Top climatologist Calls Key Allen Critique “clearly wrong.”

Myles Allen, with the complicity of the UK’s Guardian, has put words into Al Gore’s mouth in order to attack the Nobel-Prize winning former Vice President.  What makes this attack a particularly egregious breach of journalism is that Allen and the Guardian could have avoided it had they spent even 30 seconds reading their own damn links.

As we’ll see, what Gore is actually saying about the link between extreme weather and climate change is something countless scientists and independent experts have been saying — and throughout this post I will run through what many of the experts have said.

Indeed, the journal Nature just ran a story just last month with this headline:

Climate and weather: Extreme measures

Can violent hurricanes, floods and droughts be pinned on climate change? Scientists are beginning to say yes.

It is in this context that we have this phony attack on Gore in the Guardian:

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Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) is the country’s top polluter. Unsurprisingly, then, before releasing his energy plan Friday, the presidential candidate released a new attack ad and op-ed that lay out a strategy of drilling for more oil and gas, rolling back clean air and clean water standards, and spewing out a whole lot of misleading claims about the EPA.

Perry’s plan for developing more oil, gas and coal with limited regulation is straight out of 1911, not 2011. But then again, this is a guy who has stuck with his dangerously ignorant attacks on human-caused climate change — all while his state withers under the worst heat and drought ever experienced in Texas.

In an op-ed published in New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper, Perry made it clear he wouldn’t just  “pray away” environmental regulations — he would make every effort to repeal them:

As President, I would roll back the radical agenda of President Obama’s job-killing Environmental Protection Agency. Our nation does not need costly new federal restrictions, especially during our present economic crisis. I would also oppose federal restrictions on natural gas production, including hydraulic fracturing, which is successfully regulated at the state level, and will deliver the energy needed to spark our economic recovery.

Much of my plan can be accomplished by changing the occupant of the White House and removing the liberal, anti-job activists running regulatory agencies in Washington. With the stroke of a pen, I will initiate a review of all Obama-era regulations, begin a comment and review period, and work to eliminate onerous rules that kill jobs with little benefit to the environment.

Somebody call the locksmith. Rick Perry is ready to shut down the EPA and drive out the supposed “anti-job” activists who care about a healthy environment and a livable planet.

Those regulations that Perry and other candidates keep calling “job-killers?” According to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they’re actually having a lower impact under the Obama Administration than they did in 2008 at the end of the Bush Administration (see chart below). Bruce Bartlett, a former senior official with the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, had a great op-ed in the New York Times on the false claims that Republican candidates make about regulations:

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

Ouch.

Perry continues with the political opportunism by making some very misleading statements about the impact of EPA regulations:

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– Bill McKibben’s remarks to Occupy Wall Street at Washington Square Park Saturday.  Video at the end.

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.

On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.

The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.

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Following the toxic coal ash disaster of Christmas 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been developing long-neeeded rules for coal ash disposal, after decades of ignoring the dangers. The Utility Solid Waste Activities Group (USWAG) has claimed that strict regulation of ash disposal could lead to the loss of more than 300,000 jobs. An independent analysis by economist Frank Ackerman finds the industry claim “simply unbelievable,” because he discovered “arithmetic errors,” “wild extrapolation,” and a “groundless claim about potential losses due to the stigma of regulation.”

When Ackerman reconstructed the job-impact analysis of strict coal ash regulation that compares the employment costs of higher electricity prices to the employment benefits of increased spending on coal ash safety, he discovered that there would be a net increase of 28,000 jobs:

This report presents a new analysis of employment effects, based on an industry estimate of the costs of regulation that is much higher than the EPA’s cost calculation. The cost estimate I use was, in fact, developed for another industry group by the same consultants who claimed that more than 300,000 jobs would be lost.

Using that industry estimate for the cost of regulation and the well-known IMPLAN model of the U.S. economy, I show that the effect of the new spending required by strict regulation of coal ash, including expenditures for waste management, wastewater treatment, and construction and operation of facilities and equipment, combined with the impact of the resulting electricity rate increases on consumers, would be a net gain of 28,000 jobs.

Job impacts are not the only basis on which to judge new regulatory proposals. The debate should center on the magnitude and importance of the health and environmental benefits that would result, and the reasonableness of the costs of achieving those benefits. The fact that strict regulation of coal ash disposal would create a net increase of 28,000 jobs doesn’t, by itself, clinch the argument for such regulation. But it does free us of the unfounded fear of massive job loss, allowing us to evaluate the regulation on its merits.

In Congress, Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) has been pushing a bill to strip the EPA of the authority to regulate coal ash. The Recycling Coal Combustion Residuals Accessibility Act of 2011 (HR 1391) passed out of subcommittee in June but has not been taken up for consideration by the full House.

Ackerman is the Director of the Climate Economics Group at the Stockholm Environment Institute-United States at Tufts University.

Meanwhile, American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist says: “Anybody dismissing any type of job is silly.”

by Kate Gordon

Another day, another attack on the growing and popular clean energy sector.

You would think that renewable energy and energy efficiency companies actually creating jobs during a recession would be something to celebrate, not something to disparage. You’d think that the public’s strong support of clean energy programs — including the 62 percent of Americans who specifically support public investment in clean energy jobs — would help to immunize these firms from attack.

But you’d be wrong. Witness today’s Wall Street Journal story, “Green Jobs Brown Out,” which repeats all the same old and misleading criticisms of green jobs and government support of job growth in these critical industries. Let’s take the story apart piece by piece:

“Three years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade America would have five million green jobs.”

Actually, the President promised that if America would take strong actions to move the economy from a volatile, fossil fuel-driven path to a low-carbon energy path – actions including passing an economy-wide cap and trade program, implementing a national renewable energy standard, and investing $15 billion/year over ten years – we could create five million jobs in the clean energy sector. The problem? We haven’t passed any of those critical policies, meaning that carbon still doesn’t have a price, and so low-carbon technologies are competing on a playing field heavily skewed toward “cheap” and dirty resources.

Oh, and by the way, ten years hasn’t passed yet.

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37-Year EPA Veteran:  Oil & Gas “Industry is Targeting the Times” Because its Fracking Series “Had an Unprecedented Role in Prodding EPA into Action”

by Weston W. Wilson, environmental engineer, in a Climate Progress exclusive

As the boom in shale gas continues, the country finds itself at a crossroads. How will the government regulate hydraulic fracturing in order to keep air and drinking water safe?

In spite of the importance of these efforts, the oil and gas industry has launched yet another slick, well-funded campaign to resist oversight. Their campaign depicts EPA as an over-reaching bureaucracy driven to regulate companies into bankruptcy, killing jobs and preventing U.S. energy independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. EPA has had a limited role – too limited in fact – in regulating drilling, a responsibility that has been left almost entirely to the states.

The oil and gas industry has also criticized EPA’s effort to conduct a rigorous multi-year study of the potential environmental risks of a drilling technology known as fracking, which is driving the current drilling boom. But isn’t it in everyone’s best interest to have good science guiding a practice that may affect the water we drink and the air we breathe? And isn’t this EPA’s fundamental role?

This is not the first time that the EPA has studied fracking, nor the first time the industry has exerted strong pressure on EPA to soften the outcome.

In the 1980’s the agency set out to determine whether oil and gas industry waste should be considered hazardous waste.  They produced a report that concluded there was no need to make the oil and gas industry follow the same rules as other industries when it came to disposing of their waste because, EPA alleged, the risks from drilling were low. But an early version of the same report concluded the waste was in fact hazardous and should be closely controlled. EPA scientists who had worked on the report blamed political pressure for the reversal.

This same pattern continued during my tenure at EPA.  EPA’s 2004 report on hydraulic fracturing found little to no risk to water supplies. But this was contradicted by evidence of the toxic chemicals used by the industry that could create significant risks. The panel in charge of the final report was filled with industry representatives. Five of the seven members of that peer review panel were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry, including a representative from Halliburton.

Recently, the industry has attacked media venues for raising important questions about drilling practices.

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Food prices are stuck near levels not seen since the late 1970s.  And the United Nations expects that trend to worsen well into the future.

Those are the findings of a joint report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP), “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011” issued yesterday.

The report warns of continued food instability due to fossil energy constraints, climate change, local land pressures, and water availability:

There are also compelling arguments suggesting that, in addition to being higher, food commodity prices will also be more volatile in the future. If the frequency of extreme weather events increases, production shocks will be more frequent, which will tend to make prices more volatile. Furthermore, biofuel policies have created new linkages between the price of oil and the price of food commodities. When oil prices increase, demand for biofuels will increase, thus raising food prices, with the opposite happening when oil prices decrease. Because world oil prices have historically been more volatile.

These are all factors Climate Progress has been warning about for years (see links below).

Most of those impacts will be felt by smaller, import-dependent countries in Africa, according to the UN. Many of those countries have been hit particularly hard by a combination of rising prices and severe drought in the region exacerbated by a warming climate. In East Africa alone, more than 12 million people are facing inadequate food supplies, says Oxfam.

The chart below from the UN report illustrates how difficult the recovery has been for African countries compared with other regions:

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by Cole Mellino

Fall foliage may be changing later due to climate change. As certain regions experience warmer average temperatures, the growth season has been extended, causing leaves to change colors and drop later than in the past. Studies from Europe and Japan show that trees are starting to change colors and drop later, so researchers are looking at whether the phenomenon is happening in the U.S. too.

There have been no comprehensive studies performed in the U.S. yet. But a recent AP story on various pieces of research shows that the trend may be taking place:

Researchers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and at Seoul National University in South Korea used satellites to show the end of the growing season was delayed by 6 1/2 days from 1982 to 2008 in the Northern Hemisphere.

In Massachusetts, the leaves are changing about three days later than they were two decades ago at the Harvard Forest 65 miles west of Boston, according to data collected by John O’Keefe, a retired Harvard professor and museum coordinator who’s continuing to collect data.

In New Hampshire, data collected at the federal Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Woodstock suggests sugar maples are going dormant two to five days later than they were two decades ago.

In Vermont, state foresters studying sugar maples at the Proctor Maple Research Center in Underhill found that the growing season ended later than the statistical average in seven out of the last 10 years.

Researchers at the National Phenology Network have spent the last four years coming up with standards to be used by observers in reporting foliage color changes. These standards are due out in the next couple weeks. The U.S. Geological Survey is using satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to look at fall foliage from space.

— Cole Mellino is an intern with the energy team at the Center for American Progress

by John Farrell, in two posts that came from Energy Self-Reliant States

The Germans have installed over 10,000 megawatts of solar panels in the past two years, enough to power 2 million American homes (or most of Los Angeles, CA).  If Americans installed local solar at the same torrid pace, we could already power most of the Mountain West, could have a 100 percent solar nation by 2026, while enriching thousands of local communities with new development and jobs.

The following map shows what could have happened had the U.S. kept pace with Germany on solar power in the past two years (installed the same megawatts on a per capita basis).  Sunshine could power 10 states!

Solar Would Power the Mountain West if The U.S. Kept Pace with Germany

The spread of solar has also been in harmony with environmental goals.  Rather than covering natural areas or fertile land with solar panels, 80 percent of the solar installed in Germany was on rooftops and built to a local scale (100 kilowatts or smaller – the roof of a church or a Home Depot store).  Solar in the U.S. also can use existing space.  The following map shows the amount of a state’s electricity that could come from rooftop solar alone, from our 2009 report Energy Self-Reliant States:

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A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post additional links below.

Eurofighter Helps Solar Mirrors Compete With Gas, Torresol Says

Solar-thermal power plants using technology from the Eurofighter jet will compete on price with natural gas- or coal-fired generation within a decade, according to a Spanish company that’s spending $1.3 billion on the gear.Torresol Energy Investments SA opened a prototype plant this month near Seville in southern Spain that uses an alloy developed for the Eurofighter Typhoon and F-18 Super Hornet engines. The metal is used to hold molten salts heated to 565 degrees centigrade (1,050 degrees Fahrenheit), hotter than an atomic plant’s fluid. The main heat receiver is made by a venture of Spanish manufacturer Sener SA and Rolls-Royce Plc.

Torresol, majority-owned by Sener, plans to use the 19.9- megawatt “tower“-style generator as a model for learning how to slash future costs by standardizing components, refining plant operations and building generators side-by-side, Chairman Enrique Sendagorta said.

“With our next tower plant, we’ll be able to reduce the cost of power rather significantly,” Sendagorta said Oct. 7 in an interview in Madrid.

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