By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress.

The Resolution Copper Company, owned by the large multi-national mineral conglomerates Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, is pushing a bill in Congress that would give them federal land in southeastern Arizona and allow mining of one of the largest known copper deposits in the world. In return, the company would give back a plot of land to the federal government. The Resolution Copper land-exchange bill has a blatant loophole, delaying any environmental impact statement for mining these lands until after the land exchange is completed.

That would mean that after the deal is done and the tailings pond leaks, like it did at the Clayton Silver Mine in Idaho, or after major fish kills, like the ones in the Alamosa River due to cyanide leaching from the Summitville gold mine in Colorado, we could say that the too-late environmental analysis revealed a threat. That’s not the point of our environmental laws, which recognize that the value of clean air and water needs to be considered before the government sells off public resources to private interests.

However, during a hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the sponsor of the bill, pulled a bait and switch by focusing on the land that would be conserved, rather than the parcel that would be given to the mining company. Gosar told Mary Wagner, Associate Chief, U.S. Forest Service, that allowing a mining company to plunder public land is “restoring the ecological balance”:

GOSAR: Now I’m a big steward of my environment so I just heard something also from my friend on the other side, that value for the San Pedro River. Ms. Wegner, could you put a value on that as an ecosystem, could you put a price for me? Give me a price in dollars.

WAGNER: I think both the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service/Department of Agriculture have testified to the importance of the non-federal parcels, the ecological values and the important of these properties. No, I couldn’t put a price on it.

GOSAR: They are almost infinite, because it’s a giving process, we’re restoring the ecological balance within the whole ecosystem. That is unbelievably much more valuable.

Watch it:

On the one hand, his bill would set aside 5,300 acres of land currently owned by Resolution Copper for conservation purposes.

On the other hand, as written, Gosar’s bill says the extent of impacts would not be known until too late because the company would not be required to undergo environmental review or even submit a plan of operations until after the land exchange takes place. Questions like where the mine tailings would go, where large amounts of water would come from, and how erosion and subsidence from a gigantic underground mine would be dealt with won’t be investigated until the deal is signed, sealed, and delivered.

Mineral development is an appropriate use of public lands, but not when it comes in the form of a hasty land exchange that circumvents environmental laws. Unlike what Gosar seems to think, environmental stewardship in this country is based upon making sure that the public is involved in decisions that may affect its health and environment. As Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said today, “this bill short-circuits fundamental good government policies.”

Kats:  “There have been several hundred peer reviewed studies that document improvements in various aspects of health and productivity and greener more efficient design. Upgrading building energy efficiency typically improves building monitoring and occupant controls, and generally improves indoor air quality, not the other way around.”

Numerous websites have covered a recent Institute of Medicine report looking at the impact of climate change on indoor environments. The report is a good one – but very dry and probably uninteresting to anyone not involved in the building trade.

That is, until Fox News ran the headline: “Green Buildings Hazardous to Health?” And The Hill went with: “’Green’ Buildings Could Harm Your Health.”

The Institute of Medicine report warns that the effort to counter climate change has spurred a shift to untested new materials and building retrofits that could limit and alter the air flow inside buildings.

Well, that’s one way to interpret it.

The report doesn’t even focus on real “green” buildings; rather, it looks at conventional energy efficiency upgrades that tighten the envelope of residential and commercial buildings. The issue in question is whether shifting external environmental factors due to climate change will negatively impact indoor air quality in buildings with less ventilation.

People spend the vast majority of their time in indoor environments and will thus experience many of the effects of climate change indoors. The outdoor environment permeates indoors in all but maximum-containment laboratory conditions. A building that was tightly sealed as a response to adverse outdoor conditions or because of efforts to reduce energy use might protect occupants from one set of problems but would increase their exposure to another: such buildings tend to have decreased ventilation rates, higher concentrations of indoor-emitted pollutants, and more occupants reporting health problems.

It’s an important question, but certainly nothing new. Designers have always known that if you make a building more air tight, you potentially trap moisture, mold and smoke. An energy-tight building can still be a “sick” building. That’s why there’s a big difference between energy-efficient buildings like and “green” buildings that take a whole-systems approach to ventilation, lighting and materials use.

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The Senate on Thursday gave a split decision on federal subsidies for ethanol, handily voting to immediately do away with an existing blender tax credit while leaving the door open to a possible future deal to continue other assistance.

Senators gave clear agreement — 73-27 — to the idea of immediately removing a 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit set to expire at the end of the year for blending ethanol in gasoline. Along with that credit — worth upward of $6 billion this year — the amendment from Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) would also end a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports….

A second amendment from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would end federal spending for ethanol blender pumps and storage facilities lost 41-59.

I am not a fan of our corn ethanol policy (see “The Fuel on the Hill” and “Can words describe how bad corn ethanol is?” and “Let them eat biofuels!“).

And this vote suggests that we will be seeing a scaling back of some ethanol subsidies at some point probably in the not-too-distant future.

But that moment isn’t quite at hand.  The Politico reports:

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Voters want the EPA, and not Congress, to set pollution standards. An overwhelming 66 percent majority (including sizeable majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans) agrees that “Scientists at the EPA should set pollution standards, not politicians in Congress” while only 21 percent agree that “our elected representatives in Congress should set pollution standards, not unelected bureaucrats at the EPA.”

Days after the GOP debate in which Minnesota Congresswoman and Presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann called for a wholesale repeal of EPA clean air and water regulations, a new bi-partisan survey shows the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with her stance.

A poll released by the American Lung Association surveyed 2,400 likely Republican, Democratic and Independent voters and found that 75% support stricter smog standards proposed by the EPA.

According to the survey, American voters also rejected the idea that Congress should take away EPA’s authority to regulate smog. Before hearing a debate on the issue, 74% of those surveyed rejected Congressional opposition to the EPA. After hearing a balanced debate, the number dropped to 64% — still a sizable majority.

Even moderate Republicans and Republican women overwhelmingly support the EPA after a balanced debate. The only groups that show significant support for Congressional action to stop the EPA from updating smog standards are conservative Republicans, Republican men and strong supporters of the Tea Party.

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One  year ago Friday, Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) said it is “a tragedy of the first proportion” that BP agreed to Obama’s request to set up a $20 billion fund to compensate Americans for the devastation they wrought on the Gulf of Mexico by their recklessness — and then he apologized to BP CEO Hayward!

Desperate Republican leaders quickly forced Barton to retract the apology (see “Who’s sorry now?“).  But a few days later, the following tweet appeared from Barton:

It was quickly removed and then Barton’s press secretary fell on his sword to protect his boss.

You can watch the original jaw-dropping remarks by Barton (GOBP-TX) in this video from the House hearing, which makes perfectly clear that Barton meant every last word he said:

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Our guest blogger is Mike Casey, president of cleantech communications firm Tigercomm.

It’s baffling to see a dirty energy front group operative, Robert Bryce, getting a seat last week next to Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof on the New York Times’ opinion page, with a piece of pro-dirty energy propaganda, without having to say if he’s paid by dirty energy.

I remember from journalism school that opinion pages are run separately from the news pages. But is it really that hard for someone on the Times’ opinion page staff to ask Bryce where his host organization, the Manhattan Institute, gets its money? Don’t Times readers deserve to know that the Manhattan Institute gets a significant amount of money from dirty energy?

I’m not even expecting that the Times actually demand a factual grounding for the opinion pieces it runs. That seems to have gone out of style a while ago. The Washington Post demonstrated this new normal with its tortured sidestepping of questions about why it let columnist George Will demonstrably lie about the wide and deep scientific consensus around global climate disruption. Basically, it seems that you can lie without consequence on the nation’s most influential opinion pages.

But Bryce got away with something much more preventable: pretending he’s some sort of intellectually honest thinker when his organization has ties to dirty energy money that no one bothered to note.

The ease with which intellectual burglars like Bryce can break into the major media’s house of standards is why dirty energy underwrites dozens of PR firms masquerading as think tanks. And they have done so for decades, going back to the call to start farming these groups in the 1971 Powell Manifesto. The result is what can be described as a Front Group Industrial Complex for polluting industries, a network including the Manhattan Institute, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Institute for Energy Research.

Here’s something to institute on all these “institutes”: Why not have a standard for all opinion pages for papers over a certain basic level of readership requiring opinion page submission finalists to disclose financial conflicts, direct or indirect, on the subject on which they have written?

After all, the Times applies these standards to its own news staff through its code of ethics:

Masquerading. Times reporters do not actively misrepresent their identity to get a story. We may sometimes remain silent on our identity and allow assumptions to be made ­ to observe an institution’s dealings with the public, for example, or the behavior of people at a rally or police officers in a bar near the station house. But a sustained, systematic deception, even a passive one … may be employed only after consultation between a department head and masthead editors. [emphasis added]

So, for the Times’ opinion page, why not apply the spirit of that standard on masquerading by always asking a few direct questions of guest writers about their funding? The total daily time required would be, what, 30 minutes?

I’m a PR guy paid by renewable energy companies, and I proudly say that on my firm’s website. Robert Bryce is a PR guy flacking for dirty energy sources, yet he doesn’t seem to be proudly saying that. In fact, he seems to be going out of his way to avoid discussion of his funding.

By making the polluting industry front group guys answer the funding question when they submit opinion pieces to major papers, it might inject just a little bit of honesty into what is now an all-too-frequent stream of enabled propaganda. For those working to maintain the increasingly endangered standards of good journalism, that seems like a pretty easy one to uphold.

Last month, Climate Progress reported “IPCC special report finds renewables could meet over three quarters (75%) of global energy needs in 2050.”

This conclusion is hardly news.  Indeed it is rather obvious.  Nor did the IPCC  suggest it would be easy or cheap — contrary to what bloggers like Andy Revkin first claimed in a rush to pile on.  Indeed the IPCC said it would cost more than $10 trillion in investment over the next two decades alone and require many major policies changes.  Duh.

Stanford University’s Mark Jacobsen notes in an email to me today that there is an abundance of support for even stronger statements in the peer-reviewed literature:

Based on an independent analysis by Dr. Mark Delucchi (from U.C. Davis) and myself, published in several papers between 2009 and 2011, prior to the IPCC report [see here and here] we believe that a 100 percent conversion to clean, renewable electric  power sources (wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and wave  power) and electric vehicles and hydrogen for transportation, heating  and cooling, and high temperature processes, is technically feasible and economical.

So why have Andy Revkin and Mark Lynas used their blogs to attack the IPCC?  Because the source of the obvious conclusion was apparently unacceptable to them — Greenpeace.

As an ironic aside, the “source” of this attack on the IPCC is one of the most thoroughly debunked and discredited disinformers Steven McIntyre.  So I’m wondering whether we can now ignore Revkin and Lynas because they have used an infinitely less credible source than Greenpeace (see, for instance, here).

Oh, wait, I forgot, there’s the merits of the case against the IPCC.  Except, as noted, their conclusion was obvious — indeed, as we’ll see, it would be a near-certainty if we actually pursued Lynas’s own goal for averting catastrophic global warming!

Daniel Kammen, “a coordinating lead author of the report and chief specialist for renewable energy and efficiency at the World Bank, defended the report in an e-mail” to Revkin:

There is no Himalaya-gate here at all. While there are some issues with individual chapters, there is no ‘Greenpeace Scenario.’ The 77% carbon free by 2050 is actually more conservative than some cases. The European Climate Foundation, for example has a 100% carbon neutral scenario and Price Waterhouse has a very low carbon one for North Africa. Further, while the IPCC works from published cases, the scenarios are evaluated and assessed by a team.

What of the charge that published Greenpeace research was the basis for this 77% scenario — one of the many scenarios the IPCC looked at — and that the scenario was developed by Greenpeace’s Sven Teske who was also one of 9 lead authors on the IPCC report?

Let’s set aside that “Teske was nominated as an author by the German government.”  I sent links to the Revkin and Lynas articles to NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessments.  He called the fundamental charge “a silly argument”:

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A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

U.S. Solar Installations Rose 66% in First Quarter

The amount of solar energy capacity installed in the U.S. increased 66 percent in the first quarter as panel prices fell and developers took advantage of expiring government incentives, a trade group said.

Developers installed 252 megawatts of photovoltaic power systems in the first quarter, compared with 152 megawatts a year earlier, according to a report released today by the Washington-based Solar Energy Industries Association.

“Strong demand continues to make solar one of the fastest- growing industries in the United States,” Rhone Resch, SEIA’s president, said in a statement.

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Australian physicist John Cook, in a Skeptical Science cross-post

Of all the people that doubt the science of climate change, geologists seem to be the most vocal. But they, of all people, should be the most concerned.

I was headed to the Sydney ABC studio to talk about my new book on climate change denial. What was unique about this interview was my coauthor Haydn Washington and I would have the opportunity to answer questions from callers. Considering the topic at hand, we expected some demanding questions from those who doubt the climate science. On the way, I declared to Haydn I’d put money on someone bringing up past climate change. In every interview over the weeks following the launch of our book Climate Change Denial, the same question always arose: “Climate has changed naturally in the past so how do we know current climate change is caused by humans?”

Haydn wisely didn’t accept the wager. And sure enough, the first caller (listen) introduced himself as a geologist and proceeded to discuss past climate change. Afterwards, I reflected on geologists and the perception that they tend to be sceptical about human-caused global warming. Australia’s most well known skeptic, Ian Plimer, is a geologist, as is another well known sceptic Bob Carter. But is the characterisation that geologists are mostly sceptics accurate?

One survey of earth scientists found that while 97 per cent of actively publishing climate scientists agree humans are changing global temperatures, only 47 per cent of economic geologists (those who study geology with a view to its commerical exploitation) concur (pdf). In fact, among all earth scientists, economic geologists are the most sceptical.

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ThinkProgress is covering and participating in Netroots Nation 2011, taking place Thursday to Sunday in Minneapolis, MN. Below is a selection of events, films, and parties that involve the intersection of climate change, environmental justice, and building the clean energy economy. Follow @TP_Green and @climatebrad for regular updates.

THURSDAY

10:30 am: Environmental Strategy Session. L100D
Moderated caucus on climate, environment, and energy activism.

3 pm: Beyond Environmental Justice: Making Conservation Inclusive and Representative. L100H
A frank conversation dispelling myths about minority participation and interest in the conservation movement.
Roger Rivera (National Hispanic Environmental Council), Katie DeCarlo (Ella Baker Center), Marce Gutierrez (The Azul Project), Lili Molina (Energy Action Coalition), Refugio “Reg” Mata (Heal the Bay and Project Economic Refugee)

9 pm: The BlueGreen Alliance co-hosts a party at Hell’s Kitchen
Join us for free appetizers, a hosted bar, and the musical stylings of Gigamesh.

FRIDAY

1:15 pm: “The Last Mountain” (full-length screening and discussion). M100 J
Screening and discussion of this powerful mountaintop removal documentary.
Mary Anne Hitt (Sierra Club), Bob Kincaid (Coal River Mountain Watch), Clara Bingham (Last Mountain producer), Jenn Breckenridge (Rainforest Action Network)

3 pm: Dirty Energy: The Fight Against Coal, Oil, Natural Gas and Nuclear Power. L100 FG
How can the Netroots better spread the message about the negative effects of dirty energy?
Josh Nelson (CREDO), Michele Boyd (Physicians for Social Responsibility), Tim DeChristopher, Mary Ann Hitt (Sierra Club), Bruce Baizel (Earthworks)

3 pm: Meet and Greet with Van Jones. M101C
Join Van Jones and MoveOn for snacks, beverages, and the lowdown on the upcoming Rebuild the Dream campaign.

4:30 pm: Science Policy in Unexpected Places. M100 H
How can scientists and policymakers better engage the public on climate change and other crucial scientific topics?
Josh Roseneau (National Center for Science Education), Dr. John Abraham (Climate Science Rapid Response Team), Darlene Cavalier (Science Cheerleader.com), Dr. Heidi Cullen (Climate Central), Shawn Otto (ScienceDebate.org)

6 pm: The Alliance for American Manufacturing hosts a “Made in America” party right outside the front doors of the Convention Center
Delicious food, smooth drinks, party music and American-made fashion. Get tickets at the AAM booth in the Community & Exhibit Hall.

7 pm: The Sierra Club co-hosts a party at the News Room
The first 150 guests will receive a free drink ticket.

10:30 pm: Change.org continues the party at the News Room
Open bar, RSVP required.

SATURDAY

10:30 am: Hip Hop Rev preview. M100 J
The filmmaker will present a clip from the documentary about Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., and his efforts to involve urban communities in climate activism and green economy solutions.

10:30 am: Green Organizing in Red States: The Fight Against Big Oil’s Next Pipeline
Ranchers in Nebraska, landowners in Texas, Native Americans and other unexpected allies have mobilized to take the lead in organizing resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline project.
Kate Sheppard (Mother Jones), Marty Cobenais (Indigenous Environmental Network), David Daniel (Stop Tarsands Oil Pipelines), Jane Fleming Kleeb (Bold Nebraska), Nick Berning (Friends of the Earth)

12 pm: Van Jones: The American Dream Movement. General Session Hall A
The movement for ‘hope and change’ has a rare, second chance. How do we unite—as workers, business leaders, veterans, young people, seniors, social justice advo- cates, environmentalists and community organizers?

1:30 pm: Progressives vs Polluters: Standing up for the EPA. L100 FG
How do progressives fight back against the Koch suckers in Congress who are trying to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and kill the clean-energy economic recovery?
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), Miles Grant (National Wildlife Federation), David Roberts (Grist), Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins (Green For All)

3 pm: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: How Corporate Front Groups are Corrupting our Democracy. L100 FG
How the climate and labor movement and progressive allies can fight back against this corporate polluter juggernaut.
Jamie Henn (350.org), Brad Johnson (ThinkProgress Green), Per Olstad (Change to Win Investment Group), Phil Radford (Greenpeace), Richard Eidlin (American Sustainable Business Council)

SUNDAY

10:15 am: Netroots Nation Day of Service
At the oldest public wildlife gardens in the nation, the Eloise Butler Wildlife Gardens, participants will get lunch, receive a tour, and spend time getting dirty removing invasive species threatening the local ecosystem. RSVP.

The American Federation of Teachers has put together a comprehensive party and special event guide.

The Nobel prize-winning former vice president — and top vote getter in the 2000 presidential election — has some praise on his blog for a man who seeks to get the most (electoral) votes in 2012:

Good for Mitt Romney — though we’ve long passed the point where weak lip-service is enough on the Climate Crisis

While other Republicans are running from the truth, he is sticking to his guns in the face of the anti-science wing of the Republican Party:

“It seemed like a straightforward question on a second-tier issue: Would Mitt Romney disavow the science behind global warming?”

“The putative Republican presidential front-runner, eager to prove his conservative bona fides, could easily have said what he knew many in his party’s base wanted to hear.”

“Instead, the former Massachusetts governor stuck to the position he has held for many years — that he believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to it.”

The Politico says of Gore’s post:

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