Phil Aroneanu from 350.org went to Liberty Square in downtown New York City to talk with some of the organizers and activists talking part in the #occupywallstreet protest. Hundreds of people are occupying the park, organizing, and making connections across a wide range of issues, including climate change, but with one common message: “We want a more just and more fair world for everyone.”

Republicans have seized on the Solyndra controversy to go on a witch hunt against all clean energy programs authorized by the Department of Energy. For instance, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) has pressed for an investigation of all clean energy programs. A post on his congressional website claims such spending is “wasteful” and boasts that Forbes has voted “against every bailout and stimulus plan.”

Republicans are on a war path to defund all clean energy programs, targeting not only the loan program tapped by Solyndra but all green jobs efforts by the federal government. As Climate Progress’ Stephen Lacey has reported, Republicans are now expanding their inquisition to include killing a program that employs veterans to install solar panels.

Forbes, for instance, sent a letter to Secretary Steven Chu expressing support for International Biofuels’ application for a clean energy loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. Despite the fact Forbes voted against the funding mechanism for the loan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he requested that the Obama administration give preference to a company planning a renewable energy plant in Virginia. View a copy of the Department of Energy’s response below:

Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) requests clean energy loan from DoE

View more documents from lee_fang

Earlier this month, Forbes joined his colleagues in a protest vote against Department of Energy clean energy grant programs, including a cut against the same program he requested money from.

Climate Progress reporter Stephen Lacey has chronicled other examples of GOP hypocrisy. Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and David Vitter (R-LA), as well as Reps. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), Fred Upton (R-MI), and others had sought Department of Energy clean energy money in previous years. As ThinkProgress and Bloomberg reported, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), now managing an inquisition into the very idea of clean energy funding, had once sought a clean energy grant to a company with close connections to an Issa campaign donor.

Global warming is killing the world’s chocolate supply, agricultural researchers find. Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana together provide 53 percent of the world’s chocolate, but warming temperatures and changing precipitation mean rapid declines in growing conditions over the coming decades. The new report from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture paints a dire picture for the future of the cacao tree in West Africa:

Half of the world’s cocoa comes from the West African nations of Ivory Coast and Ghana. An expected temperature rise of more than two degrees Celsius by 2050 will render many of the region’s cocoa-producing areas too hot for the plants that bear the fruit from which chocolate is made, says a new study from the Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

“What we are saying is that if we don’t take any action, there won’t be sufficient chocolate around in the future,” said Peter Läderach, the report’s lead author.

“Already we’re seeing the effects of rising temperatures on cocoa crops currently produced in marginal areas, and with climate change these areas are certain to spread,” says Dr. Peter Laderach.

The fossil fuel pollution that is heating up the planet also threatens the production of coffee, beer, and wine.

Global warming threatens heat-sensitive cocoa trees, a Gates Foundation study finds

Half of the world’s cocoa supply comes from the West African countries of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. But in the coming decades, climate change could severely limit production in the region — disrupting local farmers and squeezing global chocolate supply.

A new report out from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture finds that between 2030 and 2050, land area suitable for cocoa production will fall dramatically. While rising temperatures and changing rainfall pattern may shift cocoa production to land currently not suitable, the net impact to this $9 billion-per-year industry could be severe.

The news release makes clear that climate change is already having an impact on cocoa crops:

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The crucial climate strategy is aggressive deployment of every last bit of available low-carbon technology starting ASAP.  Anyone who isn’t in favor of that strategy understands neither climate science nor the current state of clean energy.  Sadly, that covers most of the traditional media and so-called intelligentsia.

Even the traditionally staid and conservative the International Energy Agency explained two years ago that “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”

Princeton Professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala became leading champions of the “deploy now” strategy with their 2004 in Science paper, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies.”

A wedge is a strategy and/or technology that, over a period of a five decades, ultimately reduces projected global carbon emissions by one billion metric tons per year (see Princeton website here).  “The 2004 wedges paper assumed that the objective of global mitigation would require a flat emissions rate for 50 years, followed by a falling rate. Making the same heroic assumption today would result in substantial additional emissions.”

The abstract of the Science paper read:

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO₂ to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

Socolow’s views were misreported back in May, and I interviewed him at length for a post (which he reviewed):  “Breaking: Socolow reaffirms 2004 ‘wedges’ paper, urges aggressive low-carbon deployment ASAP.”

He made clear he stands behind every word of that abstract — and the carefully-worded title.  Indeed, if Socolow were king, he told me, he’d start deploying some 8 wedges immediately.

Socolow has updated that now to deploy 9 wedges starting immediately — in a paper titled “Wedges Reaffirmed,” published this week by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Climate Central. You can find a number of interesting responses to the new paper at those links.

I have spent a lot of time talking to Socolow over the years.  We agree on the vast majority of things, but take a slightly different view of the science, which I’ll discuss below.

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The small wind industry is, well, small — representing about 50 MW of capacity additions each year around the world. But new project additions are set to triple by 2015, bringing yearly capacity up to 152 MW, according to a new analysis from Pike Research.

That steady scaling will allow total installed costs to fall further, declining from about $5.40 per watt on average today to $4.10 per watt in 2015.

And guess what? The U.S. will continue to dominate in manufacturing and installing those units. According to the American Wind Energy Association, two thirds of all small wind systems deployed around the world are manufactured in the U.S. And in the American market, 95% of all turbines sold are made domestically.

Small wind may not be a mega-industry, but it does provide solid economic value.

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Last week, I wrote about the climate activism and education efforts brewing in the snowsports community. We highlighted a new ski film called All.I.Can, which attempts to get people thinking about the impact of climate change — all while showing off the best in extreme skiing.  Guest blogger Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, went to the premier of the film and brought back this story.  —Stephen Lacey

This story was originally printed in Outside Magazine and was reprinted with permission.

If there’s snow around, and you give an Inuit child one ski, or a Moroccan elder a plastic bag, both will naturally do one thing. They’ll slide downhill. Why? Because having fun is a piece of being human. A big piece.

That’s why 1,500 youth, but also some grandparents and half a dozen infants, gathered September 23 on a rainy night in Whistler, British Columbia, for the world premiere of All.I.Can, a new ski film by some young and ambitious Canadian upstarts called The Sherpas. The crowd screamed at the expected ski acrobatics, but they also sat captivated and in awe as the film delivered a subtle message not typically found in so called “ski porn.”

All.I.Can explores the common joy human beings of all cultures and ages derive from sliding on snow—and what we stand to lose if climate change destroys that opportunity. The film forces viewers to reflect on the beauty (and therefore preciousness) of the world—not just the snowcovered parts, and not just nature—as a source of redemption and happiness.

Walking around the lobby, I ran into representatives from Snowriders International, a new NGO dedicated to snowsports and the environment. It reminded me of the Mountain Riders Alliance, also formed recently “to develop values-based, environmentally-friendly, rider-centric mountain playgrounds that encourage minimal carbon footprint.” Just last week I joined big mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones in Washington, D.C., along with Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler and skier Chris Davenport, fresh from the top of Everest, to ask legislators to save our $66 billion winter sports industry from climate change. Jones, who has two children, started his nonprofit, Protect Our Winters, in 2007 in response to the visible changes he’s seen in the world. POW has 30,000 followers on Facebook.

Welcome to the cold revolution. The first generation of new era hot shots, initially out for a sick thrill, is looking for meaning, and they’re finding it primarily in the struggle to solve climate change.

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By Jill Fitzsimmons in a Media Matters cross-post

The coverage surrounding Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that declared bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee, has been sloppy on the part of both mainstream and conservative media outlets. It has also been remarkably abundant.

Between August 31, when Solyndra suspended operations, and September 23, six major print outlets discussed the story in 89 items (news and opinion).  Broadcast and cable TV networks discussed Solyndra more than 190 times, totaling over 10 hours of coverage — 8 hours of which occurred on the Fox News Channel.

To put the volume of Solyndra coverage into context, we examined how much attention major print and TV news outlets gave to 1) an obvious case of government corruption exposed in 2008 at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), and 2) a report exposing much greater loss of taxpayer dollars through military contracting waste and fraud. The charts in this post capture our results:

The data for ABC, CBS and NBC are shown by minutes of airtime:

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

Rains wreak havoc across Southeast Asia

More than 100 people have died and tens of thousands of others have been displaced as monsoon rains continue to wreak havoc across Southeast Asia.

In Cambodia and southern Vietnam, more than a 100 people have died this week in the worst flooding along the Mekong River in 11 years. Heavy rain swamped homes, washed away bridges and forced thousands of people to evacuate.

Worse could be in store if Typhoon Nesat, which killed at least 39 people in China this week and is expected to pound northern Vietnam on Friday, dumps rain deep enough inland to further swell the Mekong.

Floods are affecting hundreds of thousands of people throughout India, the Philippines, and now Thailand. One-third of Thailand was deluged and Chiang Mai, one of the largest cities was being prepared for evacuation.

China issued its first red alert weather warning of the year as Typhoon Nesat moved closer. In Guangdong province, waves damaged a seawall, causing serious disruption to transport and about 300,000 people fled from their homes there and in Hainan province.

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Climatologist Slams Media for “Silent Summer”:  Poor Coverage of Link Between Extreme Weather and Human-Caused Climate Change

The nation’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has a new paper out — and he has been speaking out.  At 350.org’s Moving Planet event in New York on Saturday, he said:

“Climate change — human-made global warming — is happening.  It is already having noticeable impacts…. If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

Hard to argue with that.

The combination of extreme heat, constant Dust-Bowl conditions in the Southwest and South central, the whipsawing from drought to deluge in the Southeast, and decade after decade of sea level rise will create nearly intolerable conditions by century’s end (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impact”).  Conditions might look a lot like this:

Oops, that’s the US Drought Monitor for Texas this week!  Dark red is “exceptional drought” (covering 86% of the state) — virtually no rain for a year.  Red is “extreme drought” (covering 97% of the state) — a Palmer Drought Severity Index of -4 or worse.

Imagine what it will be like when much of the South is like this most of the time (other than the occasional record-smashing deluge) — and temperatures are some 9°F to 11°F warmer on average.  It will be the great repopulation of the North.

Hansen also has a new paper out on climate change in which he says:

It is time for all of us to get Tea-Party-angry about what our political system has become and about the intergenerational injustice being perpetrated on young people.

Again, no argument here.

The most interesting part of the paper is his critique of the media coverage (“Silent Summer”), his discussion of the intimidation of climate scientists, and a tantalizing introduction to a forthcoming analysis on extreme weather and attribution to human emissions.  Also, he doesn’t like the phrase “global weirding.”  Here are the highlights:

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A new economic analysis of the costs of pollution to the United States finds that coal power is harming the economy. In the American Economic Review article “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy,” economists Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus model the physical and economic consequences of emissions of six major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, fine particulate matter, and coarse particulate matter) from the country’s 10,000 pollution sources. They estimate the “gross external damages” (GED) from the sickness and death caused by the pollution, and compare that to the value added to the economy:

Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. . .

Coal plants are responsible for more than one-fourth of GED [gross external damages] from the entire US economy. The damages attributed to this industry are larger than the combined GED due to the three next most polluting industries: crop production, $15 billion/year, livestock production, $15 billion/year, and construction of roadways and bridges, $13 billion/ year.

“Five industries stand out as large air polluters,” the authors write, “coal-fired power plants, crop production, truck transportation, livestock production, and highway-street-bridge construction.”

When the authors add in highly conservative estimates of the cost of carbon dioxide pollution, they find that “the damages caused by oil- and coal-fired power plants are between 30 and 40 percent higher.” With an estimated social cost of carbon — a damage estimate of global warming pollution — of $65 (far less than other estimates), the GED for coal-fired generators is 4.7 cents/kWh.

In other words, instead of being “cheap” and “affordable,” coal is actually the costliest fuel for electricity.

“The findings show that, contrary to current political mythology, coal is underregulated,” Legal Planet’s Dan Farber comments. “On average, the harm produced by burning the coal is over twice as high as the market price of the electricity. In other words, some of the electricity production would flunk a cost-benefit analysis. This means that we’re either not using enough pollution controls or we’re just overusing coal as a fuel.”

“Dow Corning invested $5 billion dollars to create a platform to innovate in the solar industry. And that’s a significant investment in the U.S. that generates jobs, innovation and in the green building space.“

In covering the Solyndra media circus, the press has been infatuated with the politics of clean energy. So they’ve often missed — or misreported — the most important story about the business community’s support of a sector that has had “explosive” jobs growth since 2003, as a recent Brookings Institution report found.

Last week, on the same day House Republicans held a hearing called “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs,” the Solar Decathlon opened up in Washington with only passing mention in the popular press. The event, which highlights the most innovative green building techniques using commercially-available technologies, is a showcase of the world’s top young talent in this budding sector.

Apparently that’s too much of a “feel-good” story. Leaving Decathlon coverage mostly to the trade press, major publications focused instead on the nonsensical Congressional attacks against clean energy.

But as House leaders issued a report last week calling green jobs a “propaganda tool” that supports a “political ideology,” members of leading international companies shrugged off the political attacks. Instead of paying attention to the political theater in Congress, they gathered at the Decathlon to talk about why efficiency and renewables are a such an important part of business.  Climate Progress spoke to a number of them for this story.

“It’s the core of the business,” explained Jim Pauley, senior vice president for government affairs at Schneider Electric, in an interview with Climate Progress. “It’s what we do.”

Schneider Electric is a leading international company providing technologies for electricity management — deploying everything from back-up systems for data centers to lighting control units in homes. Schneider is also managing the micro-grid that supports the homes at the Solar Decathlon.

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by Cole Mellino

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency that manages federal land and oversees thousands of oil and gas drilling operations, is considering whether or not to approve a proposed drilling operation of over 125 wells in Desolation Canyon – a remote canyon in northeastern Utah enjoyed by a variety of outdoor enthusiasts.

Proponents of drilling argue that it will create jobs. But at whose expense?

A recent study from the Center for American Progress outlines a compelling case for job creation by protecting public lands. The myriad employment opportunities from forest and water management, restoration and recreation are an important piece of sustainable economic development in the U.S.

Outdoor enthusiasts in Utah agree. There has been a major groundswell of concern in the state in response to the proposed drilling in Desolation Canyon.

“Utah’s outdoor recreation industry adds $4 billion to Utah’s economy, supports 65,000 jobs, and generates about $300 million in annual state sales tax revenue,” according  to Peter Metcalf, founder and CEO of Black Diamond Equipment, an outdoor sporting company.

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At the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, ThinkProgress Green interviewed Zack Rosenburg, the CEO and co-founder of St. Bernard Project. His non-profit organization has been rebuilding homes and lives in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. So far, the St. Bernard Project has rebuilt 405 houses with 36,000 volunteers, provided mental health services, and has created local jobs for unemployed residents and returning veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

With climate disasters on the rise, improving disaster preparedness and resilience is a critical need. Rosenburg believes that the existing, bureaucratic structure for disaster relief needs to be revamped drastically to be much more efficient, rapid, and responsive, because “time matters in disaster recovery.” The project still has 130 families on their waiting list for home rebuilding in New Orleans. There are 10,000 American families that are still displaced from that disaster, and 200 families are still living in FEMA trailers. The project has also been asked by the city of Joplin, MO to take over the construction part of their recovery from the devastating tornado.

“Disaster recovery in America is broken,” said Rosenburg.

Watch the interview:

Rosenburg was at CGI as a guest of Toyota. In an interesting partnership, Toyota engineers are teaching the St. Bernard Project to build houses quicker, more efficiently, and cheaper, applying the business practices Toyota uses with its automobile construction. This contribution from the Toyota Foundation compares to the kind of business consulting that companies like McKinsey provide at high cost, usually out of reach to small non-profits.

The St. Bernard Project is not alone in its mission. At the Solar Decathlon now taking place on the National Mall, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team has built Re_home, designed explicitly to be a permanent residence prefabricated for rapid response to disaster situations. Green construction also fits the philosophy of trying to reduce the risk of disasters before they start, in part by reducing the greenhouse pollution that is making our weather more extreme.

“I’m really proud of the Obama administration in taking a much more aggressive and proactive role in dealing with these inevitable disasters,” Rosenburg said. He is also hopeful for the future, inspired by the outpouring of help from around the country. “America wants America to be whole,” he believes.

Read more coverage of the Clinton Global Initiative from ThinkProgress.
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