– by Michael Conathan

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President of the Waterkeeper Alliance, has once again lambasted the Cape Wind project – a proposal to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod.  Ironically, he placed his hit-piece in in the Wall Street Journal, a Rupert Murdoch media outlet that News Corp has “turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views,” as Joe Nocera explained in “The Journal Becomes Fox-ified.”

Cape Wind has received all of its federal permits and is on track to begin construction and become America’s first offshore wind farm. Kennedy’s hatred for the project – which would sit within eyeshot of his family’s famed compound in Hyannisport, MA – is longstanding, but in this piece he has found a new mask to cover the true motivation behind his distaste:  looking out for the good citizen ratepayers of Massachusetts and attempting to portray Cape Wind as a “rip-off.”

It is simply impossible to portray Kennedy’s latest salvo in the ongoing battle over Cape Wind as anything less than utter hypocrisy. Kennedy suggests that the project, which has undergone more than a decade of environmental and economic review, could be supplanted by “renewable” power from Canadian hydroelectricity – the same alternative that has been proposed to replace Vermont Yankee’s nuclear energy. And yet in 2004 as a senior attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, Kennedy penned a piece titled “Hydro is Breaking Our Hearts.” His article lamented that hydro development in Canada had “turned pristine rivers into power corridors, ancient lakes into holding tanks, and a sacred homeland into an industrial complex.”

Yet Canadian hydropower is precisely the solution he proposes to replace Cape Wind’s green electrons. Apparently his own Hyannisport sacred homeland is somehow … more sacred?

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This Saturday, BP put another notch in its prodigious polluter belt:   A toxic brew of methanol and crude oil spilling across Alaska’s North Slope tundra.

Reuters reports:

BP said on Monday that a pipeline at its 30,000 barrel per day Lisburne field, which is currently closed for maintenance, ruptured during testing and spilled a mixture of methanol and oily water onto the tundra. The London-based company has a long history of oil spills at its Alaskan pipelines — accidents which have hurt its public image in the U.S., where around 40 percent of its assets are based.

That “history” includes the infamous 2006 Prudhoe Bay incident when 267,000 gallons (~6400 barrels) of oil and chemical leaked from unmonitored, corroded pipeline (pictured above).  It also includes:

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

UN Shipping Agency Adopts New Rules on Emissions

The U.N. agency regulating international shipping decided Friday that new cargo and transport vessels must meet energy efficiency standards and cut carbon pollution.

The decision by a powerful committee of the International Maritime Organization attacks a growing source of greenhouse gases and is the first measure on climate change to apply equally to countries regardless of whether they are from the industrial or developing world.

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ThinkProgress filed this report from Derry, New Hampshire.

It’s getting close to impossible to track Mitt Romney’s vacillating position on global warming. Appearing in Derry, New Hampshire, the Republican presidential candidate reversed last month’s stance on fighting greenhouse gases, telling a questioner that he didn’t think carbon emissions should be regulated as a pollutant:

QUESTIONER: Will you continue to support the EPA’s air quality standards that will protect all Americans from the burning of coal?

ROMNEY: I believe we should keep our air and our water clean. And that we don’t want to have pollutants that are interfering with our health and damaging the ability of our children to enjoy good health. So no question we have to have standards that improve the quality of our air. And I support reasonable standards. … Do I support the EPA? In much of its mission yes, but in some of its mission no. The EPA getting into carbon footprints, and… [APPLAUSE] I think we may have made a mistake, we have made a mistake is what I believe, in saying that the EPA should regulate carbon emissions. I don’t think that was the intent of the original legislation, and I don’t think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies. We can agree to disagree … My view is that the EPA getting into carbon and regulating carbon has gone beyond the original intent of the legislation. I do believe we should reduce the pollutants that harm our health.

ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron recorded the candidate at last Thursday’s town hall. Watch it:

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Massachusetts vs. EPA in 2007 that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Before now, Romney had not publicly taken a position on the case, which was argued before the court while he was still governor of Massachusetts, the lead plaintiff in the case.

Last month, Romney told voters in New Hampshire that “it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases.”

There are, of course, many ways in which greenhouse emissions are pollutants “in the sense of harming our bodies” — worsening and causing deadly heat waves, floods, storms, droughts, wildfires; exacerbating the effects of other air pollution like smog that cause asthma attacks and other respiratory distress; and encouraging the spread of parasites and disease.

“Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” concluded the medical journal The Lancet in 2009.

Romney’s slogan is “Believe in America,” but he should also believe in facts.

Forbes:  “The head of a marketing division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., [Paul] Carlucci once rallied his sales force by showing a film clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat.” [Warning:  This video is graphic.]

There is a cancer on the U.S. media.  That cancer is the disinformation machine aimed at spreading and endlessly repeating the most absurd falsehoods on a host of vital issues to the health and well being of Americans.

As Former NY Times Executive Editor Howell Raines put it last year: “Why has our profession … helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?” That was a WashPost op-ed, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“

The cancer’s most dangerous symptom — the one that will ultimately prove fatal to human civilization and the American way of life as we know it today — is the relentless lies on climate science (see “Foxgate: Leaked email reveals Fox News boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science” and “93% of WSJ‘s Climate Op-Eds Misrepresent Science“).

UPDATE:  Joe Nocera, who originally supported the takeover of the WSJ by News Corp, now says “The Journal Becomes Fox-ified“:

Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line….  [E]ditors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views.

Today, the NY Times published a scathing piece on the cancer that has eaten away at News Corp, which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, whose falsehood-filled editorial page is another key component of the disinformation campaign:

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

David Carr, the NYT‘s media critic, diagnoses the spread of the cancer to News Corp operations in America like a board-certified radiologist with shocking news for a patient who apparently thought he was perfectly healthy:

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In response to Oklahoma’s record drought and heat wave, Gov. Mary Fallin (R-OK) called for a statewide day of prayer on Sunday to pray for rain. For 47 straight days, temperatures in Oklahoma City have been above 90 degrees. Most of the state is in extreme to exceptional drought. There have been over 140 wildfires in the state. Outdoor burning is banned in most of the state under an executive order issued Thursday by Fallin. She also told her constituents that if enough pray, God will come to their rescue:

For the safety of our firefighters and our communities and the well-being of our crops and livestock, this state needs the current drought to come to an end. The power of prayer is a wonderful thing, and I would ask every Oklahoman to look to a greater power this weekend and ask for rain.

“I think if we have a lot of people praying, it moves the heart of God,” Fallin told CBS News. Fallin’s neighbor, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), issued an “official proclamation drawing on his constitutional authority designating three days as Days of Prayer for Rain” back in April, after which the Texas drought has only gotten much worse.

In 2007, Fallin, then a U.S. congresswoman, laughed off greenhouse pollution, saying people “need to be more concerned about global warming in the U.S. caused by a nuclear attack.” Earlier this year, Fallin attacked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for attempting to enforce clean air and clean water laws on her state’s oil and gas industry.

In contrast, the Catholic Church wants people motivated by faith to take real action against climate disasters: “We call on all people and nations to recognize the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.”

“The most important immediate step that can be taken at the federal level is to pass and implement national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through cost-effective, market-based mechanisms such as a cap-and-trade program,” say the leaders of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, including Oklahoma’s Ronald W. Carpenter, Sr, Bishop James D. Leggett, Dr. Doug Samples, Rev. Jewelle Stewart, Rev. Scott Freeman, and Rev. Dr. Craig Groeschel.

Oklahoma is the epicenter of the nation’s growing climate disasters, with the nation’s taxpayers paying most of the funds to recover from the extreme storms, fires, and drought.

More Climate B.S. at Forbes: Hiding the Energy Imbalance of the Planet

– Dr. Peter H. Gleick, in a HuffPost re-post

On July 1st, I published a blog entry here about climate distortions and misrepresentations at Forbes, which regularly publishes biased and misleading opinion pieces on climate issues. That entry described a remarkable piece by serial climate science conjurer Patrick Michaels and showed his clear misrepresentation of data on food production and climate risks. This falls well into the category of climate B.S. (bad science).

While I have no misconceptions about the likelihood of Forbes trying to apply any error-checking or fact checking to these opinion pieces, I was somewhat astounded to read today another piece by Michaels on the Forbes site, in which he makes even more egregious and outrageous claims and errors.

In this new piece, Michaels poses and then tries to answer a rhetorical question: “Why Hasn’t The Earth Warmed In Nearly 15 Years?”

I am not going to go into the detail of why his specific arguments in his opinion piece are wrong, self-serving, or serious misinterpretations of good, peer-reviewed science.

Why? Because his fundamental premise — his initial rhetorical question — is wrong. Very simply, the Earth has warmed over the past 15 years. Significantly.

Michaels’ essay is like trying to prove why the sun goes around the Earth. Or why gravity doesn’t work. Or how the U.S. faked the moon landing. It doesn’t matter what his arguments are: his initial premise is wrong.

There are really only two simple pieces to this: the actual temperature record; and all of the other ways the planet is screaming to us that the heat balance of the planet is out of whack. On both of these accounts, Michaels is simply wrong.

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In 2007, Huntsman and Schwarzenegger touted their leadership on climate issues. AP Photo.

Jon Huntsman’s enviro stance is up in air

Jon Huntsman’s unorthodox presidential campaign is having a tough time dealing with his unconventional energy and environmental record.

Like other GOP candidates who were global warming science and cap-and-trade champions just a few years ago — think Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty — Huntsman has tried to distance himself from his recent history to appeal to the right.

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–Ben Jervey, in a DeSmogBlog re-post

David Legates announced this week that he was asked to step down as Delaware State Climatologist, a position he held for seven years. A long-time denier of the human contribution to climate change, Legates’ tenure as State Climatologist has always been a controversial one.

Back in 2007, because of his stance on climate, then-governor Ruth Ann Minner insisted that Legates stop using the formal title in any public statements on climate change policy. Minner wrote to Legates:

“Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration. In light of my position and due to the confusion surrounding your role with the state, I am directing you to offer any future statements on this or other public policy matters only on behalf of yourself or the University of Delaware, and not as state climatologist.”

Legates maintained the title, however, which is designated by the Dean of the public university’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. But this week, according to Legates himself, the Dean asked him to “step down.” Legates sent the following note to his email list:

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