Masters:  “Irene is capable of inundating portions of the coast under 10 – 15 feet of water, to the highest storm surge depths ever recorded. I strongly recommend that all residents of the mid-Atlantic and New England coast familiarize themselves with their storm surge risk.”

This morning meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters posted this figure, “The height above ground that a mid-strength Category 2 hurricane with 100 mph winds would push a storm surge in a worst-case scenario in New York City”:

My brother lost his Pass Christian, Mississippi home in Katrina’s “worst-case scenario” storm surge 6 years ago this week –  so as Masters wrote this afternoon, “Take this storm seriously!”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s quote — “From a Flooding Perspective, This Could Be a 100-Year Event”– was from tonight’s NBC Evening News.  As Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, said last December, “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.”

Masters writes that in addition to the storm surge, we have the deluge:

Irene likely to bring destructive fresh water flooding
In this morning’s post, I highlighted the threat from storm surge flooding, but flash flooding and river flooding from Irene’s torrential rains are also a huge threat. The hurricane is expected to bring rains in excess of 12″ to 100-mile swath from Eastern North Carolina northwards along the coast, through New York City. The danger of fresh water flooding is greatest in northern New Jersey, Southeast Pennsylvania, and Southeast New York, where the soils are saturated from heavy August rains that were among the heaviest on record.  At Philadelphia, rainfall so far this August has been 13 inches, not far from the record for rainiest month of all-time, the 15.82″ that fell in August 1867. This record will almost certainly be broken when Irene’s rains arrive. In general, the heaviest rains will fall along the west side of the hurricane’s track, and the greatest wind damage will occur on the east side

Here is the rainfall map:

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress.

The Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity is bringing its “Running on Empty” tour to Colorado this week, to discuss the “perils of the government regulating the oil industry.”  In addition to its pro-polluter message, another of Koch Industries’ front groups has been at the helm of attacking Medicare.  So, at yesterday’s rallies across the state, concerned Coloradans pushed back using a moving billboard to ask, “Big Oil Gets Tax Breaks, Grandma Gets Medicare Cuts?”

Against the backdrop of that billboard, Dan Gould, Chair of the Boulder County Democratic Party, summed up the message of the protestors, saying “it is not the case” that ordinary Americans want what Americans for Prosperity is advocating:

It’s amazing to me that they have been able to dupe enough Americans into believing that the oil companies somehow need to have even more subsidies than they do now at the expense of at the expense of ordinary citizens, at the expense of “Grandma” as this sign says.  Grandma gets Medicare cuts, while oil gets tax cuts.  That doesn’t make sense to me.  And the thing that’s important is, these rallies are really just an extension of the Koch brothers’ lobbying efforts in Washington.  They’re trying to make it look like ordinary Americans want to have high profits for oil companies at the expense of the rest of the American public.  And that is not the case, it is clearly the case that the American people want to have fair taxation and not tax breaks for large corporations and for oil companies.

Watch it:

Protestors also called on the conservatives to help end the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies that oil companies will get just this year, even though the Big 5 oil companies have already made $67 billion in 2011.  Jeff Crank, head of the Colorado chapter of Americans for Prosperity, responded by telling the crowd that he too “couldn’t be more against subsidies to Big Oil companies.”  He was not the only one from Americans for Prosperity to voice this opinion:  Tracy Henke, the group’s national executive vice president, told the Longmont Times-Call that Americans for Prosperity does not support these corporate subsidies.  But as the debt “super committee” begins its search for new forms of revenue, AFP has ignored this wasteful spending in its events this summer and instead completely focused on blaming the Obama Administration, calling for more places to be open to drilling and decrying regulation of any kind.

The Colorado activists speaking out against handouts to Big Oil at these and other Americans for Prosperity events across the country are part of a growing trend of citizens demanding that the group pay attention to subsidies and budget cuts, rather than focusing on the “absurd and deceptive message” about how more drilling will decrease gas prices, as one ProgressNow activist put it.

A poll sponsored by the Checks and Balances project released this week found that 79% of Coloradans favor reduced speculation and manipulation of markets in order to lower gas prices.  Coloradans overwhelmingly support this crackdown, and 77% believe that fuel efficiency and reduced oil consumption will lower prices.

Relatedly, the number of rigs in Colorado has been steadily climbing since 2009, even though the industry is producing on only 32% of the federal acres that it has leased there.

With the Congressional “super committee” set to issue recommendations in November on how to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion or more, the clean energy sector will be squarely in the cross-hairs.

But rather than thoughtlessly gut energy and environmental programs as some have lawmakers and presidential-hopefuls have proposed, Congress has the opportunity to cut spending for the most harmful environmental programs while maintaining support for clean energy, efficiency and other climate programs.

That’s what the Green Scissors Project set out to accomplish this year – releasing a report yesterday that outlines hundreds of billions in spending cuts over five years that “are expensive for taxpayers and harmful for the environment.”

The Green Scissors project, a small coalition of progressive and conservative groups, has been around since 1994. Each year, the group releases recommendations for environment-related spending cuts. But this year’s report is particularly relevant as super committee starts putting together its deficit-reduction plan.

It’s a mixed bag of recommendations – some good, some bad – that could provide a framework for House members as they look to balance the budget. We’ll get to our response to the recommendations below. But there was one other notable element to this year’s report.

The Green Scissors coalition added the Heartland Institute, a fiercely anti-climate action organization that has been on the front lines of pushing misinformation and pseudo-science in order to create an artificial “debate” over climate change.

Any report co-written by the Heartland Institute looking at cutting spending in the name of the environment would raise eyebrows.

Heartland’s President, Joseph Bast, recently told Climate Progress in a video interview that “we are a fossil fuel dependent economy and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.… The ecological impact of that reliance is not negative.”

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by Emanuel Feld

After five days of action, civil disobedience protests against the Keystone XL pipeline show no signs of easing up. Another 56 people were arrested in front of the White House yesterday, many of whom came to Washington from the Gulf Coast region to share their experiences from last year’s BP oil spill and to warn of the threats the pipeline poses.

As of yesterday, 275 people had been arrested in all.

The Keystone XL pipeline, if approved by the administration, would carry 900,000 barrels of oil each day from the “tar sands” in Alberta, Canada through the American heartland to refineries in the Texas Gulf Coast. Its path would cross over 70 rivers and streams, including the Missouri, Yellowstone, and Arkansas. It would also traverse the Ogallala Aquifer, which yields about one third of the groundwater used to irrigate US crops, supports $20 billion in agriculture, and supplies potable water to about 2 million people.

The movement to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline has drawn on a broad base of community support. Among those protesting over the past week were a group of doctors from Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, who awaited arrest while clothed in their white lab coats. Nebraskan landowners and farmers who will be directly impacted by the proposed pipeline were arrested on the third day of protests, joining Canadian actors Margot Kidder and Tantoo Cardinal.

The fifth day of protests featured a number of members of the Gulf Restoration Network, including Cherri Foytlin, a Louisiana mother of six who walked from New Orleans to Washington, DC last April in order to raise awareness about the BP spill, Louisiana singer/songwriter Drew Landry, and Andrew Gaines, a first responder clean-up worker who became ill from exposure to BP crude and dispersants.

“Do not believe when you go out there today for this action that you are only standing up against tar sands or against the keystone pipeline,” Foytlin told the crowd. “You are standing up for the people of this earth.”

Brian Parras, co-founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS), called attention to the disproportionate impact the pipeline and oil-infrastructure will have on communities of color and low-income populations in Texas:

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(Reuters) — Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in danger of losing his 2012 Republican primary front-runner status, [said] on Wednesday he would not place restrictions on carbon emissions if elected….

“Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that but I think that it is,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”

“What I’m not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don’t know the answer to.”

It’s Romney’s new slogan:  “Vote for me.  Why?  I don’t know!”

Romney’s position is melting faster than the Arctic ice.  Last month he said, “I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you’re seeing.”

Hmm, does that mean Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL) was right when he said Romney was “a little mushy on environmental issues”?  Here’s a video in honor of Mushy Mitt’s new know-nothing strategy:

Let’s review what we know — our ever-strengthening scientific understanding  — which includes the “settled fact” that the earth is warming.

The evidence that the world’s getting hotter from multiple independent lines of observation is so strong that back in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal” — and that word was signed off on by every member government, including the Bush administration and China and Saudi Arabia.  The U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded its 2010 review of climate science, saying it is a “settled fact” that “the Earth system is warming.”

So we know it is warming.

As for the role of humans, the IPCC also concluded:

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On Fox & Friends Sunday, anchor Clayton Morris admitted that Fox News factcheckers have confirmed that man-made global warming is “certainly” real, but argued that it “doesn’t matter” because climate denial is popular among Fox News-watching conservatives. Morris contrasted Jon Huntsman’s defense of the National Academy of Sciences with Rick Perry’s claims that scientists have “manipulated data” to concoct manmade global warming:

MORRIS: If you dive into the weeds a little bit on this global warming thing, you see that it seems that facts are certainly on Huntsman’s side on all of this and fact checkers have come out, we’re actually having our own brain room look look at this right now that any of Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water. It doesn’t matter. What’s resonating right now in South Carolina is helping Governor Perry tremendously and he fired back at Huntsman on global warming and gaining traction, facts or not.

Watch it:

The only reason, of course, that the facts of global warming don’t “matter” for conservatives is the constant bombardment of anti-science propaganda by Fox News and other right-wing media. Americans care deeply about energy, weather disasters, food prices, clean air, and a safe future for their children. Maybe if Clayton Morris and his Fox News colleagues decided that facts should matter, they’d be able to rally Americans to fight global warming pollution before it’s too late.

(HT: Brian Merchant at TreeHugger)

Segment transcript: Read more

Okay, technically this is from February 2010.  But as I was rummaging through my old posts, I thought it’s worth remembering that even though Obama is largely silent on climate change now, it wasn’t so long ago that the President actually felt so comfortable talking about global warming that he would explain something that doesn’t fit into a soundbite.

Media Matters had the original story:

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On the campaign trail last Friday, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) defended his argument that climate scientists are manipulating data, saying his position is “skeptical science.” In a rambling statement, Perry fought back against the criticism by opponent Jon Huntsman Jr., who attacked Perry’s dismissal of the stance of the National Academy of Science that climate change is largely due to manmade pollution:

Jon is going to make his own decision. I just happen to believe that, you know, the earth’s temperature has been moving up and down for millenniums now and there are enough scientists skeptical about the reasons for it and I happen to be one that are skeptical for us to spend billions of dollars on a theory that is not proven and that you have skeptical science against that, is not in America’s best interest.

Watch it:

Perry’s “skeptical science” earned him four Pinocchios from the Washington Post. Perry’s invocation of “skeptical science” also unintentionally endorsed SkepticalScience.com, a website that debunks misunderstandings of climate change. At that site, they have a numerical list of climate misconceptions: Perry’s most recent statement invoked myth #2, myth #3, myth #73, and myth #140.

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

California panel reaffirms carbon trading program

The California Air Resources Board voted to reaffirm its cap-and-trade plan Wednesday, a decision that puts the nation’s first-ever state carbon trading program back on track, for now.

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By Michael Conathan, CAP’s Director of Ocean Policy

The reaction from Americans for Prosperity to our piece pointing out fundamental flaws in a Koch-backed study bashing the nascent offshore wind industry in New Jersey was no less predictable than the findings of the report itself. After all, why should anyone expect this organization, which is fighting against every major clean energy and climate program in existence, be expected to do something other than tear down the offshore wind industry?

As usual, AFP simply reached into its handy kit bag of catch phrases to fill in the blanks in Tuesday’s mad-lib of a blog post about our analysis of flaws in the Beacon Hill Institute’s study. There’s nothing new about AFP tossing around buzzwords like “radical environmentalists,” “anti-capitalist,” and “job-killing”—the last of which they’ve used more than a dozen times in 6 months to describe anything that vaguely threatens the status quo.

Much the way conservatives seem to think anyone who disagrees with their ideas, up to and including President Obama, must not “love America,” AFP insists that those of us who endorse boosting our economy by developing technologies of the future rather than relying on industries of the past must be jamming our “radical, job-killing, anti-capitalist agenda down the throats of the American people.”

This is precisely the kind of my-way-or-the-highway attitude that has led Washington to a perpetual stalemate in which nothing moves other than the continuous downward slump of our economic future.

Such automated jabs from AFP are not, in and of themselves, worthy of a response. However, Paul Bachman, BHI’s Director of Research, took the opportunity to lay out a thoughtful, if still misguided response to my arguments.

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