Here’s another strong case for more solar photovoltaics: Last week’s 30-state heat wave caused record-breaking demand spikes in three regional transmission systems, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. New York’s Independent System Operator came close — only 74 megawatts away from a 2006 record.

That record demand comes at an enormous cost. As power providers ramp up all the dirty, fossil-based “spinning reserve” capacity they have available, electricity prices shoot through the roof. In PJM, a transmission organization that covers the mid-Atlantic and some surrounding states, wholesale prices jumped to nearly 35 cents a kilowatt-hour. Today, the cost of solar electricity ranges anywhere from 12 cents to 30 cents per kilowatt hour — in some cases, potentially a third of what it costs to meet peak demand with conventional resources.

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Participating in the progressive “filibreather” against the FY 2012 Interior and Environmental Agencies Appropriations Act (HR 2584), Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) criticized its anti-climate provisions. Waxman attacked the Republican leadership for passing legislation earlier this year to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency finding that climate pollution threatens public health. He also called out the Obama administration and the national news media for failing to explain the scientific threat of global warming and extreme weather, since it is something his “colleagues here in the House of Representatives” need to learn:

This year, we witnessed weather disaster after weather disaster. There have been massive floods, record-breaking fire, record-breaking droughts and now record-breaking heat waves. Yet earlier this year the House passed a bill that repealed EPA’s scientific finding that climate change is occurring. It’s caused by man and is a serious threat.

We don’t hear about the connection between these weather events and climate change and carbon emissions. We’re not hearing from it when we watch the daily news shows and we’re not hearing it from this administration. I just sent recently a letter to Secretary Chu, the Secretary of Energy, a Nobel Prize winner, asking him to speak out. We need to educate the American people so we can educate our colleagues here in the House of Representatives.

In this bill, the Republican majority wants to block EPA from issuing regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants and oil refineries that are causing this catastrophic climate change. The majority also wants to block regulations to cut carbon pollution from motor vehicles, even though these regulations help break our dangerous dependence on oil, save American families money and clean the air we breathe. This house can deny science, we can amend our nation’s laws, but we cannot rewrite the laws of nature. The longer we ignore the scientific reality that our actions are destabilizing the environment, destabilizing our climate, the more costly and disruptive our response will need to be and the more we endanger our children’s future.

Watch it:

“When we were debating carbon regulations earlier this year my colleagues on the other side of the aisle claim that they supported reductions in what they call ‘real air pollution,’ whatever that means.” Waxman continued. “But it turns out they’re gutting those protections as well.”

Blumenaur: “This budget reduces our ability to deal with climate change and extreme weather events.”

This week, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is considering the FY 2012 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill (HR 2584).

Words cannot describe how bad this bill is.  But Jim Moran (D-VA), Ranking Member on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, did his best in the video above from last week’s event where Mayor Bloomberg gave $50 million to the Sierra Club’s anti-coal campaign.

TP Green has the video of Rep. Earl Blumenaur (D-WA)  on the House floor this afternoon, criticizing the anti-climate provisions of the bill, “the jihad against climate change continues”:

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When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, environmentalists were optimistic that their issues would finally become a priority at the White House. So how is Obama doing? Yale Environment 360 asked a group of environmentalists and energy experts for their verdicts on the president’s performance.

Yale e360 asked for my verdict.  I always try to take a science-based perspective, one focused on what future generations will say:

Obama’s overall record on energy and the environment deserves an F. Fundamentally he let die our best chance to preserve a livable climate and restore U.S. leadership in clean energy — without a serious fight.

Future generations are thus still headed toward a world of 10 degrees F warming, widespread Dust-Bowl-ification, ever-worsening extreme weather, seas several feet higher and rising several inches a decade, and a hot, acidified ocean filled with ever-worsening dead zones.

It bears repeating that most of the blame for this failure should go to the anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues. They have spread disinformation and poisoned the debate so that is no longer even recognizable. But the growing power of those ideologues is precisely why the country can only contemplate serious environmental or clean energy legislation when we have a Democratic president and large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Obama not only failed to seize this one brief shining moment, but his own inactions have ensured such a moment won’t return for a generation. In particular, by failing to defend climate science from the disinformation campaign, he has made it that much harder to develop the political consensus for action.

Obama’s great accomplishments are the big boost to the clean energy economy in the stimulus, the boost to fuel economy standards, and the EPA’s endangerment finding — although the jury is out on whether that finding will actually lead to any significant change in our emissions trajectory. But these all pale in comparison to the failure to get a climate and clean energy bill and his silence on climate science.

This should come as no surprise to regular readers (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  Or to climate hawks.

Assuming we fail to act to quickly cut emissions –  a tragic outcome that is increasingly likely — future generations will not care in the least about all of his other great “accomplishments.”  Quite the reverse — the fact that he did so much,  such as health care reform, will merely confirm to them that  he could have had a serious climate and clean energy bill, but he simply had other priorities.

I do think Obama may get one other shot at redemption on climate if he is reelected — through a grand budget deal that includes a high and rising carbon price.  But I see no evidence right now that he is interested in another shot.  He certainly is not laying the groundwork for any serious post-election climate action what with his misguided all-in focus on deficit reduction.

But his first-term grade is certainly an F.  I don’t share the perspective of most of the other people that Yale e360 asked, but here is the redoubtable Bill McKibben, author, scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and founder of 350.org“:

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The sculpture, “Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around,” composed of beetle-infested timber covered in coal.

Forests all across the American West are destroyed by pine beetles that are thriving due to a due to a changing climate.  The 3.1-million acre infestation is so bad in Wyoming that the Caspar Star-Tribune reported in March:

“Wyoming’s bark beetle epidemic is showing signs of slowing, forestry officials say, for the rather depressing reason that the insects are running out of trees in the state to infest.”

In response to this unique catastrophe, an artist has set up an installation at the University of Wyoming connecting the burning of coal to a breakdown of the environment.  The 36-foot diameter piece, called “Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around,” is made up of a spiral array of beetle-infested wood covered in coal.

The artist, Chris Drury, says the piece is not political in any way – he’s simply trying to “create a conversation.”

But in Campbell County where the biggest coal mines in the U.S. are located, making the connection between coal and climate change isn’t taken lightly. Two state lawmakers are protesting the art work, warning the University of Wyoming not to bite the hand that feeds it:

“[E]very now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” explained Rep. Tom Lubnau to the Casper Star Tribune – reminding administrators how much money the coal industry provides to the school and surrounding communities.

In an apolitical description of his work to the newspaper, Drury explained that “I just wanted to make that connection between the burning of coal and the dying of trees. But I also wanted to make a very beautiful object that pulls you in, as it were.”

The paper asserted that Drury’s work “blasts fossil fuels” – raising the ire of local politicians and mining officials:

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The heat trapped by hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution from fossil fuels is destabilizing the Arctic ice cap. With extreme warmth at the North Pole, about 20°F above historical norms, the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean is plummeting to record lows. This transformation of the Arctic is not only destroying the polar ecosystem and societies, but putting the stability of the global climate system at risk.

In response, Scott Borgerson, a former senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, is encouraging the United States to rush in and burn up the vast reserves of carbon that have spent millennia under frozen seas and tundra. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed with hedge fund investor Scott Minerd, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, Borgerson says the response to the “melting sea ice and thawing tundra” of the Arctic is to compete with other nations to drill the “world’s largest oil, natural gas and mineral resources” there:

While most investors are focused on the economic potential of lower latitudes, the Arctic is—due to increased access from climate change—quietly undergoing a radical transformation that is attracting the attention of savvy investors. But the U.S. is asleep at the wheel, leaving some of the world’s largest oil, natural gas and mineral resources to be developed by others. [...] Long literally and figuratively frozen to outside investors, the Arctic now has melting sea ice and thawing tundra that are yielding huge resource opportunities.

The authors say “the U.S. must manage the process so it is environmentally sustainable.”

The premise that there is an “environmentally sustainable” way of accelerating greenhouse pollution borders on insanity.

The North Slope reserves Borgerson mentions in his op-ed would alone emit about 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide if drilled and burned, the equivalent of three years of total US cabon pollution, or half the world’s total annual carbon emissions. This would speed the world headlong toward the trillion-ton limit of irreversible and catastrophic warming.

As the Arctic ice collapses, global weather patterns are changing in unpredictable ways. The jet stream is being pushed “further south and bringing arctic cold to much of Eurasia and Japan” and “increased precipitation and colder temperatures in the winter” in North America. Oceanic circulation is being disrupted, with the collapse of the Gulf Stream a future possibility.

The vast Siberian tundra is thawing, allowing for the potential release of hundreds of billions of tons of methane and carbon dioxide from the long-frozen peat bogs. This is no long-term threat — as the authors of the op-ed note, there are signs the permafrost is already becoming a “permamelt.” Yet “no climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.”

Planetary civilization is speeding toward the cliff of catastrophic climate change. Drilling for fossil fuels in a melting Arctic is as sensible as disabling the brakes and slamming down the gas pedal when the cliff is in sight.

Daniel J. Weiss and Arpita Bhattacharyya in a CAP cross-post

Checking pollution advisories could become a vital part of your pre-travel planning along with checking the weather and stopping the mail if the House of Representatives votes for more than 40 pollution provisions this week.

Simply put, the House could put future vacations at risk in order to keep Big Oil and coal interests happy. It plans to vote on the Interior Environment FY 2012 Appropriations bill, H.R. 2584, which is chock full of provisions that would prolong pollution of the air, water, oceans, and lands of your favorite vacation destinations.

Any one of these special interest provisions in H.R. 2584 is enough to wreck a vacation — from the Grand Canyon to the Great Lakes to Puget Sound from California’s Beaches to the Chesapeake Bay.  Taken together, they are an unprecedented assault on public health and public lands all hidden in an annual spending bill-which is why President Barack Obama promised to veto it.

Here’s how these provisions will impact 10 of America’s favorite vacation spots, with the appropriate section of H.R. 2584 included in parentheses:

by Valeri Vasquez, Daniel J. Weiss and Noreen Nielsen

The Big Five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell— will announce their second quarter profits this week, and expectations are running high. Analysts forecast a surge over last year’s earnings thanks to significantly higher crude prices that continue to hover near the $100 per barrel mark.  Additionally, gasoline prices have jumped for the first time since early May by 8.5 cents due to an increase in crude prices.

These large profits raise some important questions, based on important findings from previous quarters:

1. How is this quarter expected to compare to the first quarter of 2011?
2. How is this quarter expected to compare with the second quarter of 2010?
3. How have oil and gas prices contributed towards these earnings?
4. What percentage of earnings will be used towards repurchasing company stock?
5. Have oil companies that make huge earnings paid their fair share of income taxes?
6. Will the earnings enable these companies to forgo the benefits of oil industry and other tax breaks?
7. How profitable were the Big Five oil companies from 2001-2010?
8. What have the company’s lobbying expenditures been this year?
9. How much has the company contributed toward political campaigns?

Announcement schedule:

• BP announces on Tuesday, July 26, at 2 a.m. EDT
• ConocoPhillips announces on Wednesday, July 27, at 11 a.m. EDT
• Shell announces on Thursday, July 28, at 2 a.m. EDT
• ExxonMobil announces on Thursday, July 28, at 11 a.m. EDT
• Chevron announces on Friday, July 29, at 11 a.m. EDT

Below is valuable background information about each of these questions:

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In 2008, while closely examining a hydraulic fracturing operation in West Virginia, researchers at the U.S. Forest Service found that the fracking fluids near the well pad were killing trees. And after spraying some additional fluids around the area to test the environmental impact, they saw devastating results (picture above):

Almost a year later, in May 2009, the number of trees included in the tally increased to 147, representing 11 species (Table 4). Half of these trees had no live foliage, and two-thirds had less than 35 percent full crown. Although there was some sprouting of tree seedlings and ground vegetation within the perimeter, there were still significant areas of dead ground vegetation in May 2009. Nearby trees outside the application area were nearly fully leafed out and green.

The study illustrates the very real environmental risks associated with fracking, again showing why the public should know what kind of chemicals are in fracking mixtures. The study itself notes: “clearly, a better knowledge of the chemical makeup of the drilling and hydrofracking fluids is needed.”

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Ah, New Zealand, home of kiwis, the filming of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and blunt climate science reporting:

Evidence for climate change is now undeniable – scientists

Disastrous floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts are becoming more frequent because of climate change, and will continue to do so.

Scientists say the world can no longer ignore the link between climate change and extreme weather events, and they are urging countries to face up to the growing risks ahead.

New Zealander Kevin Trenberth [of] the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said events of the past 18 months had been extraordinary. “It’s as clear a warning as we’re going to get about prospects for the future.”

Last year was the warmest on record and that warming was directly related to increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he said.

Yes, New Zealand is the birthplace of Trenberth, who himself  has been one of the blunter climate scientists (see Trenberth: “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both”).

But New Zealand is also home to many other blunt climate scientists:

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The city has a new hyper-accurate map, more money, and is trying to streamline bureaucracy in the hopes that the sun could one day power half the town. Here, solar panels on a television studio in Brooklyn.

New York City’s solar power push

New York has a long way to go before becoming that solar utopia. The city currently only gets a tiny fraction of its power from solar. And until there’s a good way to store the electricity generated during the day and release it at night, solar will likely continue to make up a modest part of the city’s overall energy mix.

But even a small amount of solar can help the city in big ways. It can reduce the overall stress on the electric grid, eliminating the need to build expensive new transformers or lay underground transmission wire.

During hot days when air conditioning is working overtime, it can reduce the chance of a blackout and cut the need to fire up older, dirtier generators.

“Some people are waiting to see what the federal or state government will do,” David Bragdon, head of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s sustainability office, said at a recent solar conference in the city. “But important things are happening right here.”

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