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

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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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