A federal judge today upheld the George W. Bush administration’s decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The ruling is a blow to environmental groups that wanted the bear listed as endangered, thereby giving it more protections, and industry groups and others that don’t want it listed at all.

The original Bush decision meant listing the polar bear as “threatened” because of its melting polar sea ice habitat, but then doing nothing to actually protect that polar habitat from its primary threat, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

As I wrote at the time, the Department of Interior suffers from a rare form of bipolar disorder called bye-polar disorder.  On the one hand, then DOI Secretary Kempthorne explicitly wanted “to allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska,” while on the other hand the DOI noted:

• The polar bears need sea ice for feeding.
• The sea ice is being destroyed by human-caused emissions, faster than the models had predicted.
• Thus, the polar bear is endangered.

Bye-polar disorder is apparently hard to diagnose.  You can read the 116-page ruling of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia here, but he is no diagnostician:  Sullivan said the plaintiffs challenging the listing “have failed to demonstrate that the agency’s listing determination rises to the level of irrationality.”  Oh, it wasn’t irrational for the pro-oil Bushies, but for bears, it was just nuts.

Let’s be clear here:  “The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover,” concludes the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States.

The climate models have left people with the impression that summer Arctic sea ice will survive past 2050, but reality is already worse than the IPCC’s worst-case scenario.  As I discussed in my post last month, “Arctic sea ice volume: The death spiral continues,” it is extremely likely the Arctic will be virtually ice free in the summer within about two decades, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it happened within one.

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Aren’t we too puny to rival the great forces of nature that shape our planet?

Certainly some prominent [skeptics] have said as much.

But the facts show that we are fundamentally impacting planet Earth in unprecedented ways, and we’ve known about it for a century.

“The radiative forcing of the CO2 we have already put in the atmosphere in the last century is … the equivalent in energy terms to almost half a billion Hiroshima bombs each year.”  Radiative forcing is a measure of how out of balance the Earth’s energy budget is.  “When there’s more energy radiating down on the planet than there is radiating back out to space, something’s going to have to heat up.”

Australian scientists have been contributing to a multi-part series, “Clearing Up the Climate Debate” at “The Conversation” website.  I’m reposting some of the best.  Here, Mike Sandiford, Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute and Professor of Geology explores the staggering ways we influence the the globe and the climate.

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Texas is facing the driest eight-month period in its recorded history, a drought so bad that Texans are praying for hurricanes to get rain. But as fields dry up and the state’s reservoirs run dry, “plastic-lined pits holding millions of gallons of blue-green water are tucked away in fields chock-full of withering mesquite trees.”

The much-needed water, it turns out, is being pumped out of underground aquifers by oil companies that are using it for hydraulic fracking.

Not only does fracking come with potentially huge air pollution costs, it consumes billions of gallons of water each year, much of which cannot be recovered and reused for more imminent needs:

It can take millions of gallons of fluid to hydraulically fracture, or “frack,” a single well. Only about 20 percent to 25 percent on average of the water is recovered, while the rest disappears underground, never to be seen again.

The Texas Water Development Board estimates the total amount of water used for fracking statewide in 2010 was 13.5 billion gallons. That’s likely to more than double by 2020, and decline gradually each decade after that until dropping back down to current levels between 2050 and 2060.

“We’re using scarce resources to get scarce resources,” said John Christmann, Permian Region vice president for Apache Corp., a Houston-based oil and gas company that operates in almost every West Texas county.

Since October, parts of Texas have received as little as a tenth-of-an-inch of rain, forcing water restrictions on residents and leaving the ground dry and barren, resulting in massive wildfires that now cover large swaths of the state. The water shortage has gotten so bad that even Gov. Rick Perry (R), a staunch protector of the state’s oil industry, recently signed legislation forcing companies to disclose how much water they use in fracking operations.

Instead of using the plentiful amounts of non-potable water Texas has beneath its surface, these companies have decided to deprive the state of a valuable resource in a time of need. And for Texas, the problem is two-fold: not only is it losing its water, it’s losing it to companies who use a process that may be so destructive and dirty, not even coal mining compares.

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

Officials: W.Va. Mine Operator Kept Two Sets Of Safety Records

Federal mine disaster investigators disclosed a few pieces of new information Tuesday night from their year-long look at the April 2010 deadly Upper Big Branch mine explosion. They said that:

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As record-shattering heat cripples Oklahoma, Sen. Jim “global warming is a hoax” Inhofe (R-OK) failed to show for an fossil-industry-funded climate denial conference. A shrinking band of far-right economists, lawyers, and a few scientists have gathered in Washington, DC, for the Heartland Institute’s sixth International Conference on Climate Change, funded, like Inhofe himself, by Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil. Inhofe was scheduled to be the denier conference’s keynote speaker, but he bailed out, explaining appropriately that he is “under the weather“:

I am sorry that I will not be able to join you today at the Heartland Institute’s sixth International Conference on Climate Change. Unfortunately, I am under the weather, but I did want to send a short note to say thank you for all of your hard work and dedication. Your efforts have gone a long way to stop the global warming alarmist agenda.

Although the Koch denial machine has succeeding in blocking global warming legislation, they have certainly done nothing to stop global warming itself. Billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution are cooking the entire planet, bringing a slew of climate disasters to the United States, including “extraordinary heat and wind” behind “exceptional drought” in Inhofe’s home state. Wildfires have torn through Oklahoma’s bone-dry prairie. The “drought’s impacts have been enormous,” and “very little relief is in sight,” Oklahoma’s state climatologist, Gary McManus writes. The average high temperature in Oklahoma City in June 2011 was 10 degrees above normal, 97 degrees instead of 87 degrees. “Any way you slice it, it has been hot,” Oklahoma City’s Stephen Mullins explains:

Today marks the 29th consecutive day over 90. That is a record.

Today is forecast to be the 10th day above 100 in June. That is a record.

Today marks the 34th consecutive day above normal.

June 2011 set or tied single-day record high temperatures on the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 27th. Those record temperatures were 103, 104, 101, and 103 degrees, respectively.

Earlier in June, Inhofe cosponsored legislation to have the federal government cut $12 billion from the general budget to provide tax breaks for residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee who were victims of climate disasters this spring. In April, Inhofe championed legislation to reverse the scientific finding that greenhouse pollution threatens the public welfare of American citizens.

You may recall last year that Senator Inhofe’s grandchildren built an igloo to mock a killer snow storm, calling it ‘Al Gore’s New Home’.  Of course, extreme precipitation is precisely what we expect from human-caused global warming, but the story still got a lot of play in the media.

What’s more ironic is that the Senate’s leading climate denier bailed on the annual Heartland climate science denial conference this morning — saying “I am under the weather” (!) — just as his home state is being slammed by a record-smashing heatwave and a drought more severe than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Yes, I know, it’s just coincidence, not a karmic backlash.  But then again climate science projects a permanent dust bowl for the Southwest if we keep listening to Inhofe.  It also projects that by century’s end, the state will be above 90°F for 135 days a year!

What’s also ironic is just yesterday I pointed out that the Texas drought is so bad, “In Austin, They are Praying for a Hurricane.” Incredibly, meteorologist Stephen Mullens, aka Oklahoma City Weather Examiner, in his Wednesday post, “Heat wave records fall: No relief in sight,” writes

It seems the only hope of rain would be for a hurricane to hit the Texas coast and travel northward to Oklahoma. That path is a fairly common one. Fortunately, the scientists at Colorado State University have predicted a 50% probability that the Texas coast will be hit by a hurricane this year.

No, I don’t think one should use the word “fortunately” to describe a hurricane hitting Texas.  But it is a measure of the desperation felt by a state that is three quarters covered by severe drought and that has been above 90 for the entire month.

Here are some of the amazing statistics of this Oklahoma heat wave:

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By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Almost from the moment Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) and his Grand Oil Party colleagues took over the leadership of the House Natural Resources Committee they have been trying to spread the lie that Obama administration energy development policies have crippled domestic oil and gas production, raised gasoline prices, and cost jobs.

Not only is the industry sitting on oil and gas leases on public lands totaling more than 30 million acres without developing them, but the evidence is clear that it is market forces that largely determine the pace of drilling.

A new study by Headwaters Economics buttresses this point. The Bozeman, Montana-based independent research group reports that oil and gas drilling levels in the U.S. have now rebounded strongly from the recession, reaching almost a 20-year high. Based on numbers from Baker Hughes, the oil and gas industry standard for counting drill rigs, study author Julia Haggerty said that oil and gas drilling has surged during the Obama administration:

Oil and natural gas drilling activity has made a strong recovery since reaching a recession-induced low in late 2008. Market prices and advancements in drilling technology account for most of the increases in drilling activity. . . . When it comes to land-based oil and gas drilling in the United States, there is little evidence that state and federal regulations are hampering industry’s ability to respond to market signals.

As the charts prepared by Headwaters Economics for ThinkProgress below show, when the price of oil and natural gas rise, do does drilling activity, and it has little to do with policy:

The Republican drumbeat attacking the government for spiking oil prices is a deliberate attempt at misdirection. Despite overwhelming evidence from both federal commodities regulators and the industry itself, the Grand Oil Party won’t admit that speculation is a big factor in the recent runup in gasoline prices. After all, how could “market forces” be to blame for American pain at the pump?

First, the bad news:

Facing continued litigation, California officials will delay enforcement of the state’s complex carbon trading program until 2013, state Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols announced Wednesday.

The delay in the cap-and-trade program, which was slated to take effect in January, is proposed, she said, because of the “need for all necessary elements to be in place and fully functional.”

Nichols testified that delay would not affect the state ability to return emissions of “planet-warming gases to 1990 levels by 2020.”  It’s worth noting that the cap-and-trade program accounts for only “a fifth of the planned cuts under the state’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act.”

Derek Walker [of EDF] praised the delay as a prudent step that “will give the cap-and-trade program its best chance of success…. Cap-and-trade … cuts climate change pollution at the lowest possible cost. By getting this right, California will once again serve as a model that other states and countries can follow.”

On the other side ever warming planet, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon pollution is accelerating its cap-and-trade efforts:

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“The fundamental problem with America’s farm programs: They mostly reward those who own the land, not those who farm it, or are most in need, or grow the healthiest food, or do the best job of protecting soil, water and wildlife habitat.”

No matter how many movies we see on the problems with our industrial farming system, most of us will always conjure the iconic image of a wholesome family farming the land when we think of agriculture. But your tax dollars may not be going to who you think.

A report by the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit that monitors federal programs, concludes that the U.S. government is sending hundreds of millions of dollars to people in urban areas of the country, some of whom have no direct connection to agriculture. According to EWG’s updated 2011 Farm Subsidy Database, $394 million last year went to residents of almost 350 cities with at least 100,000 people each.

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