have been placed into effect in the C40 cities where they have statutory control, Reddy said. Adaptation is an important compondent, with many of the cities already having to deal with the effects of global warming, including heatwaves, flooding, and landslides.

The host city Sao Paulo is a perfect example of the peril and promise of dealing with our polluted climate. The city has a population of over 18 million people, spread out over an 80-mile wide circle. The city has deep poverty and serious crime, with large areas of illegal slums and shanty-towns known as favelas. The city is burdened by extreme traffic issues, and suffers from flash flooding that doesn’t drain well. At the same time, Sao Paulo’s landfill system generates 7 percent of its electricity. There are over 70 miles of bus rapid transit and 60 miles on bicycles lanes serving 25,000 people a day. Like the rest of the Brazil, Sao Paulo uses sugarcane ethanol. The city is increasing energy efficiency in buildings and lighting.

“All cities are facing the squeeze,” Reddy said, when asked about the austerity budgets and economic challenges of our current time. But a lot of the intitiatives being pursued by the C40 reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making systems more effient. “They’re good for the city, for the building, good for the climate.” Reddy emphasized that cutting back on clean energy to protect short-term budgets would be a dangerously foolish choice:

Action now on climate change will save a lot more money than if we wait till later. The costs are astronomical if you don’t prepare now. The cost of large-scale flooding, of traffic systems that don’t work, landslides. It’s worth investing.

The mayors are also trying to tackle one of the most politically difficult challenges in the climate fight — briding the divide of the rich and poor. The opportunities for investment in a city like London or Amsterdam are very different from Jakarta and Changwon. The group is trying to establish a carbon finance capacity building program, working to help developing cities be eligible for the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism funding program. World Bank president Roger Zoellick, who is attending the summit, has been working with C40 and is expected to announce positive developments.

Reddy told ThinkProgress he was surprised by the willingness of the cities to participate in the climate fight. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm of the mayors to make sure our cities are prepared for the climatic impacts that we are starting to see now,” he said. “It’s refreshing to see this city approach to climate action being successful in going forward when national governments are fighting among themselves.”

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Read more

Some of you may have heard of “the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That” as Scientific American described it.  If you visit it — think ‘birthers’ with better charts — you’ll see in the upper right-hand corner a quote from the author Fred Pearce: “… the world’s most viewed climate website.”

The website that WattsUpWithThat.com uses for comparing the web statistics from different sites is Alexa.  Anyone can use Alexa to compare the page views of Climate Progress vs. WUWT.  Here is what it looks like:

Doh!

So Climate Progress apparently has the same number of page views as “…the world’s most viewed climate website.”  I say “apparently”  because Alexa is unreliable, as I have pointed out many times. But Watts keeps using it over and over again to hype his website, most recently in an April 14 post.

Read more

A wind turbine blade is unveiled during the opening of the Vestas blade factory in Colorado.

The United States has historically been a leader in invention and innovation; however, our leadership in manufacturing has fallen dramatically, hurting our ability to compete on the global stage. With the dawn of a new era in the energy sector, America has a unique opportunity to grow its economy and create new jobs while reducing emissions and combating climate change.

A new report on low-carbon innovation written by Bracken Hendricks, Lisbeth Kaufman and Sean Pool of the Center for American Progress outlines how this transition may unfold.

Read more

Alyssa the new culture blogger at CAPAF speaks for everyone when she writes today, “I know some of y’all have been disconcerted or frustrated by Facebook commenting here. I’m really sorry about that!”

The good news is that you can set up a Yahoo account in 30 seconds, as I did today, with whatever info you like and post using that, not Facebook.

Alyssa has more tips on how to do that:

-If you’re signed in to your Facebook account when you come here, and you want to comment using said account, congratulations, you’re basically good to go. Comment away!

-If you’re signed in to your Facebook account when you come here, but don’t want to comment using it, click the “Not you” hypertext in the comments field to sign out and sign in with something different: the options are Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail logins. You’ll be prompted to pick which account you want to use when you click “add a comment” by the button that says “Comment using…” that will then present you with your login options.

-The best thing in the world is having commenters who are willing to beta test things for you. Regular Greg at Yglesias writes:

It appears that fictional Facebook accounts are, well, not showing up. Jason’s case mirrors my own in that neither of us can view even our own comments when we’re not concurrently logged on to facebook. By contrast, David (Shor) is using his own real profile, as are you, and this is working without a hitch.

If one wants to maintain anonymity, I would like to point out that using a yahoo/hotmail/aol handle has been completely successful for Myles, and now me.

greg_at_yglesias at this in the comment section:

I would like to point out a few more things my compatriots and I have worked out this afternoon.

You *need* to be fully signed off Facebook before you try any of this, and you should ideally *not* use an email that’s linked to your account. Otherwise you get logged into Facebook whether or not you want to, and then, well, the whole problem starts all over again.

Moreover, if you’re annoyed by the jumble of comment sections, I would note that across from “Add a Comment” there’s another button that lets you set the comments section to “Chronological”.

Below are the earlier comments from the Facebook commenting system:

greg_at_yglesias

Joe, first off, I really like your blog, and if you’ve been at TP before, I apologize for not reading it until now!

Second, I would like to point out a few more things my compatriots and I have worked out this afternoon.

You *need* to be fully signed off Facebook before you try any of this, and you should ideally *not* use an email that’s linked to your account. Otherwise you get logged into Facebook whether or not you want to, and then, well, the whole problem starts all over again.

Moreover, if you’re annoyed by the jumble of comment sections, I would note that across from “Add a Comment” there’s another button that lets you set the comments section to “Chronological”.

It’s really advised one does so, if one wants to avoid losing one’s mind.

Anyway, cheers.

May 31 at 3:05pm

me

I signed in using my real name Yahoo account, but the Facebook commenting system doesn’t seem to be able to figure out who I am. So I guess I’ll just have to be me.

Some site layout suggestions – I would prefer not having to press a “Read More” button for at least the top post on the blog and preferably for all the posts of the day. I have to believe that a lot of people will stop reading at that point – rather than pressing the button – and may miss some of your best points.

For posts like this one that don’t have a read me button, if a reader wants to comment – they are forced to scroll back to the top of the post, click on the title of the post, then scroll back down to make a comment.

There should be a button to post a comment at the bottom of all blog posts.

Finally, I used to send folks to some of the excellent links you had in the sidebar. This included some of your best blog posts as well as outstanding posts at places like Skeptical Science. Can those links make a comeback?

May 31 at 3:56pm

Joseph Romm

I use “Read More” because I write long posts.
Yes, links will come back via an overview post. Will take time.

May 31 at 4:03pm

Peter Bellin

Trying this thing out – it is easy to reply to a post, and comments will appear linked to the post you are commenting on. The ‘read more’ link works easily for me.

Commenting was also easy for me, I just clicked on the “Reply” button.

May 31 at 4:43pm

me

Since some folks say this works differently on a Mac – I’m trying again using a PC

June 2 at 10:40pm

intercrumb

How terrible to have to allow Facebook scripts to run so I can read the quality comments on this blog.

May 31 at 3:59pm

Peter Bellin

I will beta test commenting using my Hotmail account. I don’t really want to use this account, I prefer the Gmail account. But I guess I can use this.

That being said, I would prefer not having to log in to a social network site to comment on blogs. I hope this can be fixed on the ‘Progress” blogs.

May 31 at 4:40pm

John Tucker

I’m not doing this right or something – but I liked the format before. I don’t feel I should have to get a facebook account so I am not a second class user. What happened to our links – the auto in-line links?

I like the layout and appearance though – top notch there.1

May 31 at 5:36pm

John Tucker

I like i can like myself too.

May 31 at 5:47pm

zinfan94

I tried to press the Like icon on my comment, and ended up with a duplicate comment (which the moderator(?) later removed. I am still a neophyte in learning how to post a comment properly, let alone how to post a complex comment that is readable and understandable.

June 5 at 1:43pm

hapamoku

ok on a mac. facebook comments wouldn’t post, I don’t have enough friends. yahoo comments wouldn’t post from either safari or firefox! this is chrome.

the javascript on these pages makes my brand new pro laptop feel like I’m using a modem, and it doesn’t appear to work properly with all the major browsers.

May 31 at 9:35pm

• hapamoku

doesn’t look like yahoo profile picture gets picked up. that’s not as democratic as it could be.

even on chrome mac, the sign-in process is broken when you’re clicking ‘reply’ instead of ‘add comment’ up top.

May 31 at 9:53pm

Joseph Romm

I am hopeful the web folks will fix some of these over time — and that Facebook will improve its functionality.

May 31 at 10:06pm

hapamoku

+1

· May 31 at 10:13pm

Otto Lehikoinen

Holy moly what amount of clicks, testing the commenting via facebook proxy sign in server, do I need to get a Yahoo account to vent? Goodbye.

May 31 at 11:12pm

Otto Lehikoinen

testing proxy sign in via hotmail-account, it already gets quite a bit spam so a couple more by day won’t make a difference… no doesn’t work. Ah well, maybe the yah-oo account then someday. ‘Post to facebook’? NO NO NO. Bye.

May 31 at 11:44pm

Ted Ko

More feedback on how the above instructions don’t apply in some situations:
Using firefox on Mac.
Already logged in to FB. The “Not You” link does not appear. Instead, there is a “Change” link that lets my choose between my FB name and the name “Tester”. So I can’t switch to another account. This may be an artifact of an alternate profile on FB, but I can’t find a trace of that.

After logging out of FB, then I can sign in with my Yahoo account.

However, greg_at_yglesias note about the Chronological button seems to not be true here. That button doesn’t appear anywhere I can see.

June 4 at 7:59pm

Joseph Romm

My sincere apologies. The Chrono button should be there, but I hope we will have a FAQ up soon. I’m also hoping we could switch the default, but I don’t know. There is no excuse for this FB commenting system, and I would be the last one to try to make one for it. So I am incredibly appreciative of those willing to do make the effort. But I don’t understand why you can’t link on your secondary FB account. That seems to me a good idea. I can log on as ClimateProgress, if I don’t want my name out there and don’t want a link to my arsenal FB account.
accou

June 4 at 8:10pm

Kris Steward

I would prefer to post without Facebook as well. I tried to use an alternative method but the pull down menu offering other options does not work so other options are not available. This is too difficult.

June 7 at 7:59pm

Russell Marsh

Obama’s Eronomic advisors all of them have resigned, going back to teaching. They have no creitability they shouldn’d teach They messed things up and run away Obama isn’t a leader we would have jobs if he was leading we would have oil here We buy oil from terroist supporting those terroist. Drill for oil and create jobs it is simple stupid!

June 8 at 9:44pm

Our guest blogger is Maria Gunnoe, of Bob White, WV. The documentary film The Last Mountain opens in New York City and Washington, D.C. this Friday.

The Last Mountain

Neither the coal industry nor our politicians have kept their promises of prosperity to the people. The people in these mountains are being exploited for the coal. I have seen all of the prosperity leave these Appalachian communities on coal trucks and coal trains and what we have to show for it is polluted water in our wells and streams, depopulated communities and sick people with inadequate health care.

Now as a final insult, coal companies are blowing up the mountains that overlook the communities that our forefathers built since history here began. I am a Daughter of the American Revolution as are most of my neighbors. In our mountains we have the ones dear to us who have, for hundreds of years, laid at rest in the same daylight and the same evening sun. These are men and women that have died in the world wars, but the area around these resting places has been blown up, leaving these cemeteries inaccessible islands in the sky.

Coal does not define who we are! Our history began in these mountains long before coal was discovered. Our family settled here during the forced removal of the Cherokee. They followed the rivers to their headwaters. They settled here because of the abundance of food and the ability to survive off of this land. Throughout the rise and fall of the coal industry the people here sustained themselves from these mountains. This very activity of survival is what created the culture that I was brought up knowing.

Today our mountain culture is under attack. The mountains and even our roads are being gated off and we are kept out. These once pristine places are made unsafe and their water polluted. Clean water is a rarity in our homes and streams as this same water is what the coal companies use to process their coal and dispose of the waste.

I recognize that we are at a crossroads in our energy choices. We have to ask ourselves, “Can we continue to blow up mountains and poison water to produce energy?” — recognizing that we are ALL downstream. Appalachia’s headwaters run through the Mississippi and provide drinking water for millions of people.

Knowing about what’s happening obligates people to do something about it, and this is why I participated in the documentary “The Last Mountain.” If you know the practice of mountaintop removal is taking place, you can’t help but be compelled to stop it. Awareness is one of the most important tools that we have in stopping the destruction of our communities. Everyone will walk away from this film with ideas of what they can do to demand better for their children. For me, I dream of clean water, wind turbines and jobs forever!

Our guest blogger is John Cook, the founder of Skeptical Science and co-author of Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. This post originally appeared at the Australian Broadcasting Company’s blog The Drum.

John Cook

Consider the following definitions. Genuine skeptics consider all the evidence in their search for the truth. Deniers, on the other hand, refuse to accept any evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined views.

So here’s one way to tell if you’re a genuine skeptic or a climate denier.

When trying to understand what’s happening to our climate, do you consider the full body of evidence? Or do you find the denial instinct kicking in when confronted with inconvenient evidence?

For example, let’s look at the question of whether global warming is happening. Do you acknowledge sea level rise, a key indicator of a warming planet, tripling over the last century? Do you factor in the warming oceans, which since 1970 have been building up heat at a rate of two-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs every second? Glaciers are retreating all over the world, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people. Ice sheets from Greenland in the north to Antarctica in the south are losing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice every year. Seasons are shifting, flowers are opening earlier each year and animals are migrating towards the poles. The very structure of our atmosphere is changing.

We have tens of thousands of lines of evidence that global warming is happening. A genuine skeptic surveys the full body of evidence coming in from all over our planet and concludes that global warming is unequivocal. A climate denier, on the other hand, reacts to this array of evidence in several possible ways.

The most extreme form of climate denier won’t even go near the evidence. They avoid the issue altogether by indulging in conspiracy theories. They’ll pull a quote out of context from a stolen ‘Climategate‘ email as proof that climate change is just a huge hoax. I have yet to hear how the ice sheets, glaciers and thousands of migrating animal species are in on the conspiracy, but I’m sure there’s a creative explanation floating around on the Internet.
Read more

The Kyoto Protocol is in shambles, greenhouse pollution is at record levels, and climate disasters are growing in frequency and intensity.

To preserve the promise of civilization, we must start anew.

Twenty years ago, the world agreed that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions needs to be reversed as quickly as possible, or dangerous and potentially irreversible degradation of the global climate system would begin in about twenty years.

Those twenty years have passed, and now the world must mobilize to eliminate global warming pollution and defend humanity against the dangerous climate change that is now happening.

The existing global framework to address the threat of global warming — governmental, academic, scientific, economic, societal — is two decades old. The world’s top climate scientists drove the formation, in 1988, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations. Following the first IPCC climate change assessment report in 1990, representatives of the planet’s governments gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to establish a framework convention for addressing climate change — called, naturally enough, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That framework, ratified by all the world’s governments, including the United States, has guided civilization’s collective effort to address the threat of greenhouse emissions to the present day. As expressed in the UNFCCC:

The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

Despite their best efforts, those committed to achieving the objectives of the convention failed. The 1990 First Assessment Report correctly warned that “irreversible change in the climate” could come by 2000. Permafrost melt, sea level rise, species extinction, glacial retreat and disappearance, and other systemic impacts have transformed our planet for the worse. The degraded climate is now causing the decline of ecosystems, degradation of food production, and economic instability around the globe. Left unchecked, global warming is increasingly likely to solve the emissions problem through the collapse of industrial civilization.

So what can be done?

The necessary elements for defending civilization in a more dangerous, rapidly changing world all exist. Insurance companies are reconfiguring their policies as seas rise and disasters increase. Hedge funds are developing new financial instruments to handle the effects of climate instability. City planners are examining the security of transit and utility systems. Military officials are drawing up new war scenarios. Scientists and entrepreneurs are inventing, refining, and deploying technologies to sustainably power civilization. Activists are putting their freedom on the line to challenge the forces of inaction. But these efforts are haphazard and uncoordinated. They are insufficient to ensure that the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are realized on our polluted planet.

The missing piece, often described euphemistically as “political will,” involves a complete rethinking of the threat of global warming. Most Americans see global warming as a real problem, but one that is distant in time and space: that will only affect their children or grandchildren, one that will affect far reaches of the planet first and foremost. That misunderstanding is utterly natural, since that is the presumption of the existing framework, reinforced by the rhetoric and actions of political leaders like President Barack Obama. The greatest culpability, of course, lies in the immoral acts of powerful polluters and their allies to deny the threat entirely.

The new climate framework needs to be built on the following principles:

– Humanity is responsible for climate disasters.

– Climate change is not only a future threat but an active enemy to societal progress.

– All investments must take into account the reality of increasing uncertainty and risk as the climate system becomes more unstable.

– All existing infrastructures — physical, legal, economic, political, cultural — need to be re-examined for resilience in our changing world.

ThinkProgress Green and Climate Progress will be reporting on the efforts of this generation of humanity, and of the great democratic experiment of the United States of America, to build this new framework.

For newcomers, this is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress. Regular readers will find links to some of our best content on climate and clean energy, continually updated. Please post in the comments any suggestions you have for what you would like to see on this page.

We try to inform and entertain here — and be a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants the inside view on climate science, solutions, and politics. A key goal is to save readers’ time, save you from wading through the sea of irrelevant information — or outright disinformation — on climate and energy that pervades the media and blogosphere.

Climate Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was launched in August 2006, with me posting only once (!) a day.  Over time, this blog morphed into a true community of interest on climate and energy, with some of the top experts and activists guest posting, sharing their thoughts in interviews, and even commenting regularly, people like Bill McKibben.

In June 2010, Time magazine named Climate Progress one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010″ — and one of the “top five blogs Time writers read daily.”

To get our posts the instant they are online, join the more than 25,000 subscribers to our twitter feed, click here.

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

I was also Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 1997, where I oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. So this blog focuses as much on solutions as it does on science and politics. You can read a longer bio here.

Last year, we added a first-rate reporter Stephen Lacey, who is now Deputy Editor for Climate Progress. He edits content for publication and writes on a variety of clean energy issues. Before joining Climate Progress, he was an editor/producer with RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

In 2009, Time named me a “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” I write from what I call a climate realist perspective — the emerging scientific view that on our current greenhouse gas emissions path we are poised to destroy the livability of the climate for 1,000 years. The most important post that lays out that case is:

• An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Some other key climate science overview posts include:

Read more

Let me start by profusely apologizing that you won’t have access to the old comments for a while. I didn’t know that was going to be an outcome of this changeover and so I didn’t let you all know and I didn’t plan for it. The good news is that all the old comments still exist. More on that below.

I also ask for your patience with the new website. It is going to take a while to get the kinks ironed out.

The number one question is: Why did I make this major makeover when just last year Time magazine named this one of the top 25 “Best Blogs of 2010″? There are several reasons, though as you can already see the fundamental essence of the blog has not changed.

Read more

During the holiday weekend, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R) reclaimed her favorite position — the center of media attention — when she launched a national bus tour. Palin’s first stop was a motorcycle rally in D.C. where she rode in on a Harley and proudly announced to a group of veterans and TV cameras, “I love that smell of the emissions!” Ironically, the same day Palin professed her love of carbon emissions, the International Energy Agency issued a dramatic announcement on the same subject: greenhouse-gas emissions increased by a record amount last year to the highest carbon output in history.

The watchdog group reported that despite the recession, global carbon emissions rebounded in 2010 to their worst levels ever. One IEA official warned that the startling new numbers should serve as “another wake-up call.” Of course, Palin seemed as blithely unconcerned as ever with world events around her as she basked in the spotlight on Sunday:

Sarah Palin’s participation in the annual Memorial Day parade in Washington, D.C., has fueled as much noise about a potential presidential candidacy as the thousands of motorcycle-riding veterans participating in the Rolling Thunder ride-along Sunday.

At the Pentagon parking lot where the mob of veterans and their families pre-position for the thunderous two-wheeler march down Constitution Ave, Palin, who was not expected to address the Memorial Day crowd, said she was thrilled to participate.

“I love that smell of the emissions,” she said, donning sunglasses and a Harley Davidson skullcap-style, black helmet.

Watch it:

According to the IEA, a record 30.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere last year, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels. In light of these shocking numbers, experts now fear that it will be impossible to prevent a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius — which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change.”

One expert told The Guardian, “Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict.” Despite this distressing news, it’s unlikely that the woman who once roused conservative crowds by chanting “Drill Baby Drill!” knows or cares how tragically out of touch with reality her comments are.

Palin’s bus tour got off to a rocky start when members of the veterans group she claimed to be working with denounced her presence at the event. Even Fox News noted that several veterans were annoyed Palin had made the Memorial Day parade all about herself, distracting from the real message — honoring service members past and present. Her entire bus tour spectacle has left many in the media scratching their heads. It’s unclear if Palin is actually gearing up for a presidential run or is simply eager for more press attention as she’s felt the  national spotlight dim and refocus on the already declared candidates.

Three months after voting to eliminate funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) now says he’s outraged that the EPA isn’t doing more to protect the health of residents in his district. Barletta is insisting that the agency pay special attention to an area in Pittson, PA, after one resident alleged that a tunnel near a Superfund site gave him cancer. The EPA held an open house and information session to address the concerns of residents in the area, but said it did not plan to conduct further testing. This outraged Barletta, who called their decision “unacceptable”:

On Wednesday, Barletta sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson asking the agency to perform additional testing in the Carroll/Mill Street neighborhood.[...]“Frankly, this is unacceptable. The EPA’s own Web site indicates that one of the agency’s primary reasons for existence is to ensure that ‘all Americans are protected from significant risks to human health and the environment where they live, learn and work.’”[...]

“I was surprised to hear an EPA official basically tell the residents of the Carroll/Mill neighborhood that they would not conduct soil and water testing to find answers. It is absolutely the EPA’s job, and I’m going to make sure that job is done. The residents are scared, and they deserve answers and peace of mind.”

That’s an ironic position for Barletta, considering how often he’s tried to prevent the EPA from doing its job. In February, Barletta voted with the rest of the Republican-controlled House for an amendment that slashed funding for the EPA. Republicans were retaliating against the agency for its efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), one of the authors of the amendment, said, “The era of EPA overstepping its authority by imposing over-burdensome and unnecessary regulations at the expense of American businesses is over.”

Barletta’s vote to gut funding for the EPA flew in the face of popular opinion in his own district. A survey by Public Policy Polling found that 70 percent of voters in Barletta’s 11th Congressional District opposed Barletta’s vote to block the EPA from setting limits for carbon dioxide pollution. Those opposed included 58 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans. Voters also opposed Barletta’s votes to “prevent the EPA from reducing arsenic, mercury and other toxic pollution from cement kilns, or from collecting any data about carbon and other pollutants.”

It’s pretty audacious to attack an agency for not doing enough mere months after attacking them for doing too much. Barletta should hope his constituents have short memories and forget his attempts to stop the EPA from upholding health standards that Republicans insisted were a “burden” to business.

The three worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise and ocean poisoning:  Hell and High Water.  But another impact “” far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog “” may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source “” if not the source “” of two of our biggest recent wars. As the NYT reported in 2009:

Read more

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate surveys a damaged fire station with a Joplin firefighter.

In response to the deadliest spring of climate disasters in decades, House Republicans are slashing billions from disaster preparedness programs, including support for firefighters. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee cut the successful Department of Energy clean car manufacturing loan program by $1.5 billion to add $1 billion to disaster relief. But they also slashed other parts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Homeland Security budget, including cuts of $1.5 billion from President Obama’s request for next year in firefighter assistance grants and state and local grants administered by FEMA.

During the markup, Reps. David Price (D-NC) and Steve LaTourette (R-IL) attempted to restore $460 million in funding for firefighter grants and $1.1 billion in state and local grants, but their amendment was defeated 20 to 27 by the Republican majority. Price blasted the decision to “decimate funding” for disaster preparedness:

One of the worst decisions was to decimate funding for almost every grant program for state and local preparedness. Providing a total of $1 billion for all State and Local Grants, or 65 percent below the request, and providing $350 million for Firefighter Assistance Grants, almost 50 percent below an already reduced request, breaks faith with the states and localities that depend on us as partners to secure our communities. These cuts will be doubly disruptive as many of our states and municipalities are being forced to slash their own budgets.

“In today’s environment,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said, according to CQ, “we can’t be subsidizing local governments to the extent we have.” Rogers did not recognize that today’s environment is growing more disastrous and dangerous because of coal and oil pollution. Parts of his district were declared a federal disaster area earlier this month because of catastrophic flooding.

I believe a blog should get a big shakeup every two or three years, so Climate Progress is due.  The change-over will occur this weekend.

On Tuesday, the new, improved Climate Progress will debut — fully integrated with my (big) sister blog, Think Progress, which itself is getting an extreme makeover.

Here are some details:

Read more