Media Bias: Solyndra v. Keystone XL |
In recent weeks, email communications between Obama administration officials and corporate executives at energy companies have come to light. Television coverage of the Solyndra photovoltaic company’s bankruptcy has been wall-to-wall, with over 190 mentions and 10 hours of coverage (led by Fox News) between Aug. 31 and Sept. 23. Meanwhile, emails from the permitting process for TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline show a complicitous relationship between State Department officials and corporate lobbyists. Coverage of the dirty energy scandal has been nil, Media Matters finds.
NEWS FLASH
Robert Bryce Raises Climate Denial To New Levels Of Stupid |
“The science is not settled, not by a long shot,” writes disinformer Robert Bryce in the Wall Street Journal. “Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.” This argument might — repeat, might — not be the dumbest argument against global warming ever concocted.
The Yale Project on Climate Change Communications asked Americans “If you had the opportunity to talk to an expert on global warming, which of the following questions would you like to ask?”
The top question, as reported in their “Global Warming’s Six Americas in May 2011” report, is “How do you know that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, not natural changes in the environment?”
So this is a question that all climate hawks should be able to answer, and the figures/charts in this post are ones that you can refer to. I just used this post myself today during a radio interview.
Given the popularity of my recent “Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts,” which collected and summarized dozens of posts covering some 50 scientific articles, I thought I would occasionally repost updated versions of other important pieces and reviews.
Revealing Interview with Ethicist Who Withdrew from Panel, Equally Revealing Article by Panel Member on Report’s Dysfunctional Process
Earlier this week a panel of experts released a report calling for more research into geoengineering — directly manipulating the Earth’s climate to minimize the harm from global warming. This panel, put together by the Bipartisan Policy Center, inanely — and pointlessly — tried to rename “geoengineering” as “climate remediation.”
Geoengineering is not a remedy. No one should try to leave the public with any such impression.
Frankly, it would be more literally accurate to rename geo-engineering “smoke and mirrors,” as those are two of the most widely discussed measures for managing incoming solar radiation.
Climate Progress has an exclusive interview with Prof. Stephen Gardiner, an ethicist who has written extensively on climate change and geoengineering — and who withdrew from the panel earlier this year. I contacted him when I learned he had originally been on the panel. He confirmed “I was indeed originally on the panel.” He “withdrew in March of this year when it became clear to me that there wasn’t going to be movement on some of the report’s recommendations, and I wouldn’t be able to endorse them.”
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), one of the top climate hawks in the U.S. Congress, is calling on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to reject the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The signatories raise the specter of corruption in the use of a former Clinton campaign official as TransCanada’s top lobbyist. In a letter signed by several fellow House Democrats, Blumenauer “says newly released emails of exchanges between the State Department and TransCanada have tainted State’s review of the project”:
Rather than acting as fair arbiters of TransCanada’s application to build a massive pipeline across environmentally sensitive areas of the United States, State Department officials appear to have acted as little more than cheerleaders for the company’s bid.
Blumenauer’s co-signers are Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Tim Ryan (D-OH), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY). They also express concern that the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) developed by a TransCanada contractor for the State Department is flawed and inadequate.
“Given the significant risks of this pipeline route to our nation’s precious groundwater resources, and the serious questions recently raised regarding the impartiality of the EIS process, we encourage the Department of State to reconsider the decision not to evaluate alternative pipeline routes, and request that you find this proposed route not in the national interest,” they conclude.
Activists are planning an #OccupyStateDept protest and rally beginning tonight and continuing through Friday, when a public hearing on the pipeline will be held in Washington, DC.
Last week, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) said “We can’t compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines.” As Climate Progress noted, this defeatism is un-American in every respect.
This morning, President Obama responded bluntly:
I heard there was a Republican member of Congress who is engaging in oversight on this. And despite the fact that all of them in the past have been supportive of this loan guarantee program, he concluded, “You know what? We can’t compete against China when it comes to solar energy.”
Well, you know what?
I don’t buy that. I’m not going to surrender to other countries the technological leads that can end up determining whether or not we are building a strong middle class in this country. So we’re going to have to keep on pushing hard to make sure the manufacturing is located here, new businesses are located here and new technologies are developed here. And there are going to be times when it doesn’t work out, but I’m not going to cave to the competition when they are heavily subsidizing all these industries.
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund
Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee passed a bill out of committee yesterday that would waive 36 environmental, health, and tribal laws within 100 miles of U.S. land borders. H.R. 1505, the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, would give Customs and Border Protection, an agency under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, complete authority to waive these 36 laws if the agency deemed it necessary for border control activities. These laws include the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Superfund Law, and the Clean Water Act (see full list here).
Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), who sponsored the bill, defended it by claiming that “apparently we cannot have security with the present environmental laws.”
This bill simply removes the impediments, the prohibitions, and the restrictions. If Homeland Security needed to waive 36 laws to build the fence, those same 36 laws need to be waived for the border so they can do their job, and I defy anybody to tell me which of those laws has a higher priority than border security. You can have a good environment with security but apparently we cannot have security with the present environmental laws and the cavalier attitude in which they are being administered.
Watch it:
Democrats on the committee questioned why only environmental laws were included in the list, rather than bills regulating industrial development on public lands such as mining, energy development, and timber. They pointed out that if Rep. Bishop’s claim is true — that “unacceptable restrictions…prevent Border Security experts from doing their jobs” — then other laws dictating the use of federal lands should be included on the list. An amendment from Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) added two statutes governing mineral development and oil and gas extraction to the bill, and yet even after the amendment process, the bill remained almost entirely focused on rolling back environmental and health laws.
H.R. 1505 would also give Customs and Border Protection decision-making authority over federal land management agencies to conduct activities that “assist in securing” the U.S. border. This means that any recreational or industrial use of federal lands, such as hunting, fishing, hiking, grazing, mining, and many others, could be ended at a moment’s notice if Customs and Border Patrol demanded access to and control of a specific area.
For example, a hunting trip in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico or a fishing trip in Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota could be suddenly interrupted by new roads and fences. All of this could occur without any public notice or comment, or even judicial review. As ThinkProgress reported this summer, these authorities are “czarlike powers” for a single agency and could compromise our country’s critical checks and balances system.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) said yesterday that this bill should be thought of as “undocumented legislation,” in that Republicans are attempting to “sneak it into law” by claiming that border security and environmental protections cannot go hand in hand.
Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL): "We can't compete with China."
This morning, President Barack Obama bashed the Republican argument that the United States can no longer compete in global manufacturing. Earlier this week, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) said that the bankruptcy of Solyndra means that the United States should surrender the clean-energy race to China. “We can’t compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines,” Stearns told NPR, because one advanced-technology solar company that had received private and public financing had closed shop.
I heard there was a Republican member of Congress who is engaging in oversight on this. And despite the fact that all of them in the past have been supportive of this loan guarantee program, he concluded, “You know what? We can’t compete against China when it comes to solar energy.”
Well, you know what?
I don’t buy that. I’m not going to surrender to other countries the technological leads that can end up determining whether we’re building that in this country. So we’re going to have to keep on pushing hard to make sure the manufacturing is located here, new businesses are located here and new technologies are developed here. And there are going to be times when it doesn’t work out, but I’m not going to cave to the competition when they are heavily subsidizing all these industries.
Watch it:
In fact, the clean energy sector in the United States is one of the few bright spots for the middle class in today’s economy. The U.S. solar industry was a net global exporter by $1.9 billion in 2010. U.S. wind power capacity represents more than 20 percent of the world’s installed wind power. The clean energy sector grew by 8.3 percent between 2003 and 2010, nearly twice as fast as the overall economy, with good-paying jobs for blue- and white-collar workers.
However, Republicans like Stearns are actively trying to cripple the future of clean energy manufacturing, by killing off any rules or programs that reward clean work instead of fossil-fuel pollution.
By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 6, 2011 at 12:35 pm
This GreenTechMedia repost is a joint effort of the solar industry supergroup: Doug Payne, Donnie Fowler, Danny Kennedy, Ned Harvey, Tom McCalmont, Jigar Shah
By now the financial, political, and emotional fallout from the recent Solyndra bankruptcy filing is running at full tilt. Print, online, and social media channels are filled with the appropriate questions about what happened — who’s responsible, who’s accountable, and who’s going to pay for it?
Incumbent energy providers, including coal and oil, along with many politicians are cynically rushing to tout this event as the beginning of the end for renewable energy, while others see Solyndra’s collapse as merely a singular event that is part of an inevitable macro-trend toward a 21st century clean economy.
However, in reality, Solyndra was not the entire solar industry. It was just a manufacturer and supplier to the industry. Citing Solyndra as a grave indicator of the end of the solar industry is like noting that the demise of Goodyear would end the auto industry. As long as solar makes economic sense; systems will continue to be deployed.
So how about we all take a breath, step back, and look at what’s happening in the bigger picture that is the global energy business.
There are no silver solar bullets to America’s energy needs — but there is solar buckshot.
Solar Buckshot, aka Top 10 Reasons Why Solar Energy Will Win
For environmentalists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, the battle is about more than just transporting tar sands oil from Alberta. It’s about whether the United States — and the rest of the world — will finally come to its senses about global warming.
In the last three years, three things have happened to the climate movement, one political, one meteorological, and one geological. Taken together, they explain why 1,253 people were arrested outside the White House in late summer protesting the Keystone XL pipeline — and why that protest may be the start of something big and desperate.
Here’s the political thing: When Barack Obama was elected, he carried with him the hopes of people the world around that something might finally happen to break the 20-year stalemate that had prevented meaningful action on global warming. That hope was perhaps always excessive — but then, the man himself had done all that he could to encourage it. On the night he clinched the nomination he said that during his presidency “the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.” Waiting for a messiah, we managed to convince ourselves we might have found one.
American enviros sensed he had no real intention of battling the oil companies early on: Deciding between dealing with health care and with energy, he chose to use his considerable political capital on the former. You can argue that it made moral and political sense to deal with the last question of the 20th century before turning to the first of this millennium, or you can argue it didn’t. What you can’t argue is that health care used up that capital, as the rest of the world found out in Copenhagen. The president’s State Department team had managed to accomplish nothing in the year beforehand, leaving Obama and his Chinese counterpart to scribble together a last-minute plan for a meaningless set of voluntary commitments.
That movie didn’t end the way it was supposed to, and a few months later the president made not the slightest move as carbon legislation died in the U.S. Senate. In essence, 20 years worth of work was done, and mostly wasted; there wasn’t going to be a price on carbon in America, and hence not in most of the rest of the world, anytime soon — an assumption underlined by the results of the 2010 election.
By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 6, 2011 at 10:55 am
by Cole Mellino
According to the 2007 USDA Agricultural Census, the median age of farmers in the U.S. is 57. As of 2008, approximately 2-3% of the U.S. population is directly employed in agriculture. Only a century ago, half the U.S. population was employed in agriculture. The number of farms in the U.S. dropped from 7 million in 1930 to 2 million in 2000 — and of those 2 million farms, just 3%, produced 75% of the nation’s farm output.
All this means that food is being produced by a very small handful of older farmers — many of whom are not really farmers, but businessmen who hire low-paid farmworkers to do the work in massive, industrialized operations. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of innovative and sustainable farmers of an older generation. But it’s time for a new younger generation to become interested in farming and change the way that we farm altogether in this country.
That’s especially true since feeding 7 billion people, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion in a world of ever-worsening climate change will be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced (see “Global Food Prices Stuck Near Record High Levels” and links below).
Senate Dems Cave, Protect Big Oil Tax Breaks |
Senate Democrats have jettisoned President Obama’s proposal to help pay for jobs legislation by eliminating billions of dollars in oil-and-gas industry tax breaks, the Hill reports. Leaving them out could help Senate Democratic leaders corral votes from oil-state Democrats who put Big Oil over the nation’s interests.
Welcome to Clean Start, ThinkProgress Green’s morning round-up of the latest in climate and clean energy. Here is what we’re reading. What are you?
The floodwaters of Tropical Storm Irene that ripped up roads and washed into living rooms across Vermont took a dramatic toll on quaint old villages — filling white, steepled churches with muck and knocking 19th-century clapboard houses off their foundations. [AP]
The European Union should be allowed to force all airlines to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions whenever they land or take off from European airports, a top adviser to the bloc’s highest court said Thursday. [NYT]
On Wednesday, Mattel announced that it will stop using paper products from companies “that are known to be involved in deforestation.” [Blue Marble]
China is on course to exceed forecasts for greenhouse gas emissions because its economy is growing faster than expected and becoming “locked in” to carbon-intensive activities, two studies warn this week. [Guardian]
A year after its creation, a federal-state working group on Wednesday released a preliminary strategy for addressing long-term environmental problems along the Gulf Coast, including the disappearance of wetlands and a seasonal dead zone caused by runoff from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. [NYT]
“Every single chance they had to do business with Iran, or anyone else, they did,” one ex-employee of Koch Industries told Bloomberg, adding “You feel totally betrayed. Everything Koch stood for was a lie.” [Price of Oil]
Flooding forced the evacuation of hundreds of inmates from a prison in central Thailand on Thursday and a prominent think tank slashed its forecast for economic growth this year as farmland was inundated and a big industrial estate had to close. [Reuters]
The House on Wednesday evening rejected 13 Democrat amendments to a bill that would delay pending EPA regulations affecting cement plants, and was expected to reject 10 others that will be debated later tonight. [The Hill]
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar defended President Obama’s record on the environment amid deepening criticism from green allies over a 2008 campaign promise to “end the tyranny of oil,” saying that we’ve left the “Hummer Age.” [ABC News]
The October heat wave continues in Minnesota with record-breaking weather. [KARE]
By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 6, 2011 at 9:31 am
by Richard W. Caperton
Raise your hand if you know who permits transmission lines.
This should be easy, right? It’s the Department of Energy. And the Department of the Interior. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. (At this point, you’re out of hands to raise.) And the Department of Agriculture. And the Environmental Protection Agency. And tribes, states, counties, and cities.
The truth is, it’s not easy to permit a transmission line. It’s a cumbersome, laborious process that involves working with multiple agencies at multiple levels of government, all of which have an important role to play.
Even though it’s difficult, we can’t just give up the fight: we need to build more properly-sited transmission to carry additional clean energy and to reduce blackouts that harm our economy.
Yesterday, nine federal entities announced seven new transmission lines that will be pilot projects for a new permitting process. By coordinating schedules and processes, making work with Tribal governments more consistent, and reducing conflicts across agencies, this new process will reduce the permitting time for critical transmission investments.
It’s important to remember, too, that transmission lines don’t just appear out of thin air. Transmission lines are massive construction projects that will employ thousands of people in good jobs. These seven lines are expected to create more than 10,000 jobs across twelve states.
The announcement for this exciting new project had reactions from across government. Here are a few quotes:
The Conservatives are falling short on climate change targets, despite committing to spend $9-billion on efforts to meet them in 2010, according to a new report out of the Office of the Auditor General.
The report was filed as part of the 2007 Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, which requires the Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to assess the government’s progress towards meeting the goals outlined in Kyoto.
Predictably, the Conservatives, who do not support the international accord, got a failing grade.
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by Cole Mellino
by Richard W. Caperton
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
