U.S. Heat Records Continue Crushing Cold: Incredible 22 to 1 Ratio in August

Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and found that in August,”The over 3000 daily heat records swamped the 142 cold records by 22.2 to 1.”

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming.  And 22 to 1 is a stunning ratio.  In the last decade, the ratio averarged about 2 to 1 — see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.”  As Scolnik writes, “For meteorological summer (June-August) as a whole, the ratio increased to 11.4 to 1 … and the year to date is now at 3.4 to 1, more than 50% above the average for the previous decade.”

The meteorological summer was the third hottest on record in the NASA dataset.  This is particularly impressive because we’ve been in a  La Niña most of the year and were headed back into one –  and that is normally associated with cooler global temperatures.  It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

The “high-water” extremes this summer were record-smashing from Virginia, whose deluge was an “off the charts above a 1000-year rainfall,” to my hometown area around the Catskill Mountains, where Hurricane Irene was “the most devastating weather event ever to hit the region,” to Binghamton, NY, where “an extreme rainfall event unprecedented in recorded history has hit.” This is precisely what climate scientists warned would happen if we kept pouring  billions of tons of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, heating the planet up and putting more water vapor in the atmosphere to be entrained into monster superstorms — see the scientific literature here: Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment.

And, of course, there’s Texas to put the “hell” in “Hell and High Water,” a place where “No One on the Face of This Earth has Ever Fought Fires in These Extreme Conditions.” The NDCD has this stunning statistic on the severity of the Texas drought in its monthly “State of the Climate” Report:

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Cutting funding for advanced vehicles that would produce less carbon dioxide pollution to pay for extreme weather disaster relief is like cutting funds for Smokey the Bear’s fire prevention campaign to pay for forest fire damage.

by Daniel J. Weiss

This week the House of Representatives plans to vote on a continuing resolution for fiscal year 2012, H. J. Res 79, to fund the government from October 1 to November 18 while Congress debates and passes comprehensive spending bills for all of FY 2012. The CR includes “a total of $3.65 billion in disaster relief funding to provide much-needed assistance to the thousands of people affected by Hurricane Irene, recent wildfires, the devastating floods and tornados in the Midwest and South,” and other natural disasters. This is partly funded, however, by robbing $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan program. It is run by the Department of Energy and provides loans to auto and part supplier companies to help them retool their factories to produce significantly more efficient cars.

Providing assistance to the families and businesses harmed by recent disasters is essential for their lives and our economy. Unfortunately, stripping funds from ATVM would hurt employment. The ATVM loans to six companies have already created up to 42,000 jobs. Taking some of the unspent funds from ATVM for disaster relief shouldn’t affect these loans but it will make it impossible to fund the 18 pending loan applications worth a total investment of $9.8 billion and cost up to 43,500 jobs.

Of the 18 applications, Department of Energy information provided by sources on Capitol Hill indicates that six pending loan applications are in “late-stage term sheet negotiations” with an “estimated date of conditional commitment” expected “this fall.” These are the loans closest to finalization. These applications seek $5.6 billion in loans for these advanced battery, diesel, and hybrid van projects. The six projects could be announced by the end of the year but now may not be funded.

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Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain agreed that the federal loan to now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra involved corruption. Prompted by Chris Wallace, Cain claimed that President Obama “was trying to help one his political supporters” when the Department of Energy approved the $528 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, because one of the private investors in the company is a foundation started by a top Obama supporter. Ryan accused the administration of “crony capitalism at its worst,” predicting “billions more” in loan defaults:

RYAN: There are billions more of this exact kind of spending that came out of the stimulus that will produce these results we fear. This is industrial policy and crony capitalism at its worst. It’s exhibit A for how this kind of economic policy doesn’t work. We shouldn’t be picking winners or losers in Washington. We should be setting the conditions for economic growth so that the private sector can create jobs. Washington is not good at picking winners and losers, so we shouldn’t try.

Watch it:

Cain repeated Ryan’s assertion that the Solyndra case shows the danger of the government being “in the business of picking winners and losers.”

Ryan and Cain are dangerously wrong. The economic stimulus package — now hitting the end of its two-year time limit — reversed America’s economic tailspin. The clean-energy loan guarantee program, even accounting for the Solyndra bankruptcy, has been an astounding success, fueling billions of dollars of economic activity, and driving a recovery in American manufacturing. The American auto industry, supported by the Advanced Vehicle Technology loan program, has recovered and is now making some of the most efficient and popular cars in the world. The American solar industry had a positive trade flow of $1.9 billion in 2010, was a net exporter to China by more than $240 million, and added or expanded almost 60 factories in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and other rust-belt states.

The track record of the federal government under President Obama — with a selection process by career civil servants — has not been one of doing a bad job of “picking winners and losers” but helping create the conditions that allow private investors and entrepreneurs to create winners.

As ThinkProgress’s Marie Diamond pointed out, the only thing conservatives seem to dislike about “crony capitalism” is when their cronies in the fossil fuel and nuclear industry don’t get all the subsidies. Ryan is treading on thin ice when he accuses others of “crony capitalism” — his family benefits from the oil subsidies he has repeatedly voted to preserve.

At the New Republic, Timothy Noah notes that Republicans — the party of Big Business — don’t actually dislike “crony capitalism“:

But of course, “crony capitalism” was a liberal phrase long before it was a conservative phrase. Paul Krugman, for example, used it to cuff President George W. Bush about his pal Ken Lay in 2002. The term came into vogue during the 1980s. It makes much more sense as a liberal phrase because Republicans cozy up to business far more than Democrats do. (That’s why Perry is vulnerable to the accusation.)

If congressional Republicans really disliked crony capitalism they would back off from their support for Medicare Advantage, the money-losing, government-funded private sector alternative to Medicare, and for-profit colleges, which they want to shield from default limits on student loans. They would also stop trying to interfere with the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

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Nobody likes to see $500 million in taxpayer funds lost. But as Congress investigates the loan guarantee given to the now-bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra, it’s important to put the failed loan into historical context.

Not the chart of the day

America spends a staggering amount on the military (see here and chart to the right, which is NOT the Chart of the Day).  Heck, the U.S. Military spends $20 billion a year just on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan!

America has always backed ambitious military ventures — many of which have ended up as spectacular failures after sucking up tens of billions in taxpayer dollars. Political leaders accept these failures because advances in military technologies are deemed strategically important.

Clean energy plays an equally-important strategic role for our energy security, economic security, environmental security, and, most especially, national security.  Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases are now the greatest preventable threat to the security of Americans. Yet the Solyndra failure is being used to label clean energy as a “pet” project of the Obama Administration.  Some politicians are now threatening to derail an industry that every other country in the world sees as an important driver of economic growth.

Somehow, we can tolerate hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on military programs that may not produce results. But when a solar company goes bankrupt, the whole idea of making strategic investments in renewable energy is called into question. It doesn’t make sense.

So where does the Solyndra loan guarantee match up with previous security programs? The chart of the day, created by Philip Bump, says it all:

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By Tom Kenworthy, Center for American Progress senior fellow.

Another day, another bogus House GOP hearing on how “excessive” regulation of the energy industry is killing jobs and hurting consumers. Today’s is in Grand Junction, Colorado, and features the chairman of the House Small Business Committee’s subcommittee on agriculture, energy and trade, Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO). Among other subjects Tipton is scheduled to look into are the perils of government regulation of hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells and how the Department of Interior energy permitting process is working.

But if Tipton was really concerned about his Colorado constituents and their relation to the energy industry, he’d be holding a hearing based on a new investigative report by the non-profit journalism organization ProPublica, called “Science Lags as Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields.” For three years, ProPublica has been conducting extensive reporting on the U.S. natural gas boom and the widely used practice of hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The latest report focuses on widespread health problems reported by people living in communities that have been home to extensive natural gas exploration and production activities and how neither the federal government nor the states have done any serious investigations of the health impacts of drilling.

As the report concludes:

Hydraulic fracturing, along with other processes used to drill wells, generates emissions and millions of gallons of hazardous waste that are dumped into open-air pits. The pits have been shown to leak into groundwater and also give off chemical emissions as the fluids evaporate. Residents’ most common complaints are respiratory infections, headaches, neurological impairment, nausea and skin rashes. More rarely, they have reported more serious effects, from miscarriages and tumors to benzene poisoning and cancer.

ProPublica examined government environmental reports and private lawsuits and interviewed scores of residents, physicians and toxicologists in four states—Colorado, Texas, Wyoming and Pennsylvania—that are drilling hot spots. Our review showed that cases …go back a decade in parts of Colorado and Wyoming, where drilling has taken place for years. They are just beginning to emerge in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale drilling boom began in earnest in 2008.

Among the cases looked into by ProPublica was that of Susan Wallace-Babb, whose ranch in western Colorado was close to a natural gas well and storage tanks holding liquid hydrocarbons. Fumes made her sick, according to Wallace-Babb, including rashes and lesions, and she eventually started wearing a respirator and swim goggles when she went outside her house to attend to her farm animals.

In another case, investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency found benzene and other hydrocarbons in domestic water wells in Pavillion, Wyoming as well as “an unusual chemical variant of a compound used in hydraulic fracturing.” A health survey conducted by an environmental group found that “94 percent of respondents complained of health issues they thought were new or connected to the drilling, and 81 percent reported respiratory troubles.” As ProPublica reported:

“In some communities it has been a disaster,” said Christopher Portier, director of the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and the National Center for Environmental Health. “We do not have enough information on hand to be able to draw good solid conclusions about whether this is a public health risk as a whole.“

So few public figures who are not scientists or environmentalists speak out on climate change these days that it is noteworthy when one does.  MSNBC’s Martin Bashir show had a segment a few weeks ago on “The political legacy of Hurricane Irene” with historian Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Great Deluge,” about Katrina and New Orleans.

Bashir asked Brinkley whether Obama’s failure to mention climate change was an opportunity that’s been missed. Brinkley’s answer was quite solid for someone whose specialty is not climate:

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I’ve often said that future generations, which of course include future historians, will judge Obama (and Bush and all current political leaders) harshly for inaction on climate change.  How could they not when they will be suffering through multiple catastrophes post-2040 that could have been prevented or seriously reduced — widespread Dust-Bowlification; multi-feet sea level rise followed by SLR of 6 to 12+ inches a decade until the planet is ice free; massive species loss; the ocean turning into large, hot acidified dead zones; and ever-strengthening superstorms that bring devastation to country after country that equals or surpasses what has happened to Texas, large parts of the East Coast, Moscow and Pakistan and Nashville and New Orleans (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).

After calling on Obama to deliver “a presidential prime time address on global warming,” Brinkley, who has authored and edited books on Ronald Reagan, compares Obama’s inaction on climate to Reagan’s on AIDS.  He says “you see President Obama at this juncture needing to lead on  the global warming issue.”

Brinkley goes on to say:

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Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), best known for frequenting the prostitution services of the DC Madam, is joining the GOP’s Obama-bashing over Solyndra — the renewable energy company that received federal government loans before it went bankrupt. Vitter has even introduced a bill to increase scrutiny of taxpayer-financed renewable energy projects.

Vitter called the administration “reckless” for awarding billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy projects. That’s a particularly hypocritical charge coming from a man who has repeatedly asked for loans for those very same projects in his home state:

But Vitter was not always so critical of the loan program. Documents obtained by The Associated Press show he wrote to the Energy Department at least seven times since 2009 seeking money for projects that would benefit his home state.

One of the projects backed by Vitter, a company that makes activated carbon to reduce pollution at coal-fired power plants, has received preliminary approval for a $245 million loan guarantee.[...]

Vitter has also backed projects for nuclear power, renewable diesel fuel and a company that makes fuel-efficient cars.

Vitter’s bill would require that federal agencies conduct a full audit of any renewable energy projects that have received taxpayer money since 2009 — presumably including the projects he lobbied for.

“We can’t afford any more crony capitalism where the federal government picks winners and losers and then leaves taxpayers on the hook when everything falls apart,” Vitter said in a news release announcing the bill. The Time’s Swampland blog points out that the Senator doesn’t seem to be opposed to crony capitalism so much as he opposes the fact that his cronies haven’t benefited enough. So far, several of the projects Vitter has pushed have been turned down by the Department of Energy.

Vitter once also signed a letter complaining that the Energy Department was being too careful with loan guarantees for nuclear plants. The coal project he championed that received federal loans presumably isn’t crony capitalism because “clean coal isn’t renewable.” Vitter has also defended taxpayer funded subsidies for the five biggest oil companies and sought to protect Big Oil from liability for spills they caused.

So according to Vitter, Big Oil doesn’t need more oversight — just renewable energy firms. Republicans’ manufactured fury over Solyndra threatens to derail important clean energy investments around the country.

This Thursday, Republicans in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are holding a hearing called “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs.” Could they make their ideological opposition to clean energy any more clear?

The Solyndra bankruptcy and subsequent layoff of 1,100 workers has given opponents a platform to rail on green jobs as some kind of fantasy — even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

Case in point: There are now 100,237 jobs in the American solar industry, according to preliminary figures released this morning by the Solar Foundation. The organization is currently putting together its second solar jobs census, which will be released next month. The census tracks a diverse range of jobs in solar PV, solar thermal and concentrating solar power.

The Solar Foundation found that between August of 2010 and August of 2011, the solar industry grew by 6.8%, far outpacing the 0.7% growth rate of the overall U.S. economy.

According to figures compiled by the solar census researchers from an Economic Modeling Specialists database, jobs in the fossil fuel electricity-generation sector actually dropped by more than 1,600 over the last year. Meanwhile, the solar industry added more than 6,700 jobs.

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Keystone XL Pipeline Safety Standards Not as Rigorous as They Seem

TransCanada and the U.S. State Department have repeatedly touted safety standards for the proposed Keystone XL heavy crude pipeline as robust and unparalleled. As proof, they point to 57 “special conditions” that the Alberta-based pipeline operator has agreed to follow.

But environmental watchdogs counter that those much-boasted-about claims are based on nothing more than smoke and mirrors. And they have compiled evidence to back up their accusations.

According to recent research by the Natural Resources Defense Council, only 12 of the 57 conditions set by federal regulators at the Department of Transportation differ in any way at all from the minimum standards the DOT routinely requires for pipeline safety. NRDC is an advocacy organization intent on halting construction of the pipeline.

“Many of these safety conditions are just restating current regulations,” said Anthony Swift, the NRDC energy analyst responsible for the point-by-point study. “But they’ve been used as the cornerstone in the argument that we don’t need to worry about Keystone XL because these 57 conditions will solve any unknown safety risk that the pipeline poses.”

Is Obama dragging his feet on environmental issues to get reelected?

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Our guest blogger is Chris Mooney. This post is cross-posted from Mooney’s blog, The Intersection, which just moved to be part of Science Progress, the Center for American Progress’ science policy initiative.

Joe Romm is already on this, but I too note an important new poll from Stanford showing the public is shifting into the pro-global warming camp…or at least, the not-particularly-radical center of America seems to be moving that way. As Romm notes, “Interestingly, the polling shows that the biggest movement toward understanding the Earth has been warming occurred among independents, a 9.5% rise in those who believe the Earth has been warming.”

That’s great….except, the poll also shows that the denial flank is more sure of itself than ever:

– The percentage of Americans who are certain that warming has been happening has also climbed, from 45% to 53%.

– However, those who do not believe in global warming have become more resolute in their attitude (certainty from 35% in 2010 to 53% in 2011).

This gets us back to the “if they won’t join us, beat them” logic advanced by David Roberts a little while back. The idea is that you get together a strong enough coalition and you just drive over the opposition, since it is implacable anyway. And if the center is moving more towards accepting the science, then that’s a very good sign.

I support this argument in the following sense. I really do believe that if we could just come up with a national policy on climate change, the debate over the science would itself become far less intense–because we’d have put that question, essentially, behind us. It wouldn’t be as live an issue, people would fight over it less, and the current polarization would decrease accordingly. (Although many people would take the idea that global warming is “junk science” all the way to the grave.)

That said, I would really like to find a more sane way of resolving these kinds of problems. But if that isn’t possible…then damn the extremists, and full steam ahead.

CEO Says the Energy Future is a Renewable One

One of the world’s leading industrial energy giants, Siemens, is leaving the nuclear industry.  Speaking to Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper Sunday, Siemens CEO Peter Loscher explained that the company did not see a future in building new nuclear plants:

The move is a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March, chief executive Peter Loescher said.

He told Spiegel magazine it was the firm’s answer to “the clear positioning of German society and politics for a pullout from nuclear energy”.

“The chapter for us is closed,” he said, announcing that the firm will no longer build nuclear power stations.

After the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, governments all around the world are reconsidering their nuclear strategies.

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Members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which is responsible for governing the Democratic Party, have joined the movement to ask President Barack Obama to reject the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Last week, Democratic National Committee Member and Maryland state Del. Heather Mizeur circulated a DNC resolution asking Obama to stop the pipeline:

Delegate Mizeur asks her DNC colleagues from across the country to endorse the resolution as a way to voice their opposition to a project that would increase carbon emissions, place one of America’s largest aquifers in the line of danger, and do little to improve America’s energy security.

The resolution cites the protesters who engaged in civil disobedience at the White House and the national environmental groups and Peace Prize laureates who supported their cause. The following DNC members have signed the resolution so far:

– Heather R. Mizeur (Maryland)
– Gilda Cobb-Hunter (South Carolina)
– Pat Cotham (North Carolina)
– Carol Pensky (Washington, DC)
– Valerie Rongey (Washington)
– Rick Stafford (Minnesota)

Mizeur is promoting the resolution on Twitter with the hashtag #DNCtarsands. She has also set up a page for people to send their thoughts about the pipeline to the Democratic National Committee.

The resolution will be open for signatures from the over 200 DNC members until Oct. 5, 2011.

by Jorge Madrid and Adam James

With all the focus on Solyndra and the attacks on green jobs from the Right-wing noise machine, the mainstream media have completely overlooked the explosive success of the weatherization assistance program (WAP) funded almost exclusively by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

With a serious investment under the Recovery Act, WAP increased the numbers of homes weatherized by 1000 percent over any previous year since 1976. This means we are close to weatherizing as many homes in one month (25,000) as we previously did in one year. By the end of ARRA’s three-year lifespan next March, the WAP will almost double the number of homes upgraded in the first year of the program — bringing the total number of energy efficiency projects to 720,000.

The press has focused on negative, headline-grabbing stories about green jobs in recent weeks. But we should not lose sight of the fact that DOE programs like WAP are making a major impact. We already know energy efficiency retrofits create three times the jobs compared with oil and gas, and that WAP has boasted over 14,800 jobs in just the three-month ramp-up period from April to June 2011.  Furthermore, an earlier CAP analysis shows if we retrofitted just 40% of our nation’s building stock, we could create 650,000 permanent jobs over a sustained ten year period. The remarkable success of the WAP proves that weatherization can be a source of sustained job creation, and further solidifies the argument for why investments in clean energy are the right kinds of expenditures for these tough economic times.

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