When Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, he declared that future generations would remember it as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” More than three years later, the oceans are still rising and our planet has done more howling – in the form of extreme weather – than healing. In fact, the current political climate is actually headed in the wrong direction….

It’s not all Obama’s fault: His plans to rebuild America’s energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress. But the president has spent far too much time blaming others, when he could have been taking action on his own. Here are 10 things Obama could do right now – without any say-so from Congress – to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. All it takes is the will – and some political courage.

Jeff Goodell has a good piece in Rolling Stone on 10 steps Obama can take on climate without any Congressional approval.

He interviewed me, and you can probably guess what I said.  My suggestion is number 10 on the list.  I won’t reprint the whole piece, just the specific suggestions along with some excerpts.

What did Rolling Stone miss?

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ThinkProgress Green is covering the Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality live from New York City.

A day which began 23 hours ago in Mexico City at 7 PM local time on Wednesday has wrapped around the world, reaching New York City. Former Vice President Al Gore is leading the ultimate presentation of how greenhouse pollution is making our weather more dangerous and deadly, and leading the global discussion on how humanity can rise up to take back our future from the fossil-funded deniers.

Watch here:

ThinkProgress Green is reporting live from New York City, headquarters of the Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality event. The event is nearing its conclusion, with this hour’s presentation from Rio de Janeiro.

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress Green, Climate Reality Project CEO Maggie Fox explains why her fight against climate change is more than just a job — it’s personal. A lifelong expeditionary mountaineer, Fox spent years leading Outward Bound trips for teens and adults, exploring some of the most remote and beautiful places on the planet, from Alaska to the Himalayas. A lot of the time was spent climbing and teaching in Glacier National Park, learning to survive amid some of the biggest glaciers in North America.

Recently, she returned to Glacier National Park, flying over the park with reporters. The impact of what she saw left her almost unable to speak:.

Glaciers are bigger than big. Glaciers are worlds. The notion that a glacier could disappear in my adult life was incomprehensible to me. The vastness of them. The depth. The huge massifs they encompass. To be able to not just go back into the Himalayas but also here in the United States and actually fly over a national park whose name will have to be changed very shortly, because there are almost no glaciers left, and to see things that I climbed, and was fearful of my life in, are gone, virtually gone — had an impact on me that’s hard to describe.

Watch it:

Fox explained that what happens to the glaciers isn’t just an unfortunate consequence of our actions, but is also connected — like the rest of the natural world — to our fate as humanity.

“We inhabit the natural world,” Fox said. “We are of the natural world. It is a source of unbelievable joy and connection.”

“It doesn’t really matter if you don’t care about a particular finch or a glacier,” Fox concluded. “There are parts of the natural world that connect to all of us. Our connection to our planet is part of who we are as a people. Changing our planet is also changing us.”

When it comes to foreign policy, the saying goes that politics stops at the water’s edge.

When it comes to climate science, we say that politics should stop at the atmosphere’s edge.

One of us is a Republican, the other a Democrat. We hold different views on many issues. But as scientists, we share a deep conviction that leaders of both parties must speak to the reality and risks of human-caused climate change, and commit themselves to finding bipartisan solutions.

Kerry Emanuel, a climate and hurricane expert who happens to be a Republican, has co-authored a must-read op-ed with Peter C. Frumhoff, an ecologist. who happens to be a Democrat, “Candidates must deal with facts, not wishes.”

Here’s more:

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Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program Is Putting Americans to Work, Producing Cleaner Cars

by Daniel J. Weiss, Valeri Vasquez

Congressional Republican leaders have been fairly silent about President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act proposal to put people back to work despite the stalled economy. But even more discouraging is that they plan to undermine an existing program that employs thousands of Americans in the auto sector. They propose to slash $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program—signed into law and first funded under President George W. Bush—to pay for disaster relief. Helping Americans suffering from economic damages caused by extreme weather—the storms, floods, and droughts linked to climate change—should be a top priority. But chopping this program would compound economic harm by hurting American manufacturing plants and eradicating tens of thousands of jobs as companies retool to build more efficient vehicles for the future.

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 included the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program to help auto companies and their suppliers convert their domestic plants to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles and to create or maintain auto industry jobs. It provided direct loans to help them retool their facilities or build new ones to make parts or build vehicles that are at least 25 percent more efficient than cars in 2005. They must achieve a fuel economy of 34.4 MPG.

In 2008 Congress passed and President Bush signed into law $7.5 billion of credit subsidies to support $25 billion of loans to promote the production of energy-efficient advanced vehicles and component parts. Since then the Department of Energy has used approximately $5 billion of credit subsidies to provide $9.1 billion in loans to five companies, which created nearly 39,000 direct jobs and another 2,600 construction jobs in 11 states. (see chart above) The projects would reduce gasoline use by more than 311 million gallons annually.

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The climate is changing with unprecedented speed thanks to human emissions.  And so the extreme weather we are seeing today — more and more outside the bounds and “off the chart” of our record-keeping — is but a glimpse of an almost unimaginable future.

This is the second in a three-part post about how woefully unprepared we are for what’s to come.  Part 1 described how some key political leaders are reacting to today’s extreme weather events.  Part 2 lays out some of the factors that are producing a perfect storm of vulnerability.

by Bill Becker

The flood waters born of hurricanes along the East Coast and tropical storms in the Gulf, and by extreme storms and snow melt in the Midwest, are receding now. People in communities up and down tornado alley are making valiant efforts to rebuild.  Texans are selling off their cattle, praying for rain, watching wildfires devour homes, and trying to acclimate to three-figure temperatures.

The emerging consensus in the science community is that our weather over the last decade has become more violent because of global climate change.  Greenwire quotes John Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as saying that man-made global warming is to weather what steroids were to Barry Bonds.

But the worst news is that some types of the extreme weather we’re seeing today are likely to be with us for centuries to come and to become even more violent as result of our continuing greenhouse gas emissions.

Whether we can adapt to these changes in any civilized sense of the term remains to be seen. But we should do our best to minimize our vulnerability.  Ironically, some of our biggest vulnerabilities come from our own mindsets and practices over the last century, including how we’ve tried to protect ourselves from past natural disasters.  For example:

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The University of Lincoln-Nebraska athletic department is dropping a sponsorship deal with TransCanada, after the tar sands pipeline company’s “Husker Pipeline” ad received angry boos at a Cornhuskers football game:

A highlights video for the Huskers’ 1978 conference championship football team appeared on the giant HuskerVision screen inside the stadium. When the logo for the video’s sponsor appeared at the beginning and end, people in the stands began booing.

TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline is opposed by leaders in both parties in Nebraska, including the governor and both senators. Dozens of Nebraskans joined the civil disobedience protest in front of the White House last month to ask President Obama to stop the pipeline.

“We have certain principles regarding advertising in the stadium such as no alcohol, tobacco or gambling advertisements. We also avoid ads of a political nature,” Athletic Director Tom Osborne said in a statement. “Over the last two or three months, the pipeline issue has been increasingly politicized. Our athletic events are intended to entertain and unify our fan base by providing an experience that is not divisive.”

TransCanada has donated $137,000 in 2010 and $500,000 since 2007 to various non-profits in Nebraska.

President Obama with Bill Daley, the man who helped killed the administration’s ozone regulations (with the help of Cass Sunstein).  Photo: Pete Souza

– Dave Roberts, in a Grist cross-post

A new story in The Wall Street Journal confirms all my worst suspicions about Obama’s cave on ozone regulations, namely that it was a) a crass political move, b) driven by new Chief of Staff Bill Daley, and c) based on daft political logic.

Savor the irony of these three paragraphs:

On Aug. 16, Mr. Daley met with environmental, public-health and other groups to discuss the Environmental Protection Agency rule that would tighten air-quality standards. At one point he lamented that the issue couldn’t be worked out by consensus with industry, as the White House did with the auto industry on fuel-economy rules.

When the American Lung Association mentioned a poll showing public support for EPA standards, Mr. Daley appeared uninterested, according to one person in the room. “He literally cut the person off and said ‘I don’t give a [expletive] about the poll’,” this person said. A senior White House official said Mr. Daley wanted to hear arguments about the substance of the regulation and its impact, not political arguments, and he was uninterested in all polls on this topic.

The same day, Mr. Daley met with industry groups, who gave the White House a map showing counties that would be out of compliance with the Clean Air Act if the stricter standards were put in place. The map showed that the rule would affect areas in the politically important 2012 election states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio.

He wants to hear arguments about the substance of the rule … like how it would affect swing states in the next election!

Oh, man. So much to unpack here.

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Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) leaked confidential data about oil speculation to a number of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. Ordinarily, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body that oversees futures trading, does not provide identities of speculators to the public. However, the data leaked by Sanders provides a rare snapshot into the trading volumes by major speculators right before the oil price spike in the summer of 2008.

As experts from Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Massachusetts, and authorities have concluded, rampant oil speculation was the prime driver of the record high prices for crude oil three years ago.

To view a copy of the data, click here for documents leaked by Sanders. To view an organized spreadsheet, click here.

Notably, the top speculators are noncommercial players, meaning they are companies that simply and buy and sell crude contracts with no interest in actually refining and selling the product. Each contract in the list represents 1,000 barrels of oil. The documents show the total volume of trades made on one specific day shortly before the record high price of $148 per barrel.

The data, though revealing, still does not give a complete picture of trading strategies. Speculators invest in multiple private exchanges, and trading tactics can shift from day to day. Moreover physical plays, such as buying up large quantities of actual oil and storing it on tankers or in large containers, are still largely hidden from public view.

Tyson Slocum, an oil speculation expert at Public Citizen, reviewed the documents and spoke with ThinkProgress. He said that this data is important because it shows who the “big players are” and underscores the need for transparency and regulation in these so-called dark markets:

SLOCUM: What this tells us is who the big players are, because volume equates market share in a way, if you are driving volume, and if your volume is at a significant enough amount you become a price setter or at least a price trender where you’re going to have the effect of unilaterally influencing prices and that’s very significant. And you’ve got sort of a cascading effect, and the smaller traders are going to follow Goldman Sach and others will chase the leader, which is why Dodd Frank said Congress shall set position limits in these markets. Position limits would limit the market share, limit the positions banks could take. Dodd Frank recognizes the danger that one or two traders can have when they dominate the positions in a given market.

Professor Michael Greenberger, a former CFTC official, told ThinkProgress that the “short” positions outlined by the document might cause confusion because in many cases banks act simply as intermediaries for their clients. Critics will note the net short positions and assume incorrectly that many of these players were simply betting on prices to go down, not up. Greenberger explained that if you look closer at the data, the trading shows banks and other speculators were actually pushing the price up:

GREENBERGER: When you look at it carefully, the speculative money has all been heavily weighted in the favor of buying in the direction of the price going up. […] They go in and buy long in the regular futures market, which sends a long signal to the market, that there’s a supply problem that really doesn’t exist. To keep their long bets in place, they have to do something called the “Goldman Roll,” which is these contracts don’t go on forever. They expire. So what they have to do is sell short to get out of the contract when the expiration takes place, then roll around and buy long again to keep the long bet on the books. So the long bets are predicated on intermediate short bets, that are canceled out within three or four days of each other.

Regardless of the actual trading strategies, the volume makes clear that not only were Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as pension and sovereign wealth funds, among the top participants in the oil speculation bubble, but so were politically connected hedge funds. Elliott Management, one of the top hedge funds revealed by the documents, is led by Paul Singer, a billionaire investor and a major donor to Karl Rove’s network of attack groups and to Republicans on the Financial Services Committee.

As we have discussed on this blog, “all the major oil companies (Shell, BP, Occidental, etc) operate like Wall Street investment banks and use their privileged position in the oil market to make speculative bets on the price of oil.” An accidental leak of private Chevron data two months ago confirmed that the company relied on sophisticated speculation strategies, just as much as drilling and refining oil, to make a profit. This data seems to confirms that Koch Industries — a conglomerate that has admitted that it is among the top five oil speculators in the world — participates in the oil speculation market on the level of big banks.

The Dodd-Frank law passed last year contains a mandate that the CFTC crack down on rampant oil speculation by imposing position limits to curb the number of contracts held by participants in this market. As lobbying firms have spent months fighting these new rules, it is instructive to note that the biggest players 2008 oil price spike have also flooded campaign coffers of DC politicians, potentially hoping for influence in shaping these rules or weakening the CFTC’s hand (through budget cuts and other limitations). MapLight has compiled the campaign donations for some of the largest speculators revealed by Sanders’ leak, which can be viewed on this spreadsheet.

For more on Koch Industries’ role in deregulating the oil speculation market, carving out the infamous loopholes, and actually inventing the first oil derivatives, view our report here.

by Kiley Kroh

Yesterday, federal regulators released their report on the cause of BP’s April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. The report finds BP “ultimately responsible” for the catastrophe because it had sought to cut costs and save time, all at the expense of safety. The joint Interior-US Coast Guard effort is the conclusion of a 17-month investigation, the most exhaustive to date.

Though the brunt of the blame certainly falls on BP for its “failure to have full supervision and accountability over the activities associated with the Deepwater Horizon,” the report also cites key failures on the part of both Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton Co. as contributing to the eventual blowout.

The report concluded that a “central cause of the blowout was failure of a cement barrier.”  Halliburton ran cementing operations for the well that ultimately took three months to seal.  The report also criticizes drilling rig owner Transocean for two critical failures. First, rather than sending the escaping gas overboard, Transocean personnel used a piece of equipment that kept the gas on the rig, allowing it to ignite. And second, they subsequently failed to promptly alert engine operators that gas was detected.

The report echoes many of the same findings as previous probes – including those of the independent National Oil Spill Commission. The question now is whether the governmental involvement will carry any weight in Congress where Republican lawmakers in particular have said they are unwilling to adopt reforms until this investigation was complete. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has had no problem passing a host of bills that cater directly to the oil industry by simultaneously weakening oversight and opening vast areas of the US to new drilling.

On the regulatory side, the report notes that “stronger and more comprehensive federal regulations might have reduced the likelihood of the Macondo blowout.”  The Washington Post offers harsher criticism:

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

Don’t Be Fooled By the Solyndra Bankruptcy Circus — Solar Is Booming

By Time’s Michael Grunwald

I doubt the facts are going to matter much now that Republicans have latched onto the Solyndra solar “scandal,” and even if they did matter, I’d be the wrong guy to defend the Obama administration (and some of the world’s top venture capitalists) for making the same honest mistake I made.  After a few dozen Solyndra hearings like the one in the House today, nobody’s going to remember the Bush administration was just as hellbent to make this loan. Nobody’s going to care that all successful loan programs have failures, that the Solyndra venture was barely 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio, that there will still be over $2 billion in reserves for busted loans no matter how Solyndra shakes out. That’s politics.

But I do want to push back against the idea that Solyndra’s failure reflects some kind of failure of the solar industry. That’s just wrong. The solar industry is on fire, thanks to the same collapse in prices that doomed Solyndra.

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JR:  Chris Mooney, science journalist and author, is moving his blog The Intersection over to join our colleagues at Science Progress.  Chris was one of my inspirations for becoming a blogger, so I’m delighted he’s joined the American Progress team.  Climate Progress will be cross-posting the SP pieces that bear on climate change and science communications.

by Chris Mooney

Hi to all. I’m thrilled to be here at Science Progress—the next stage in what is nearly a decade long run for my science and politics blog, “The Intersection.”

Many of you may know me already. If you don’t, here are the specs.

I’m a science and political journalist and author, as well as a blogger, podcaster, and professional trainer of scientists in the art of communication.

I’m the author of three books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. And I’ve just completed the draft of a new book, which remains unannounced–but I tipped my hand a tad (but only a tad) with this recent article in Mother Jones.

I work regularly with the National Science Foundation to train scientists to be better communicators of their research, and travel monthly to different states to do so. (For more information on the “Science: Becoming the Messenger” program, see here.) I also blog twice a week for DeSmogBlog.com about climate change, and am a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast, with a new show airing every other Monday.

So what can you expect of this blog, “The Intersection,” at its new home at Science Progress?

I cover the policy and the politics of science, as well as the communication of science and a new area, the science of politics. I often invite guest bloggers with similar interests, like Jon Winsor and Jamie Vernon, to contribute as well.

So what does this mean?

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by Eban Goodstein

Events of the past year have starkly revealed the limits of an outside lobbying strategy to impact climate policy in Washington. Given the changed political landscape, and with climate change impacts accelerating, we need new strategies.

C2C Fellows is a new national network for young people aspiring to sustainability leadership in politics and business.

C2C Fellows will engage 300 students and recent graduates each year in intensive leadership training. We will challenge young people to consider: What skills and experiences are needed to become people of power, people with the ability to affect the future, within five to ten years? C2C will then support the Fellows to gain these skills.

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