As Climate Progress approaches its 5th anniversary, we are (slightly) upgrading the website one more time.  We are restoring Word Press commenting — and all of CP’s original comments.

The site redesign and merger with Think Progress on May 31 brought a great number of improvements to CP.  Our content could be more easily shared and promoted by TP, which gets 10 times our traffic.  We got the benefits of some terrific design improvements from CAPAF’s outstanding IT team — including the ability to feature stories at the top of the page as well as the retweet and “like” buttons, which have been a big success.

In the weeks and months since the merger/redesign, however, readers kept raising a number of issues.  Most of those concerned the commenting system, which many suggested was non-optimal for sustaining the unique community dialogue — almost a salon — that had grown organically over the past few years.

After much discussion here at CAPAF, we are restoring Word Press commenting for CP — with some new features such as nested comments.  You can use HTML.  You won’t need an ID to comment.  I still prefer non-anonymous commenters, but nom de plumes will be allowed.  First-time commenters will have to go through moderation (once).  Others won’t, as long as they meet the terms of use (and don’t get tripped up by the spam filter, by, say, trying to post too many links).  I still urge people not to come here and try to spread disinformation — there are plenty of sites on the bunkosphere for that.

UPDATE:  “Preview” has been enabled!

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“I called Rick Perry a year ago and told him, ‘If you’re running for president, I’ll be the first to endorse you,’ ” Inhofe said at a State Chamber of Commerce breakfast at the Tulsa Press Club.  “I’m going to be that person on Monday.”

What a duo!  Their states are almost entirely under extreme or exceptional drought — drier than the Dust Bowl (and hotter).  Their states’ preferred adaptation strategy is prayer.

And, of course, they are hard-core climate deniers who take big bucks from Big Oil and smear climate scientists — and if their do-nothing policies continue to triumph in this country, they will turn their states, and the entire SouthWest, into permanent Dust Bowls.   I smell bromance in the air.

Here’s why Inhofe wouldn’t support Romney (or Gingrich):

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

There’s something about the ever-elusive prospect of sucking petroleum out of the American West’s vast supplies of shale rock that addles people’s brains and warps their judgment.

Oil shale has been a pipe dream in the Rockies for the better part of a century. In 1916, the Pittsburgh Press confidently declared that the development of resources in Colorado and adjoining states “will mark a new era in oil production….” In 1980, the Washington Post said commercial oil shale development “seems assured.”

And today, at a field hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee energy subcommittee in Grand Junction, Colorado, Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) said that with reserves of 1.5 trillion barrels of oil lodged in shale, “the time is appropriate for the U.S. to grasp the reins of its own energy future.”

With three panels of mostly cheerleading witnesses, Tipton and his Colorado colleague, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), tried valiantly to blame the Obama administration for erecting roadblocks to the development of oil resources that could fuel our SUVs for a century or more.

But the simple truth is that “the rock that burns” has never been commercially viable, and despite ongoing research projects in western Colorado and eastern Utah, it shows no signs of becoming commercially viable any time soon.

As a senior policy researcher for the Rand Corporation advised the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June, oil shale development remains “uncertain” after a hundred years of promises:

The prospects for oil shale development in the United States remain uncertain… It is our understanding that privately-funded research activities are ongoing but that no private firm is prepared to commit to commercial production.

And beyond the question of whether oil can be economically extracted from shale, there is the equally important question of whether the West could afford the cost in water. In a study last year the Government Accountability Office found that oil shale development would use between three and five barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced.

That water would come from the Colorado River basin, the water source for 25 million people in the West, and a resource that is already over-allocated and looking at a reduction in flow of as much as 25 percent by mid-century due to climate change.

“A full-scale oil shale industry producing 1.55 million barrels of oil a day would require approximately 360,000 acre-feet of water a year — roughly one-and-a-half times the amount of water used by Denver per year,” concluded a new study by the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The water supply impact of this demand would not only affect agriculture and cities in the region, but could have an impact on all Colorado River Basin water users, even those as far away as southern California.”

Randy Udall, an energy analyst from western Colorado, calls oil shale “the petroleum equivalent of fool’s gold.” As today’s hearing showed, there are plenty of fools left who are still chasing that phony gold.

by Mike Tidwell, who was arrested and released last weekend as part of the tar sands protest

If you want to know just how determined activists are to stop the proposed tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, listen to this:

Last Saturday morning, August 20th, more than 50 activists were arrested in front of the White House. They were handcuffed, stuffed into blistering-hot paddy wagons, and informed that they would spend two nights in a crowded, harsh DC jail. The U.S. Park Police – who have jurisdiction outside the White House — openly informed organizers of the police strategy: We’re going to go very, very hard on the first wave of protestors to discourage others from joining your planned 15-day action.

That action, organized by tarsandsaction.org, aims to get 50-plus people arrested at the White House each day, peacefully, day after day, till September 3rd. The goal is to pressure Obama to reject the 1700-mile tars sands pipeline, which is fully within the President’s power.

So did the police plan work? Hell no. Saturday night — as Bill McKibben, Gus Speth, and others were still packed 15-to-a-tiny-cell and eating baloney sandwiches – 45 new recruits were being trained at a local D.C. church to repeat the civil disobedience the very next morning. The second wave of volunteers, who came from all over America, fully understood that the police had gone hard core on the first group instead of offering the usual minor citation and fine for White House protesting. On Sunday morning August 21st at 11, right on schedule, the “Fantastic 45” sat down outside the White House fence. They too were handcuffed and led away to paddy wagons.

But that’s when the police gave up. They threw in the towel on the “hard way” approach. The Fantastic 45 were released by 3 pm Sunday and allowed to pay a $100 fine at the Park police station. No jail time.

Here’s what sources say happened:

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One of the largest private companies in the country, Koch Industries, is fighting tooth and nail against regulations aimed at protecting the United States from a terrorist attack on chemical plants, according to a new report. Since 9/11, homeland security officials have worked to establish rules for top chemical producers to ensure that major American plants identify vulnerabilities and shore up potential risks. However, the safety rules are costly, and as Greenpeace reveals in a study released today, Koch has used its influence in Congress to loosen enforcement on its own sprawling network of chemical facilities.

There are two bills that deal with industrial chemical safety standards and terrorism prevention. One bill, the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standard (CFATS), will “exempt most facilities and actually prohibit the authority of Department of Homeland Security to require safer processes.” Another bill, the Continuing Chemical Facilities Antiterrorism Security Act (CCFASA), closes security loopholes and provides authorities the power to enforce the law on chemical manufacturers. Koch has pushed for an extension of CFATS and has unambiguously lobbied to kill the CCFASA bill.

John Aloysius Farrell, Ben Wieder and Evan Bush, reporters for iWatch News, have covered the issue and note the proximity of Koch’s most dangerous facilities to large population centers:

– An Invista chemical plant in LaPorte, Texas, where a spill and vaporization of formaldehyde could threaten almost 1.9 million potential victims within 25 miles.
– A Georgia-Pacific plant in Camas, Wash., where a chlorine spill and gas cloud could endanger 840,000 people within 14 miles.
– A Flint Hills refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, where 350,000 people living within 22 miles would be threatened by a hydrogen fluoride spill and vaporization.
– And a Koch Nitrogen plant in East Alton, Ill., where 290,000 people live within 11 miles, and face the potential danger of a poisonous anhydrous ammonia cloud.

Koch’s campaign donations appear closely aligned with their anti-terrorism prevention lobbying. For instance, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA), the lead author of the flawed CFATS extension, blocked amendments to the bill that would “require facilities to asses their ability to convert to safer chemical processes, close regulatory loopholes, and involve non-management level workers in the chemical security process.” Lungren has accepted over $22,000 from Koch-related campaign donations.

Thousands of activists are facing arrest this week and next at the White House to challenge President Obama to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. In addition to the devastating consequences to our climate if the carbon locked in the bituminous sands of Alberta is burned, the proposed pipeline also poses major contamination risks to the states on its path from Montana to Texas. The Keystone XL pipeline company TransCanada has a terrible pipeline spill record, but the management believes that the new pipeline will be the safest in history. Their confidence may be based on the foolhardy idea that threats you ignore won’t happen, Greenwire reports.

The Keystone XL pipeline will be carrying millions of barrels of diluted bitumen (dilbit) over thousands of miles, but the industry doesn’t actually know whether the pipeline can safely handle dilbit. Questions raised by environmental organizations like the Natural Resource Defense Council about the corrosion risk of dilbit have been dismissed by tar sands proponents as “emotion” with “no factual basis”:

“The challenge we have is combating emotion with facts,” said Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert during an interview this month when asked about the safety charges leveled by critics of oil sands development, particularly the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline.

Liepert readily acknowledged, however, that few if any targeted studies of diluted bitumen’s corrosion risks are available to help him make the case for more oil sands development. . . .

The safety of shipping dilbit is simply “the latest issue that’s been raised by opponents to create doubt and uncertainty with no factual basis for it,” TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said during an interview this month in his Calgary office. Any corrosion risks already are managed effectively, he added, and they come “not from inside the pipe, but from the outside.”

Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board chairman Dan McFadyen agreed. “If you look at systemic issues the pipeline industry has faced over the last several years, internal corrosion is not a factor,” he said.

Veteran pipeline engineer Richard Kuprewicz, a member of PHMSA’s safety advisory panel who has worked for both TransCanada and NRDC, offered a different take.

“Both external and internal corrosion are a factor” in pipeline failures, said Kuprewicz, president of the consulting firm AccuFacts, and the state of current regulations governing the latter is “a little weak.”

“There is no evidence from our tracking,” McFadyen told Greenwire, “that the type of product being carried in the pipeline results in anything different with respect to failure.”

But there’s “no evidence” only because the industry hasn’t actually bothered to study it. NRDC independently pulled together pipeline data and found that on dilbit pipelines, “corrosion abnormalities are occurring faster than [companies] are able to correct them.”

In an email to Climate Progress, green jobs champion Van Jones explains how the New York Times misrepresented his quotes and his views.

The story in question is “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises.”  I debunked it here yesterday for completely ignoring the “explosive growth” documented by a recent Brookings study in the clean energy jobs sector –  even though the article cited the study!

I thought that the quotes attributed to Van Jones didn’t sound like the passionate, optimistic green jobs guru I have had the good fortune to get to know at the Center for American Progress:

President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.

“I won’t say I’m not frustrated,” said Van Jones, an Oakland activist who served briefly as Mr. Obama’s green-jobs czar….

#FAIL

I asked Jones if that’s what he really said, and he replied:

I was quoted in the story as “frustrated.” I am. But not in the way that the story suggests.

“Yes, I said I was frustrated. But I was talking about my frustration with the GOP, not the green jobs movement. The whole thing is ridiculous. Dirty energy backers blocked cap-and-trade, which would have spurred green innovation and enterprise. Now they complain that we have not had more progress regarding green jobs?

That would be like someone tripping a racehorse and then saying, “See, I told you that horse was no good!”

That is the frustration that I was talking about.

What I find inspiring, if not miraculous, is that the green economy continues to blossom — despite everything that has been thrown against it. Thanks for pointing that out in your column.

But it gets better, which is to say, worse.  The Times claims that Jones has scaled-back his projections:

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Government’s Funding Proposals for “Strategic Emerging Industries” Show Major Push for Green Technologies

by Melanie Hart

China’s State Council (the national cabinet) is currently reviewing a set of massive funding proposals for seven key “strategic emerging industries”: environmentally friendly and energy-efficient technologies, next-generation IT, biotechnology, high-end equipment manufacturing, alternative energy, alternative materials, and alternative-energy vehicles. The Chinese identify these industries as the most optimum market environments for their indigenous innovation program, and the State Council is expected to approve and release the official package next month, including an overall 2011-2015 development plan for strategic emerging industries and individual funding and policy support plans for each industry.

This package is designed to address China’s competitive disadvantages in technology innovation particularly with the United States. U.S. policymakers should pay close attention because if the Chinese succeed this will be a game-changer especially in the energy sector.

This new plan aims to address the fact that in many current market sectors the technology gap between Chinese firms and the current market leaders is so large that it’s almost impossible for the Chinese to compete. Either they manage to leap frog ahead on the technology side (often through assimilation and “re-innovation” rather than real bottom-up innovation) but then falter at the operational level (as in high-speed rail) or they simply cannot catch up at all.

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I will be speaking Saturday afternoon at the 2011 Steve Schneider Symposium in Boulder, Colorado.  The whole event, from the 25th (tomorrow) to the 27th will be live webcast here.  The agenda is here.  You can still register for it here.

Schneider, who died in July of last year, was one of the truly important voices in climate science of our time.  For over three decades, he had been researching and speaking out on the need to sharply and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

He was a coauthor of a 2010 study that reaffirmed the broad scientific understanding of climate change and questioned the media’s reliance on a tiny group of less-credibile scientists for “balance.”  The video above is an interview he gave on that study.

Here is more on the Symposium and the man:

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Speaking on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, environmental writer and activist McKibben called the Keystone XL Pipeline protests “the largest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement in decades.”

Indeed, since the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline in front of the White House began last week, 220 people have been arrested. And as the action continues this week, major news outlets are picking up on the story: CBS, The New Yorker, Reuters, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Politico and numerous others have all run stories on the civil disobedience against the tar sands pipeline.

And as McKibben and others sat in jail, The New York Times also published an op-ed on Sunday against the proposed 1,700 mile Keystone XL pipeline that would bring carbon-intensive, environmentally-disastrous tar sands crude from Canada to the Gulf Coast:

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Corrosion Questions Hound Canada-To-U.S. Oil Pipeline

Hold a vial of pumped and processed oil to the light here, just before it enters the pipeline that one executive jokingly calls “the cash register,” and you can see a layer of watery sediment settled at the bottom.

The vial contains diluted bitumen. What happens to it inside pipelines, 0.5 percent sediment content and all, is powering a controversy that spans the continent.

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Today, the National Hurricane Center in Miami reports that it has upgraded Hurricane Irene to Category 3 status. The hurricane is barreling towards the eastern coastline of the United States, having already pounded the Bahamas and other locations in the Caribbean sea.

As federal, state, and local governments scramble to prepare for the imminent arrival of the hurricane, it is important to look at how budget cuts at all levels of government have imperiled the ability to detect and respond to Hurricane Irene and other similar extreme weather events in the future.

Last week, Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), warned that federal budget cuts will force the agency to go without building a satellite that helps detect extreme weather events five years from now:

Without money to build a new satellite, the federal government will no longer be able to forecast severe weather events far enough in advance for communities to take life-saving action five years from now. That was the message that Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, delivered on Wednesday at a town-hall-style meeting in Denver. [...] “Whether the gap is longer than that depends on whether we get the money”— $1 billion — “in the next budget,” warned Dr. Lubchenco, an environmental scientist. “I would argue that these satellites are critically important to saving lives and property and to enabling homeland security.”

Unfortunately, some of the nation’s budget cuts are already hurting the ability of local communities to respond to the incoming Irene. In Palm Beach County, Florida, budget cuts have forced a cutback in the emergency management budget by 16 percent. In South Carolina, another state likely to be battered by Irene, budget cuts have led to a third of the emergency management divisions’ staff being lost. “We’re going to do what we can with less and we think we can be effective in that regard,” said Joe Farmer of the division.

As the far-right continues to demonize government and demand even more austerity, it is important to remember that government spending on things like disaster preparedness not only keeps important employees working but is crucial to saving lives.

An investigation from a Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald, shows that Royal Dutch Shell has been censured for breaking safety rules 25 times in six years, giving it the second-worst safety record in the United Kingdom.

The piece was released days after Shell closed a pipeline leak in the North Sea that dumped about 218 tons of oil into the water – the worst spill in the UK since 2000. It also comes as Shell seeks to drill exploratory wells off the Arctic coast next summer.

The list of censures reported by the Sunday Herald is wide-ranging:

The British oil multinational has been prosecuted, fined and formally reprimanded for repeatedly failing to maintain pipelines and other vital equipment in the North Sea, for failing to report a dangerous incident, and for failing to protect workers from hazardous chemicals.

The revelations, from records held by the Government’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), have led to renewed criticism of Shell in the wake of last week’s oil leak from a pipeline to the Gannet Alpha platform 112 miles east of Aberdeen. The company has been slammed for failing to be open about the leak, which it claimed to have sealed on Friday.

According to the HSE, which released the documents to the Herald, Shell has faced more legal prosecutions for safety and environmental transgressions than any other major oil company. Only a Danish company, Maersk, has received more warnings.

Shell also had one of the worst records for offshore spills in the UK, according to HSE documents:

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