States hit hardest by heat wave cut or cancel programs to help poor people cool their homes

One of the most brutal heatwaves in recent memory has been met with denial by right-wingers (see “Limbaugh Calls Heat Index a Liberal Government Conspiracy“).

Now, the Washington Post reports that “Many states hit hardest by this week’s searing heat wave have drastically cut or entirely eliminated programs that help poor people pay their electric bills, forcing thousands to go without air conditioning when they need it most. Oklahoma ran out of money in just three days.”  Hard to believe we’re the richest country in the world.

The U.S. is, in some sense, being slammed by two different heatwaves –  a tropical heatwave with staggering humidity that is driving up the heat index to deadly levels and a ‘subtropical heatwave’ with staggering aridity that turns a drought into a Dust Bowl.

Of the tropical heat wave, meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters writes:

Wunderground’s climate change blogger Dr. Ricky Rood in his latest post, [explains that] with hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland still inundated by flood waters, and soils saturated over much of the Upper Midwest, there has been plenty of water available to evaporate into the air and cause remarkably high humdities. This makes for a very dangerous situation, as the human body is not able to cool itself as efficiently when the humidity is high.

At the same time, it is a basic prediction of climate science that the subtropics will expand (see the Geophysical Research Letters paper “Cause of the widening of the tropical belt since 1958“).  I used to call that desertification until some readers pointed out that some deserts are full of life, which isn’t where we’re headed.  That’s why I now call it Dust-Bowlification.

Speaking of Dust Bowls, I noted last week that the Texas drought is now far, far worse than when Gov. Rick Perry issued a Proclamation calling on all Texans to pray for rain.  The latest U.S. Drought Monitor is out, and, incredibly, the Texas drought got even worse:

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By Christine Shearer

In 2008, I took a tiny cargo plane to the Inupiaq village of Kivalina, in the northwest of Alaska above the Arctic Circle. I had heard the village would be lost to climate change from erosion, which I imagined to be a slow, gradual, and predictable process.

Touring the island and speaking to residents and government workers, I soon realized the erosion is actually often sudden, severe, and erratic, brought on by increasingly strong storms that threaten the peoples’ safety. Kivalina needs to be relocated. The problem is there is no policy or structure in place to relocate them.

While the continental U.S. shifts between weather extremes - from strong storms fueled by increased precipitation to prolonged droughts aggravated by heat – the changes in the Arctic have been much less ambiguous: steady warming.

Annual mean temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as the global average. The warming is melting glaciers, allowing for the absorption of more heat, with recent studies suggesting the possibility of a completely ice-free summer by 2040 or even 2030. Entire ecosystems are transforming, as rising seas pour into freshwater systems, making deltas and lakes more saline and inhospitable for some species, while attracting whole new species.

These changes are also affecting the people of the Arctic, particularly indigenous communities that depend on the land for their daily needs. That land is changing around them, making traveling on ice more dangerous and the migrations of mammals and fish less predictable. The traditional knowledge that has sustained them for millennia is becoming more and more at odds with the transforming landscape.

Some communities are facing the eventual loss of their entire homeland. This includes Kivalina, an Alaska Native village of about 427 people perched on a thin strip of land between the Chukchi Sea and the Kivalina Lagoon.

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Bloomberg:  The time has come for our nation to begin transitioning away from coal-fired power plants towards cleaner, more efficient, and more cost effective energy sources. If we succeed, and I fully believe that we will, we will save millions of lives and we will help millions of children avoid asthma and its debilitating effects.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that he is giving $50 million to the Sierra Club campaign to shut down dirty coal plants around the nation.

I ventured out into the sweltering DC heat to bring you this video of Bloomberg’s remarks:

I’m joining the Sierra Club on another front in the battle for clean air and that is in ending America’s reliance on coal-fired power plants specifically by working to phase out existing power plants like the one right behind me [in Alexandria, Va]. And we’re calling this campaign Beyond Coal.  It’s especially timely to put the focus on coal on a day when the region is under Code Orange alert for pollution levels considered dangerous to children and other particularly vulnerable people.

Every year, coal burning power plants like this one cause more than 200,000 asthma attacks nationwide, many of them affecting children.  Coal pollution also kills 13,000 people every year and costs us a hundred billion dollars in medical expenses.  Just think about that. 13,000 people from something that’s planned and is something that is going to happen again next year and the year after and the year after unless we do something about it. The burning of coal does terrible harm to children, mothers, and families across the country.  Every year coal pollution causes birth defects and developmental problems for children. And we can change it. There’s just no question about the science

I had a chance to chat with Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune briefly about their strategy.  They aim to create enforceable deals to shut down one third of the dirtiest coal plants in this country by 2020 — and replace them with clean energy.  Everything you could want to know about the  Sierra club’s Beyond Coal Campaign is here.

I think they have a real chance of succeeding.  As Bloomberg said, in the past decade, the Sierra Club’s efforts have helped to stop “the construction of more than 150 plants all over the country and in every case they have worked with local utilities and local governments and local community groups to develop a plan to replace that dirty energy with energy from cleaner sources.”

Bloomberg’s investment is certainly a “game changer,” as Brune said — not just because it will allow Sierra Club to greatly expand its efforts (from 15 states to 45) — but also because Bloomberg personally committed to help make it happen.  Bloomberg is a centrist politician, successful billionaire businessman, and a committed philanthropist.  He is a guy who makes things happen

Here is a transcript of his full remarks, which extend beyond the video above (I used my iPhone for that):

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According to tax records and other materials acquired by Bloomberg News, Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and numerous other corporations paid tens of thousands of dollars to write legislation for lawmakers that would repeal carbon pollution reduction programs in various states around the U.S.

These companies working to dismantle environmental programs are members of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which allows private-sector parties to “pay-to-play” – charging thousands of dollars to sit at the table with legislators and craft bills.

According to Bloomberg News, Exxon Mobil donated $39,000 to ALEC last year and the Koch Charitable Foundation donated $75,858 in 2009, the final year in which tax documents were available. Both companies, along with BP, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy helped draft legislation that has been introduced in Oregon, New Hampshire, Washington State and New Mexico designed to take those states out of regional cap and trade programs:

The eight-paragraph resolution, which was introduced in March, said “there has been no credible economic analysis of the costs associated with carbon reduction mandates” and “a tremendous amount of economic growth would be sacrificed for a reduction in carbon emissions that would have no appreciable impact on global concentrations of carbon dioxide.”

The model resolution was adopted by ALEC’s Natural Resources task force in April 2010, according to minutes from the meeting obtained by Bloomberg.

The group drafting and endorsing it included 13 legislators from states including Texas, Kansas and Indiana and 21 private sector members representing companies such as Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries and BP Plc (BP/), and trade groups including American Electric Power, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy.

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

Alberta pipeline shut down after 1,300 barrels of crude oil leaked into swamp and creek

Pembina Pipeline Corporation said Wednesday that it is investigating an oil spill northwest of Edmonton, Alberta.

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Spinning a conspiracy theory that puts his listeners’ lives at risk, hate radio merchant Rush Limbaugh argued that government warnings of life-threatening heat are “playing games”:

They’re playing games with us on this heat wave, again. Even Drudge. Drudge getting sucked in here. Going to be 116 in Washington. No, it’s not. It’s gonna be like 100, maybe 99. A heat index, manufactured by the government to tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there.

Listen here:

“We have this every year,” Rush claimed, after arguing that former vice president Al Gore could cancel the heat wave by scheduling a “global warming conference.”

Limbaugh is dangerously wrong.

This record-shattering heat wave is part of a year of extremes, with a winter and spring of record precipitation in the northern half of the country, and record drought and heat in the southern half. The record warmth baked the Great Plains, and is now expanding over the flood-soaked ground of the Midwest and Northeast, drenched by record precipitation over the winter and spring. That added moisture is creating the uniquely dangerous heat wave hitting the East Coast.

The record precipitation feeding the steam heat now is part of a long-term trend of increasing precipitation caused by greenhouse pollution. The record snows were mocked by climate deniers like Limbaugh and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), whose family built an “igloo for Al Gore” on the National Mall.

The combination of heat and humidity in the heat index is no government conspiracy — researchers have found that sickness and mortality go up sharply when the heat index gets above 95.

This is no ordinary summer — in July alone, record high temperatures have been recorded 1,279 times. This is no ordinary year. This is no ordinary decade. The climate is changing, because of the pollution of hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases from burning coal and oil. This is a more deadly planet now, and will be for the rest of our lives. Rush’s ravings are mortally irresponsible.

Transcript: Read more

By Jessica Goad and Christy Goldfuss.

The Senate Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure met yesterday morning to gather information about ExxonMobil Pipeline Company’s Silvertip Pipeline spill along Montana’s Yellowstone River earlier this month, which dumped 42,000 gallons of crude oil into America’s “last best river.”

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), the chairman of the subcommittee, called the hearing to “track down the cause of this spill and learn from it” and to “make sure something like this never happens again.” Today he and other senators took to task both Exxon and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the regulatory agency which oversees pipelines.

Frustration over the pipeline spill revolved around the continuing lack of information about it — the Exxon witness Gary Pruessing, President of the ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, said that almost three weeks later, “we do not yet know the precise cause of the current breach in the Silvertip Pipeline.” Even though the pipeline had recently been checked out and deemed in compliance by the PHMSA, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) pointed out that the pipeline had received a number of warnings from the agency in the past:

PRUESSING: At the time that this incident occurred, we did not have any outstanding issues from a regulatory standpoint on this pipeline.

LAUTENBERGWell, I have a list of criticism and complaints that PHMSA talked to ExxonMobil about going back to January 30, 2003: proposed compliance order, notice of amendment, February 18, 2005 probable violation, compliance order, proposed civil penalty, notice of amendment. The list goes on, there are nine of those. And that doesn’t sound like it’s very insignificant or relatively minor things to me. I’m sure you’re aware of these, would you say they are minor?

Watch it:

Many questions remain unanswered after today’s hearing, both about the Yellowstone spill and about pipeline safety and regulation in general. For example, Exxon has promised to pay “all legitimate claims” for the cleanup of this spill, but experience with BP has shown that this rhetoric can turn out hollow. Indeed, BP just recently modified its compensation policy saying that only oyster famers should receive compensation for future losses because the area is recovering economically and environmentally. This, of course, came after the company promised to pay “all legitimate claims” after the Gulf spill.

Additionally, while today’s hearing was designed to probe the causes and effects of a spill in one state, the U.S. State Department is currently reviewing plans for a much bigger pipeline across six states and one province. The Keystone XL Pipeline, an addition to the current Keystone pipeline that traverses the country, is designed to transport Alberta tar sands all the way south to Texas. This pipeline is vastly bigger than Exxon’s Silvertip. Whereas Silvertip is 69 miles long, Keystone XL is 1,661 miles long — 27 times the distance. 

This means that Keystone would carry far more oil, up to 900,000 barrels per day, and as such a spill could have drastic consequences. In fact, The Hill reported last month that there have already been 14 leaks on the existing portion of the pipeline since it began operating in the spring of 2010. In response, federal pipeline regulators issued a corrective action order to TransCanada, just as they did for ExxonMobil’s spill two weeks ago.  But future spills could be worse and more frequent — TransCanada’s own estimates show that the Keystone XL pipeline would have 11 “significant spills” over its 50-year lifecycle, while an independent analyst guessed that this could actually be as many as 91 spills — two per year.

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“Since the first use of hydraulic fracturing,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) claimed in a Tuesday op-ed in the Hill defending the natural gas industry, “producers have completed more than 1.5 million fracturing jobs without one confirmed case of groundwater contamination from these fracked formations.”

Inhofe, who has made this claim before, is simply wrong. Rather than go through every environmental violation or instance of groundwater contamination, here’s a list of five famous instances where deep natural gas drilling, using the technique known as hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking, has resulted in groundwater contamination:

1: Sublette County, Wyoming was the first site of groundwater contamination to be documented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, in 2008. Water from more than 88 drinking wells was contaminated and found to contain benzene, a chemical that causes leukemia, at concentrations up to 1,500 times a safe level.

2: The town of Dimock, Pennsylvania began to have water bottles delivered to them by Cabot Oil & Gas after the company’s fracking contaminated the entire town’s water supply in 2009. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (D.E.P.) began to investigate after people felt dizzy whenever they showered, when their “water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman’s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.”

3: Duke University scientists collected water samples from 68 wells in New York and Pennsylvania, finding unsafe levels of methane. According to the report, which was released in the National Academy of Sciences, the closer a sampled well was to active natural gas drilling, the higher the methane level within the well, especially if the well was shallow.

4: A blowout in Bradford County, Pennsylvania sent 30,000 gallons of fracking fluid into the Susquehanna River Watershed, which serves the Chesapeake Bay and more than 6 million people. As a result of the spill, Chesapeake Energy is facing a lawsuit from the state of Maryland.

5: The people of the Pittsburgh region were advised by D.E.P. officials in 2008 to drink only bottled water during a drought because wastewater produced by fracking was at dangerous levels in the Monongahela river.

The process of hydraulic fracturing has many documented hazards. Nevertheless, Sen Inhofee continues to peddle industry talking points and denials. Inhofe accepted more than $450,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in the last cycle alone, even though he was not up for re-election.

–Sean Savett

Land grabbing, a practice in which governments buy or lease land outside their borders, is a growing threat to food security. In 2009, total land grabs around the world equaled the size of France, with much of that activity happening in developing countries.

Some of the land grabbers are surprising.  While the culprits are typically nations and/or investors, even  American universities like Harvard and Vanderbilt have been channeling endowment dollars through hedge funds to make huge land grabs in Africa.

Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations and current chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, has been drawing attention to the tri-fold problem of climate change, food security, and land grabs, calling for an end to predatory land grabs.  In a recent lecture Annan criticized the practice:

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– Francesco Femia, Christine Parthemore, and Caitlin Werrell, in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cross-post

Article Highlights

• The United States has expended enormous resources in response to the security threats posed by WMDs, terrorism, and the economic crisis.
• The Defense Department and CIA consider climate change a significant national security threat.
• Other American policymakers have not matched the security establishment’s assessment with the appropriate resources or political will, leaving the United States with a relatively feeble response to an enormous security threat.

Over recent decades, the United States has dedicated enormous resources — in terms of money, manpower and national credibility — to reducing the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the global economic crisis. These commitments have been made not necessarily because the potential dangers are expected to materialize often — many of them are low-probability risks — but because the consequences if they do are so large as to be considered unacceptable. There’s another threat that’s both potentially devastating on a global scale and highly likely to become reality, but it has not received anything like the same attention or response from our civilian policymakers: climate change.

The US military and much of the broader national security community have actually recognized the seriousness of the threat posed by global climate change. The US Defense Department, for example, included the climate threat as a key pillar of its most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, conducted wargames to plan for climate impacts, and, in its most recent Unified Command Plan, designated Northern Command to lead activities in the Arctic region. Even the CIA has established a Center for the Study of Climate Change.

But US policymakers have failed to follow the security establishment’s lead. As a result, the US response to climate change has been relatively feeble, even though increasing global temperatures pose an enormous threat to national and global security. The inadequacy of the US climate change effort is perhaps best illustrated by direct comparison to the country’s responses to arguably less likely or smaller scale risks.

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