Activists seasoned by weeks of civil disobedience in front of the White House dogged President Obama’s campaign manager today over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Jim Messina was greeted by about 40 protesters when he came to Harvard University to speak, including over a dozen activists who had been arrested during the White House protests. A majority of the activists had volunteered or worked for Obama’s election in 2008. As Messina tried to evade the rally, the protesters cried:

Obama can stop the pipeline, Yes He Can!

If Obama approves the tar sands pipeline, the protesters would no longer volunteer their time and effort for his re-election.

“Messina can probably expect my vote for Obama, but if he wants me to be excited about the campaign, to donate money and knock on doors like I did last time, President Obama needs to stop this pipeline,” protester Craig Altemose told ThinkProgress. Altemose, the executive director of the Better Future Project, is a graduate of Harvard Law School (like Obama), and was one of the more than 1,000 people arrested at the White House tar sands protests.

Just when it seemed like the debate about repealing oil and gas subsidies had faded away, President Obama gave the issue new life. Speaking at the White House yesterday, Obama proposed cutting certain tax credits to profitable oil and gas companies to pay for part of his $467 billion job-creation package.

“The bottom line is, when it comes to strengthening the economy and balancing our books, we’ve got to decide what our priorities are,” he said, speaking in the White House Rose Garden. “Do we keep tax loopholes for oil companies, or do we put teachers back to work?”

The president seems to have support from the American public. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted this July, 59% of Americans said they supported repealing permanent tax breaks for fossil fuel companies to reduce the deficit. While the funds would be used for a jobs plan rather than deficit reduction, the President and Democratic members of Congress are hoping to ride that support.

In an interview with Climate Progress last month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was bullish on the oil and gas subsidy issue. Even while expressing doubts about getting support for extending clean energy incentives, Reid said he believed it is possible to roll back certain permanent tax credits in the fossil energy sector:

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Sadly, the same media commentators who celebrate diamond planets without question are all too quick to dismiss the latest peer-reviewed evidence that suggests man-made activities are responsible for changes in concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere.

The scientific method is universal. If we selectively ignore it in certain disciplines, we do so at our peril.

The author discovered a planet that may be a 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond.  Diamonds are forever.  Is climate science denial?

Matthew Bailies is an astrophysicist and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at Swinburne University of Technology.  This is a repost from The Conversation.

Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar.

Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded that it was certain to be crystalline. In other words, we had discovered a planet made of diamond.

Following the publication of our finding in the journal Science, our research received amazing attention from the world’s media.

The diamond planet was featured in Time Magazine, the BBC and China Daily, to name but a few.

I was asked by many journalists about the significance of the discovery. If I were honest, I’d have to concede that, although worthy of publication in Science, in the field of astrophysics it isn’t that significant.

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By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Proponents of restricting presidential authority to create national monuments on federal land tried hard today during a congressional hearing to make the case that such land protections inhibit economic growth, but they ran headlong into a comprehensive economic study that clearly shows otherwise.

Both Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee’s subcommittee on public lands, and Jerry Taylor, the mayor of Escalante, Utah, spoke in favor of a suite of bills that would limit or strip a presidential authority dating to the 1906 Antiquities Act. The act gives presidents sole authority to create national monuments and has been used by most presidents of both parties for more than a century.

Taylor asserted that the 1996 creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah was an economic bust, and Bishop said the same was true for the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument on the Utah-Arizona border:

I don’t see where the monument has brought in any jobs for our community.

Here are the facts, authoritatively reported in a new study by Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonpartisan research center in Bozeman, Montana that looked at the economic performance of areas around 17 national monuments in 11 western states:

Between its creation by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and 2008, the communities around the 1.8 million acre Grand Staircase saw their population grow by 8 percent – and had job growth of 38%. During the same time period, real personal income rose by 40% and real per capita income jumped 30%. Service jobs saw an increase of 59%.

In the Grand-Canyon-Parashant region, jobs grew by 44 percent between 2000 and 2008, ten percentage points higher than population growth. Real personal income was up 44 percent.

And it wasn’t just Utah communities that benefitted. Not one of the areas surrounding the 17 monuments created since 1982 and studied by Headwaters Economics suffered economically. In fact, according to Ray Rasker, the group’s executive director, “In all cases there was growth of employment, real personal income, and real per capita income after designation of the national monument.”

Supporters of the various bills to change the monument designation process, either by giving Congress the sole authority or by requiring the president to get state approval before creating new monuments, contend they are trying to protect local economies from assaults by presidents and “faceless bureaucrats” hell-bent on launching federal “land grabs.”

The goal of his Senate legislation and a companion House bill, said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) at today’s hearing, “is to protect jobs.”

But the real goal is clear: the only jobs Hatch – up for re-election next year — and the others like Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT), also a candidate for Senate in 2012, are trying to protect are their own, by demagogic appeals to anti-Washington voters.

JR:  The disinformers like to say the extreme weather we are seeing today is nothing unusual.  They don’t live in Texas, where “No One on the Face of This Earth has Ever Fought Fires in These Extreme Conditions.” Or my hometown area around the Catskill Mountains, where Hurricane Irene was “the most devastating weather event ever to hit the region.”  Or around Binghamton, NY, where “An Extreme Rainfall Event Unprecedented in Recorded History Has Hit.”

Capital Weather Gang Chief Meteorologist Jason Samenow has the details on one more record-exploding extreme event in this repost.

On Thursday, September 8, Ft. Belvoir received an astounding 7.03” of rain in three hours. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), that amount of rain in that amount of time was an “off the charts above a 1000-year rainfall (based on precip frequency from Quantico).”

Chris Strong, warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS in Sterling, emailed media a note on the frequency of rain return from last week’s event, for locations in Maryland and Virginia. It’s extraordinarily impressive and reproduced in full below…

National Weather Service note:

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Our guest blogger is Matthew Bailes, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at Swinburne University of Technology. This blog post originally appeared at The Conversation, a new website with original writing from Australia’s research community.

Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar. Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded that it was certain to be crystalline. In other words, we had discovered a planet made of diamond.

Following the publication of our finding in the journal Science, our research received amazing attention from the world’s media. The diamond planet was featured in Time Magazine, the BBC and China Daily, to name but a few.

I was asked by many journalists about the significance of the discovery. If I were honest, I’d have to concede that, although worthy of publication in Science, in the field of astrophysics it isn’t that significant. Sure, there are probably somewhere between six and a dozen quite important theoretical astrophysicists around the world who would have been thrilled at the news (after all, the diamond planet fills a gap in the binary pulsar family).

But in the overall scheme of things, it isn’t that important.

And yet the diamond planet has been hugely successful in igniting public curiosity about the universe in which we live. In that sense, for myself and my co-authors, I suspect it will be among the greatest discoveries of our careers. Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.

How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists.

Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections. Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science.

Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings. People on the fringe of science would be quoted as opponents of our work, arguing that it was nothing more than a theory yet to be conclusively proven. There would be doubt cast on the interpretation of our data and conjecture about whether we were “buddies” with the journal referees. If our opponents dug really deep they might even find that I’d once written a paper on a similar topic that had to be retracted. Before long our credibility and findings would be under serious question.

But luckily we’re not climate scientists.

Our work is part of the astonishing growth in our knowledge of the universe, made possible by huge leaps forward in instrumentation and telescope technology. It may come as a big surprise to many, but there is actually no difference between how science works in astronomy and climate change – or any other scientific discipline for that matter. We make observations, run simulations, test and propose hypotheses, and undergo peer review of our findings. We get together (usually in nice locations around the world) and discuss and debate our own pet theories, become friends and form a worldwide community.

If you are a solid state physicist, an astronomer, or doing laser optics, the world is happy to celebrate your discoveries, use them in new products such as WiFi, and wonder about the growth in knowledge and technology.

Of course we all make mistakes. But eventually the prevailing wisdom of the community triumphs and the field advances. It’s wonderful to be a part of that process. But on occasion those from the fringe of the scientific community will push a position that is simply not credible against the weight of evidence.

This occurs within any discipline. But it seems it’s only in the field of climate science that such people are given airtime and column inches to espouse their views. Those who want to ignore what’s happening to Earth feel they need to be able to quote “alternative studies”, regardless of the scientific merit of those studies.

In all fields of science, papers are challenged and statistics are debated. If there is any basis to these challenges they stand, but if not they fall by the wayside and the field continues to advance. When big theories fall, it isn’t because of business or political pressures – it’s because of the scientific process.

Sadly, the same media commentators who celebrate diamond planets without question are all too quick to dismiss the latest peer-reviewed evidence that suggests man-made activities are responsible for changes in concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere.

The scientific method is universal. If we selectively ignore it in certain disciplines, we do so at our peril.

JR:  America’s future depends on rapidly accelerating the transition to clean energy.  That’s the only way to avert the chaos of peak oil and catastrophic climate change.

CAP’s Valeri Vasquez has the story of how Big Oil continues to bet against America’s future.

We’ve seen this movie before:   A global crisis rocks international energy markets, driving up the cost of petroleum. Spiking prices help Big Oil rake in huge profits, reinvesting handsomely in their own stock to spur share values and enrich senior executives. And they shamelessly defend billions of dollars in annual government subsidies even as the money rolls in.

But that’s not the least of it: the largest of these companies, ExxonMobil, pays a lower effective tax rate than the average American.  Meanwhile, families across the country are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of hard-earned cash at the pump because they’ve got few transportation options—gasoline runs the car that they rely on to get to work and ferry their kids to school.

Now, at the request of Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has confirmed just how little the nation’s five primary oil companies care to invest in the future of American energy security.

During these difficult economic times, oil giants are doing very little to drive the innovation that stands to free us from the financial turmoil in the world petroleum markets. A 2009 CAP analysis determined that while most of the top oil companies claim publicly to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development, these “greenwashing” campaigns are “little more than empty rhetoric.” All told, they devoted a mere 4 percent of their collective 2008 earnings to green R&D.

Despite the consistently massive financial gains that allow these companies to buy back their own stock—more than 50 percent  this year by ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips—the CRS Research and Development by Large Energy Production Companies report shows that the amount invested in clean energy R&D is miniscule. CRS researchers found that:

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As Herman Cain talked about “people who have been abused by the EPA” at the Tea Party debate last night, the coal front group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity ran a new ad with the same theme. “Today too many Americans are just trying to hang on to their jobs,” the ad says. “So why is EPA in a rush to push regulations that would saddle Americans with more energy costs and throw even more of us out of work?”

Of course, the only reason coal has gotten “cleaner” in the last 40 years is because of the EPA.

The other main sponsor of the debate was ExxonMobil, which ran ads promoting the safety of fracking and tar sands.

by Stephen Lacey and Richard Caperton

It’s often claimed that the Solyndra loan guarantee was “rushed through” by the Obama Administration for political reasons. In fact, the Solyndra loan guarantee was a multi-year process that the Bush Administration launched in 2007.

You’d never know from the media coverage that:

1. The Bush team tried to conditionally approve the Solyndra loan just before President Obama took office.
2. The company’s backers included private investors who had diverse political interests.
3. The loan comprises just 1.3% of DOE’s overall loan portfolio. To date, Solyndra is the only loan that’s known to be troubled.

Because one of the Solyndra investors, Argonaut Venture Capital, is funded by George Kaiser — a man who donated money to the Obama campaign — the loan guarantee has been attacked as being political in nature. What critics don’t mention is that one of the earliest and largest investors, Madrone Capital Partners, is funded by the family that started Wal-Mart, the Waltons. The Waltons have donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates over the years.

With a stagnant job market and Obama sinking in the polls, the media has decided on a narrative that matches right-wing talking points but not the facts.  For instance, Bloomberg had this incredibly misleading headline yesterday, “Obama Team Backed $535 Million Solyndra Aid as Auditor Warned on Finances.”  If you replace “backed” with “touted,” that would be accurate.  But the headline makes it seem like the White House had decided to give $535 million to a company after an auditor had said it was financially troubled.

You have to read half the story to learn that the loan guarantee was made in 2009 and the audit was done in 2010 after market conditions had sharply worsened! And the Bloomberg story never explains that the company itself raised $250 million from private investors after the supposedly devastating audit!

To set the record straight, Climate Progress is publishing this timeline — verified by Department of Energy officials — that shows how the loan guarantee came together under both administrations. In fact, rather than rushing the loan for Solyndra through, the Obama Administration restructured the original Bush-era deal to further protect the taxpayers’ investment:

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JR:  Please spend some time on the Climate Communication website and provide feedback in the comments section here.  It’s an important effort, and they can use the wisdom of the CP crowd.

by Susan Hassol, Director of Climate Communication

Joe Romm asked me to write a guest post introducing you to Climate Communication — a new science and outreach organization dedicated to improving public understanding of climate change science. Before I do that, I want to say that Joe does a remarkable job of keeping Climate Progress readers informed on an impressively wide variety of topics related to climate change. And he does so in a rapid response mode that is truly amazing. It’s the first site I send people to when they ask where they can go to keep up with what’s happening on a daily basis with climate change. We at Climate Communication are doing something different, as I’ll describe below.

This is a critical time. The science has never been more clear and compelling. Yet the public has never been so confused and misled. There is much to tell, and there are many scientists who are talented at and committed to telling it. People need to know the facts, and there are labs and universities ready to offer them. People also need to hear the stories of climate change, from scientists and other messengers whom they trust. The need is urgent, as the time for effective action is short. In this context, Climate Communication was born.

I’d spent a couple of decades working with climate scientists to communicate their work to the wider public. I had helped to put a lot of great reports on the shelf (see for example: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, Impacts of A Warming Arctic, etc.). But if a tree falls in the forest and not enough people hear, then what?

So we’re here to do everything we can to bring the science forward in a way that it can be heard. We’re still doing much of what I’ve been doing for a long time: helping scientists produce accessible reports and other science-based materials. But we’re also doing a lot more.

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Solyndra, a California green-tech company banking on the success of advanced solar-cell manufacturing, fell into bankruptcy when silicon prices collapsed. After receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee, the company’s records are under investigation by the FBI. Now RNC chairman Reince Priebus is claiming the company is a “prime example of stimulus failure” and “taxpayer-funded cronyism” because one of the investors, George Kaiser, is an Obama fundraiser:

Solyndra’s downfall puts a spotlight on the kind of taxpayer-funded cronyism this White House said it would eliminate. After bundling tens of thousands of dollars for President Obama and his campaign, company officials were granted at least 20 visits to the White House and had Energy Department officials sitting in on company board meetings.

However, Solyndra’s top investors also include the Republican Walton family. The CEO, Brian Harris, is also a Republican.

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

Coal Industry Backs Boehner

U.S. coal companies have pumped $1.5 million into House Speaker John Boehner’s political operation this year, a sign of the industry’s beefed-up efforts to fight new and proposed regulations from the Obama administration.

The coal industry now ranks as one of the top sources of cash for the Ohio Republican, rivaling such perennial GOP donors as Wall Street and the real-estate industry. A large part of the coal industry’s donations came in a single week at the end of June.

Donations from coal-industry interests account for more than 10% of the $12.5 million Mr. Boehner collected from Jan. 1 to June 30 for fund-raising accounts he directly controls. Mr. Boehner’s personal campaign account collected less than $200,000 from the coal industry during the entire 2009-10 election cycle.

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For a while, we almost had it. Before America’s comprehensive climate and energy bill turned into a devastating failure in 2010, the U.S. seemed to be on the verge of having an energy plan based on a sustainable vision for the future. But today, with “climate,” “clean energy investment” and “green jobs” being dirty words to one major political power, we’ve moved further away from that goal than ever.

That’s why the Rocky Mountain Institute’s recent project, “Reinventing Fire” — a peer-reviewed, commercially-viable vision for the future of energy — should help inform the future conversation around energy. In typical RMI fashion, it provides an aggressive-but-plausible scenario for economic prosperity based on clean energy and efficiency, blending together the different disciplines from the organization.

RMI’s book on Reinventing Fire will be out soon. For now, the organization reminds us where we are today and what the future could be:

1. The U.S. transportation sector burns 13 million barrels of oil a day (half of it imported), at a cost of $2 billion. Personal transportation is now America’s #2 consumer cost after housing, totaling $740 billion in 2009 and consuming, on average, 17.6% of household expenditures.
2. America’s 120 million buildings consume 42% of the nation’s energy—more than any other sector. If they were a country, they would rank third after China and the U.S., in primary energy use.
3. We spend more than $400 billion a year to heat and power buildings, even more than the government spends on Medicare.
4. U.S. industry employs almost 131 million people and generates more than 40% of U.S. GDP, but uses roughly one-fourth of the nation’s total energy per year.
5. 86% of U.S. electricity is generated in large, centralized power plants.

What could the energy landscape of 2050 under the Reinventing Fire scenario look like?

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