Texas finally received rain over the first weekend in October.  But as the Drought Monitor shows, while the portion of the state under exceptional drought has dropped a little, 99% of the state is still under severe drought, just as it was last week.

The L.A. Times reported:

Texas has finally received some rain, but the weekend deluge has yet to make a dent in the yearlong drought that weather experts say could last a decade.

Some cities set daily rainfall records last weekend, prompting flash-flood warnings, including Waco, which received 5.83 inches of rain Sunday. Houston, in the midst of its driest year and after enduring its hottest summer on record, received 5.11 inches of rain, another daily record. Dallas got 1.37 inches.

Deluges are not the ideal solution to a drought because of the possibility of flash floods and massive runoff.  What’s needed is slow but steady rain.  Unfortunately, global warming pushes the extremes in both drought and deluge.

UPDATE:  Coincidentally (or not), while I was writing this post, Lubbock was hit by a monster dust storm.  Here’s one amazing video (via NY Times) and another is at the end:

A fearsome dust storm whipped through the Panhandle and South Plains of Texas on Monday with wind gusts up to 75 miles an hour in some places….  the monstrous cloud wrapped the city of Lubbock in darkness shortly before 6 p.m.

Tim Oram, a meteorologist at the weather service, said that in Lubbock, the cloud of dust whisked from the ground stretched up to 8,000 feet high and caused zero visibility brown-outs in some places.

“To get to zero visibility, that’s pretty thick,” Mr. Oram said. “That’s what made this one probably a little unusual.”

For background, see USGS on Dust-Bowlification: Drier conditions projected to accelerate dust storms in the U.S. Southwest (which has stunning videos of dust storms in Australia) and NBC: “The Dust Storm that Swallowed Up an American City” (which has stunning videos of this summer’s monster dust storm in Phoenix).

I reported several weeks ago that state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon had predicted: “I’ve started telling anyone who’s interested that it’s likely that much of Texas will still be in severe drought this time next summer, with water supply implications even worse than those we are now experiencing.”

More recently, he did an analysis suggesting the drought could last a decade, which made headlines, but more recently he modified that to “I’d guess the odds that this drought will last five years are only about 25%”:

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In one of his most unhinged rants yet, hate radio show host Rush Limbaugh argued that the revelation that a famous book about multiple-personality disorder is a hoax means that “nothing is real,” including global warming. “Sybil” was an influential 1973 book written for a popular audience that told of a psychiatrist’s client with “multiple personality disorder.” The book influenced the field of psychoanalysis for years. By the 1990s, questions were raised about the veracity of the tale, and a new book by Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed, fully debunks the story, after thousands of people were mistreated.

In today’s show, Limbaugh took this news to mean that all institutions are part of a global “liberal” conspiracy, including climate science:

So here we have a real-life recent case of an agenda-driven hoax becoming scientific consensus and a popularly accepted concept that real decisions were based on. Sound familiar? Sound familiar, folks? Does it not sound exactly like what’s happened with global warming?

“The United States Congress, the White House, you name it, wherever they have dominated for a significant amount of time, you have perverse corruption, lies, outright fraud and hoaxes all for the express purpose of controlling people, all because they want to control everybody,” Limbaugh concluded. “Now, who do you think is in charge of this stupid Occupy Wall Street thing? The same bunch of fraudsters, the same bunch of liars, the same bunch of hoaxers. Nothing is real.”

Limbaugh is engaging in a fallacy common among climate deniers, the belief that climate science totters like an upside-down pyramid on a few key observations or influential scientists. In reality, the science of manmade global warming is a robust accumulation of knowledge from diverse fields, from molecular chemistry to ecological biology, from satellite-based atmospheric physics to paleoclimatology.

Limbaugh wants his listeners to believe that the 99 percent movement — which has now gone global — is part of a conspiracy of “perverse corruption” and “outright fraud.” Limbaugh has claimed, without evidence, that “Obama’s responsible” for the movement, fed by “George Soros money” and “organized and paid for by a bunch of anti-Semites.” It’s not clear what the connection is between this supposed conspiracy, climate scientists, and a psychiatrist who’s been dead for nearly twenty years.

Okay, maybe not a miracle, but the bar is so low for the President rhetorically now that he does deserve praise when he manages to get it right:

President Obama used some of the harshest rhetoric of his term today in denouncing the Republican jobs plan, saying the GOP’s emphasis on less regulations would harm the environment, undercut health care and fail to produce necessary jobs in the short term.

“You got their plan, which is let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, (and) less people with health insurance,” Obama said in kicking off a three-day bus tour at the airport in Asheville, N.C.

So he has the simple language and some repetition (“dirty”) here — though “less people with health insurance” doesn’t flow.  I might have said, “dirtier air, dirtier water, sicker people — and just when people need health insurance the most, the GOP wants to cut 30 million of them off.”

But let’s give him the props.  Now he just needs to repeat this a hundred times or so.

Here’s the video:

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A group of 35 progressive climate hawks in the House of Representatives want the special deficit committee to end Big Oil subsidies worth $122 billion over the next 10 years. In a letter to committee chairs Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), and 33 other House Democrats ask for the end of the subsidies because “the United States can no longer afford to give away billions of dollars every year to corporations earning billions of dollars in profits”:

In the current budgetary environment, the United States can no longer afford to give away billions of dollars every year to corporations earning billions of dollars in profits and costing American taxpayers twice: at the pump and through the tax code. We urge the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to consider eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels as an excellent source of deficit reducing savings. According to a coalition of organizations, eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuels industry could reduce our national debt by up to $122 billion over ten years.

Welch and Blumenauer are members of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. Their letter adds their support to the request made by leaders of 52 national and state organizations on Oct. 5 to the super committee to end “government handouts to the oil, coal and gas industries.”

The list of subsidies includes:

$43.5 billion in federal tax subsidies to oil and gas companies
$2.5 billion in federal tax subsidies to coal companies
$1.3 billion tax credit for refineries
$9.5 billion in royalty-free oil and gas leases
$52 billion in “last in, first out” accounting for inventories, a tax credit that disproportionately helps the oil and gas industry
$10.5 billion dual capacity tax credit, which also largely benefits oil and gas companies

Ending these subsidies would not only help restore fiscal health to the nation, but also take a small step towards repairing the health of the planet’s climate. The fiscal committee needs to go farther and place an explicit price on carbon pollution so that fossil companies pay for their pollution, instead of future generations.

Last week, the so-called “pro-life” party voted for several bills that will actually endanger thousands of lives. First, House Republicans passed the anti-abortion bill opponents call the “Let Women Die” Act. Then they pushed through H.R. 2250, which eliminates several pollution control requirements for industrial boilers and incinerators.

That anti-EPA vote came on the heels of a measure to relax proposed regulations on cement kilns. The EPA estimates that the environmental regulations Republicans weakened or repealed in just the past two weeks will lead to at least 32,500 premature deaths:

House Republicans argued that the EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 was a “timeout” from long-delayed regulations aimed at mercury that threatened to raise costs on boiler operators and incinerators. But the measure also exempts smaller burning facilities from any regulation at all.

The EPA estimated that the bill, H.R. 2250, would allow 20,000 people to die prematurely from pollution. [...]

It’s just the latest in an ongoing assault on the EPA that as of last week had prompted 159 anti-environmental regulation votes on the House floor this year. The House passed a measure last week to relax proposed regulations on cement kilns, which the EPA says will lead to 12,500 premature deaths.

The bill will allow incinerators that are often located in highly populated areas to burn tires, plastics, oil sludge, and other toxic substances without any oversight or reporting requirements, Huffington Post notes.

Earthjustice attorney Jim Pew said it is “simply appalling” that lobbyists who pushed for this bill and the members of Congress who voted for it know that it will sicken and kill thousands of Americans.

President Obama has said he will veto the legislation in the unlikely event that it passes the Senate.

Buried at the end of today’s must-read Washington Post piece, “Obama allies’ interests collide over Keystone pipeline” is this bombshell:

On Oct. 11, in an interview with the Associated Press, [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton said she realized “this is a very emotional decision” for some but emphasized that she had not been involved in the process yet because “originally, two and a half years ago, this had been delegated to the deputy.”

State Department officials have said they will issue a final decision on the permit by the end of the year; on Nov. 6, McKibben and other activists plan to ring the White House with placards of Obama’s words from the 2008 campaign, including his pledge to free the United States from “the tyranny of oil.”

Hmm.  Is she distancing herself from the process because it was unbelievably flawed — see Bombshell: State Department Outsourced Tar Sands Pipeline Environmental Impact Study to ‘Major’ TransCanada Contractor?

My sources say there is a possibility the White House will delay the decision (until after the election), which would be a semi-victory.

The full transcript of the Clinton interview does shows her leaving the door open for such a delay.  Amazingly, she says, back when she delegated the decision, “This was not something that the Secretary was going to decide”:

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“Climate change poses an immediate, growing and grave threat to the health and security of people in both developed and developing countries around the globe,” Europe’s top medical leaders concluded at an international conference on the risks of global warming. At London’s Health and Security Perspectives on Climate Change conference, participants discussed how the destabilization of the global climate system is already hurting people’s health and security, with much greater threats to come:

Climate change leads to more frequent and extreme weather events and to conditions that favour the spread of infectious diseases. Rising sea levels, floods and droughts cause loss of habitat, water and food shortages, and threats to livelihood. These trigger conflict within and between countries. Humanitarian crises will further burden military resources through the need for rescue missions and aid. Mass migration will also increase, triggered by both environmental stress and conflict, thus leading to serious further security issues. It will often not be possible to adapt meaningfully to these changes, and the economic cost will be enormous. As in medicine, prevention is the best solution.

Signatories include the editors-in-chief of the British Medical Journal and Lancet, the chairman of the British Medical Association, the president of the Norwegian Medical Association, and the executive director of Greenpeace International.

In their statement, they call on the European Union to unilaterally adopt the climate target of a 30 percent reduction from 1990 levels in greenhouse pollution by 2020, and the rapid phasing out of coal plants.

by Shauna Theel, in a Media Matters cross-post.  Climate Progress first wrote about this study here.

A study published in the prestigious journal American Economic Review estimates that the costs imposed on society by air pollution from coal-fired power plants are greater than the value added to the economy by the industry. The study concluded that coal may be “underregulated” since the price we pay for coal-fired power doesn’t account for its costs.

According to a Nexis search, not a single major newspaper or television network has covered the study. By contrast, an industry-funded report on the cost of EPA regulations of these air pollutants has received considerable media attention.

The authors of the American Economic Review paper — Nicholas Muller of Middlebury College and Yale’s William Nordhaus and Robert Mendelsohn — are considered centrists. Mendelsohn opposed the Kyoto climate treaty and spoke this year at the right-wing Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote that the study should “be a major factor in how we discuss economic ideology,” adding “It won’t, of course.” From Krugman’s post:

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by Greg Hanscom in a Grist cross-post

Somewhere on the way back to the city, Americans got sidetracked.

Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs.

The trends have spawned stories like this one, from America’s Finest News Source, headlined, “Family Of Five Found Alive In Suburbs.”

BUFFALO GROVE, IL-The Holsapple family, long feared missing or spiritually dead, was found alive in the Chicago suburbs Monday, somehow managing to survive in the hostile environment for more than eight years.

Rescuers discovered the five-person clan after a survey plane spotted a crude signal fire the family had created in a barbecue grill.

All ended well for the Holsapple clan, thanks to paramedics who rushed them back to civilization, but what about the roughly 150 million other Americans who are still stranded out there, out by the mall, in all those creepy look-alike subdivisions?

As one commenter on this website recently wrote, “Saying people prefer living in suburbs in the new century is a bit like saying people really liked living in East St. Louis, Watts, or Oakland in the 1970s.”

Watts? Really? I mean, I know that the real estate crash hit some suburbs hard, but last time I ventured out past the city limits they had the rioting relatively under control. The gun battles in the streets were down to just a couple a day. Heck, you could still get a tank of gas for less than I pay for a bag of groceries at my neighborhood Whole Foods.

Methinks we may have jumped the gun on the whole collapse of the suburbs bit.

So what’s really up with Americans and our weird relationship with the city? There are a lot of explanations for the discrepancy between where we live and where we say we’d rather.

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– Gail Zawacki, in a Wit’s End Repost

After the exhaustion of staying up all night Thursday to deter the threatened eviction of Occupy Wall Street early Friday, which to much teary jubilation, was thwarted, I came home for a nap and then returned again today.  My intention was to first join with one of many collaborative demonstrations going on around the city, a protest against mountain top removal coal extraction, which I had been informed was to meet in front of the NYC Library.  I arrived early and nobody else was there yet, so I wandered around back to the park, and came across a statue of Gertrude Stein.

Okay!…so I admit, I put my Anonymous mask on her bronze effigy!  (I like to think she would have approved.)  The rest of this post consists of quotes from her, and my first interview to upload (it takes some time, more will come).  This first young lady, who is utterly charming, sincere, and articulate, presents an unsentimental assessment of the prospects for our industrial society and the inhibited actions of the major environmental groups that is amazingly sophisticated.  I was impressed, and encouraged.

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by RL Miller, in a Climate Hawks cross-post

by Jess Zimmerman in a Grist cross-post

Enough people thought this was a good idea that the ad made it into print. How did this ad meeting go? “We need to convince the youth to buy giant boat-cars.” “Okay, tell them bikes will cockblock them.” “Perfect, let’s call it a day.” Nice work, Don Draper.

GM has clearly been getting a lot of blowback for this ad, which presents biking as an embarrassment so profound you’ll want to hide your face from the sight of pretty girls. They’ve been falling over themselves to apologize on their Twitter feed. It’s tough for them! Reality sucks, guys.

UPDATE:  David in the comments directs us to the great response ad by Giant Bicycles:

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Other stories below: China Resource Tax Goes National; Perry Slashed Environmental Enforcement in Texas; California has 1 in 4 U.S. Solar Energy Jobs; Renewable “Gold Rush” Powers Germany’s North Shore.

Khosla Increasing Clean Technology Bet With $1.05 Billion Fund

Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capital investor, is increasing his bet on clean technology.

Khosla Ventures, the venture capital company he formed in 2004, will steer as much as 65 percent of its new $1.05 billion fund to support businesses developing renewable sources of power, energy-efficiency technology and LED lighting products, Khosla said.

In supporting early stage companies working on unproven technology, Khosla expects some to fail. Lawmakers in Washington have criticized a U.S. Energy Department program that followed the same strategy by offering a loan guarantee to Solyndra LLC, a solar-module maker that filed for bankruptcy Sept. 6.

“When you’re trying new things, some things just don’t work,” Khosla said in a phone interview yesterday. “Solyndra wasn’t cost competitive with other companies in the Valley; there are other companies that are doing fine.”

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