The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team released a study showing that the earth’s surface has warmed 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950, with the hopes that the study would address the critiques of climate deniers who continue to insist that the earth is not warming.

Even Richard Muller, Berkeley Earth’s scientific director who was notorious for not believing the conventional wisdom about climate change, said this study confirms global warming. Muller founded Berkeley Earth, to which the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation donated $150,000, to correct for factors like urban heat, which he said earlier studies had not considered. And yet Muller’s study still confirmed the earlier studies showing global warming.

But the deniers remain skeptical — including one denier who had said in March he would accept these results, according to the New York Times:

[Anthony] Watts, a former television meteorologist, contended that the study’s methodology was flawed because it examined data over a 60-year period instead of the 30-year-one that was the basis for his research and some other peer-reviewed studies. He also noted that the report had not yet been peer-reviewed and cited spelling errors as proof of sloppiness.

He said he was not backing away from the pledge he made but that he wanted corrections made first. “I’m still happy to accept the results, whatever they might be,” Mr. Watts said. ”All I’m asking for is an apples-to-apples comparison of data.”

As Joe Romm put it: “We were told these results would be accepted. [...] It goes to show there is nothing that will derail the deniers.”

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

During a forum in Las Vegas Wednesday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told the Republican audience he would like to see federal public lands in Nevada privatized.

Speaking at the Western Republican Leadership Conference, Paul declared that Nevada, which has a large percentage of federally-owned public lands, ought to become more like Texas, where “private owners” have “developed all the natural resources.” Paul went on to say “how wonderful it would be if land will be or should be returned to the states and then for the best parts sold off to private owners”:

PAUL: Take a look at the state of Nevada. Do the people own the property in Nevada? No. Who’s the biggest landowner? It’s the federal government. I would like to see the development of this state the way that Texas had the privilege of developing. Before we went in the Union, it was owned entirely by private owners and it has developed all the natural resources, a very big state. So you can imagine how wonderful it would be if land will be or should be returned to the states and then for the best parts sold off to private owners.

Paul’s remarks fall in line with the attacks on public lands from conservative lawmakers and corporate front groups. For instance, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) has been waging war on public lands from his helm as chairman of the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, while the Koch Brothers have funded pro-oil events across the West.

For more information, read Center for American Progress President John Podesta’s article on defending public lands or a report from CAP’s public lands team on how public land conservation creates jobs.

“Occupy” protests in cities around the country are increasingly featuring environmental themes, particularly climate change. Protesters contend that inaction on climate change only benefits the top 1%, while hurting the other 99%.

Earlier this month, Climate activists built on the Occupy movement to raise awareness for a major protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline outside the State Department. Drawing connections between Wall Street activist demands for political and financial equality and their own call for environmental justice, climate leaders stood in solidarity with the movement.

In New York earlier this week, Occupy protesters staged an anti-coal protest outside Bank of America — one of dozens of protests focused on different themes over the weekend. In order to step up the environmental messaging, one activist has created an Environmentalist Solidarity Working Group. ClimateWire had a nice piece on the evolving climate-related protests this week:

“We need to understand it’s all a priority, because it’s all connected. You can’t have social reform without natural resources and the environment. It’s a snowball, and it all affects each other,” said Stephanie, who received her master’s degree in environmental sustainability from Columbia University and spoke on the condition that she withhold her last name over concerns she would be targeted for arrest.

Climate change mitigation and the total abandonment of fossil fuels figure prominently in the working group’s agenda. However, Stephanie acknowledged that unlike the larger aim of banking reform, these issues are difficult to mobilize on.

While there’s evidence of pollution in the air, water contamination and topsoil being eroded, global warming and climate change are ambiguous terms that Americans have difficulty trying to grasp, she said. “People say, ‘It’s not going to affect me’ or ‘I’ll be dead by then,’” said Stephanie. “So we do need to be radical in order to stop climate change or to stop it where it’s come so far.”

While the scientific evidence of climate change gets more dire each day, America moves further away from addressing the problem. The gobs of money spent on lobbying and disinformation campaigns by the fossil fuel industry have been the single-biggest contributor to stalling action. Speaking out against this strong corporate influence is a central part of what the Occupy movement is all about.

But this messaging also comes with some inherent contradictions. Addressing climate change requires taking multi-trillion dollar action — and that means harnessing the support of the world’s biggest energy companies and financial players.  How can this circle be squared?

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress.

While Occupy Seattle continues in downtown Seattle, a group of concerned citizens led by Environment Washington held press conferences over the last two days in Seattle and Yakima to call for an end to subsidies to Big Oil companies that have already reaped billions in profits this year. Rachel Padgett of Fuse Washington spoke at Environment Washington’s press conference about Americans’ growing awareness of and frustration with corporate greed that spurred her and other activists to call for an end to special tax breaks for oil companies:

We all know that thousands of Washington families are struggling. High unemployment, record foreclosures, and skyrocketing poverty are pushing many of us to the brink. We’re seeing this frustration boiling over in the hundreds of Occupy protests around the country. Simply put, we’re sick and tired of super-wealthy corporations making record profits while the rest of us are just struggling to get by. Handouts to Big Oil don’t reduce our dependence on foreign oil, they don’t create jobs, and it doesn’t rebuild our economy. They just pad the oil companies’ record profits while adding to our deficit.

Watch it:

To further promote its message, Environment Washington took a mobile billboard to Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, while in Yakima, the group placed as stationary billboard on an important road in the middle of the city. Both billboards read “Big Oil Gets Tax Breaks, We Get the Pollution.”

Speakers at the press conferences in both Seattle and Yakima called on Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) to use her “unique position” as the co-chairwoman of the super committee to end oil subsidies as a critical way to reduce the deficit. This is because taxpayer-funded oil subsidies will cost $77 billion between 2011-2021, according to a report from the Center for American Progress.

A number of congressional leaders have begun to realize the importance of ending oil subsidies as a debt-reducing mechanism, as seen in a recent letter to the super committee from 35 members of the House of Representatives, who stated: “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.” A similar letter from 14 senators two days ago also called on the super committee to eliminate subsidies to the five biggest oil companies.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is weighing in on Keystone XL, the controversial 1,700 mile pipeline that would bring carbon-intensive crude across the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries in the Gulf Coast.

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this month, Reid expressed concerns about the environmental impact of the project. The Washington Post reported on the October 5th correspondence:

“The proponents of this pipeline would be wiser to invest instead in job-creating clean energy projects, like renewable power, energy efficiency or advanced vehicles and fuels that would employ thousands of people in the United States rather than increasing our dependency on unsustainable supplies of dirty and polluting oil that could easily be exported,” Reid wrote.

Reid has been a strong supporter of clean energy and has maintained that support during a time of severe Congressional backlash against government incentives for the sector. But this is the first time he has publicly given his opinions on the Keystone XL Pipeline — a project that has united environmental activists and split the Democratic party.

Some Congressional Democrats have remained silent on the issue, waiting for the State Department to make a decision. Others have thrown their support behind the pipeline, which they say will create jobs and boost tax revenues.

Meanwhile, the environmental community is putting heavy pressure on the Obama Administration to delay or abandon Keystone XL, calling it “game over for the climate.” They’re also highlighting the immense conflicts of interest within the State Department and the proposed builder, TransCanada — pointing out that the agency outsourced the environmental review of the project to a TransCanada contractor.

Many see this as the ultimate test of the Obama Administration’s commitment to combating climate change. Harry Reid, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, appears to see it that way too.

Almost half of clean energy projects proposed in recent years have been delayed or abandoned due to local opposition, according to a March report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That’s a lot of development potential denied.

[SL correction: I reported earlier that all the projects were clean energy. In fact, around 45% of the projects tracked were renewable energy, while the other projects included nuclear, natural gas and coal. I have changed the title of the post to reflect the changes, and changed the above paragraph.]

The causes of this opposition are diverse: Environmental concerns, worries about property values, suspicion of outside developers, and many more. Lots of these concerns are legitimate; many others come from a lack of understanding of the sector, poor communication by local officials and developers, or even from fake “astroturf” opposition funded by corporate special interests.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems is that much of that economic potential is not going directly to citizens. If people don’t have a direct financial stake in a project, they’re more likely to oppose it. That’s why I’ve called for feed-in tariffs on the local and state level as a way to stimulate more community and individual engagement in the clean energy economy. It’s what drove community development in Germany, Denmark and other European countries — and it’s more important than ever in the U.S. given how much clean energy we need to deploy in people’s backyards if we’re going to truly address the climate crisis.

EnergyNOW had a piece worth watching on some of the barriers holding up clean energy projects in the U.S. It doesn’t touch upon how incentives like feed-in tariffs can influence public attitude, but it does look at some unique problems project developers and individuals face.

Politico ran a story this week, “Liberals unhappy with Solyndra focus.”  It mentions Climate Progress by name and cites the data we posted on the disproportionate coverage the loan to the failed solar company received.  Thanks for that, Politico!

But long before then, it mischaracterizes progressives and the complaint that we made.  The piece opens:

Liberals and environmental activists desperately trying to change the narrative away from Solyndra are simultaneously working to throw the White House and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton under the bus with another energy trouble spot.

The Nation, The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Grist, Climate Progress and Media Matters have run editorials and articles in recent weeks bemoaning the “out of proportion” Solyndra coverage and drawing attention to the State Department’s pending review of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline that would connect Canada’s Tar Sands to the Gulf Coast.

Uhh, no.  I’m going to repost the full debunking of this spin by Dave Roberts at Grist below, but here is his dead-on key point:

The whole point of the critique has been to expose the fact that another group of people, a group unremittingly hostile to Obama and clean energy, are desperately trying to focus the narrative on Solyndra — and they’re succeeding!

… Republican talking points are delivered as first-order news. Liberal talking points are wrapped in meta-news about liberals and their talking points. It makes liberals sound defensive and manipulative, and it’s condescending as sh*t.

Indeed, maybe my opening sentence should have been “Politico desperately trying to defend its excessive coverage of Solyndra.”

When cable news was criticized for excessive coverage of the Royal wedding, many used that opportunity to just do another Royal Wedding story — on whether the coverage was excessive.  Crafty folks, those media mavens.

UPDATE:  Daily Kos has a good analysis of how Politico’s coverage is skewed toward treating Solyndra — but not Keyston XL — as a scandal.

The Politico quoted me correctly later on, but missed the point — the coverage actually was (and still is)  disproportionate:

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Climate change may cause hundreds of millions to be trapped in vulnerable cities and rural areas, affecting people who are unable to relocate due to poverty or the lack of a better option. A U.K. government committee’s study advises that those who are trapped will represent “just as important a policy concern as those who do migrate” in environmental disasters.

Climate disasters displaced 42 million people last year alone, up from 17 million in 2009. With climate change, scientists report the world is largely unprepared to handle the greater number of people needing to take refuge.

The study warns:

Reduced options for migration, combined with incomes threatened by environmental change, mean that people are likely to migrate in illegal, irregular, unsafe, exploited or unplanned ways. People are also likely to find themselves migrating to areas of high environmental risk, such as low-lying urban areas in mega-deltas or slums in water-insecure expanding cities.

Poor and immigrant populations are especially at risk in disaster. Relocating is expensive, and regions that experience environmental change could lose additional wealth. Hurricane Katrina is a telling example of how natural disaster affects a city. In 2005, the devastating hurricane caused the wealthy to move from New Orleans, while lower-income populations stayed behind in less safe emergency shelters. By 2010, the city’s population had shrunk by 25.4 percent.

Lacking infrastructure and access to sanitation and clean water, developing countries face an even greater challenge. The report estimates that by 2060, up to 552 million people living in rural Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean will be affected by flooding.

-Rebecca Leber

by John Farrell, in a Grist cross-post

In just three weeks, citizens of Boulder, Colo., will vote on whether to begin a big, formal process to unplug from Xcel Energy’s system and plug into local energy self-reliance. The vote to form a municipal electric utility could set a precedent for communities across the United States to keep millions of dollars local instead of sending them to remote electric utilities each year.

The vote on ballot measures 2B and 2C is the culmination of a multi-year struggle by the city of Boulder meet the Kyoto greenhouse-gas emission targets by getting less coal power and more renewable energy from its investor-owned utility.

At every turn, the utility has stalled local efforts.

When the city first considered municipalization, Xcel offered to finance and build a local smart grid but has since been allowed by the state’s public utility commission to charge Coloradans for significant cost overruns. When the city asked Xcel to bring in more clean energy, the utility offered to build a new wind plant and import its power from across the state only if Boulder citizens agreed to pay more when the wind blew and pay when it didn’t, too. Despite the ill nature of the offer, the city offered to put it on the ballot along with a vote to municipalize, but Xcel refused, demanding that the city also offer citizens a separate “status quo” measure.

In contrast, a Boulder-owned utility offers enormous clean energy and economic opportunity without having to beg a big, private company. The city could increase renewable energy production by 40 percent from multiple, local sources without increasing rates, according to a citizen-led peer reviewed study. The economic value of local energy ownership would multiply within the city’s economy to as much as $350 million a year, according to research by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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Other key stories below: Wind Power Record Set in Texas — 15.2% of Demand; EPA Plans to Regulate Water from Fracking

California Becomes First State to Adopt Cap-and-Trade Program

The California Air Resources Board on Thursday unanimously adopted the nation’s first state-administered cap-and-trade regulations, a landmark set of air pollution controls to address climate change and help the state achieve its ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The complex market system for the first time puts a price on heat-trapping pollution by allowing California’s dirtiest industries to trade carbon credits. The rules have been years in the making, overcoming legal challenges and an aggressive oil industry-sponsored ballot initiative.

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