– Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in a HuffPost repost

I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2000-5000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 — enough, they claimed to power our country for a century.

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry’s worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas generation plants. That transition could reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America’s grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20% — literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America’s abundant renewables.

American sourced natural gas might also have helped free us from our debilitating reliance on foreign oil now costing our country so dearly in blood, national security, energy independence, global leadership, moral authority, and treasure amounting to $700 billion per year — the total cost to our country of annual oil imports — in addition to two pricey wars that are currently running tabs $2 billion per week.

My caveat was that the natural gas industry and government regulators needed to act responsibly to protect the environment, safeguard communities from irresponsible practices and to candidly inform the public about the true risks and benefits of shale extraction gas.

The opposite has happened.

The industry’s worst actors have successfully battled reasonable regulation, stifled public disclosure while bending compliant government regulators to engineer exceptions to existing environmental rules. Captive agencies and political leaders have obligingly reduced already meager enforcement resources and helped propagate the industry’s deceptive economic projections.

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*No, shutting down isn’t an option.

Auden Schendler, Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and a board member of Protect Our Winters wants to hear answers to that question from Climate Progress readers.

He acknowledges that skiing has “limited redeeming value from a sustainability perspective.”

I would add that unless the world acts to reverse emissions trends very rapidly and sharply through efficiency, conservation, and clean energy, much of the U.S.  skiing industry is likely to be rapidly collapsing by sometime in the 2030s, if not sooner. Peak oil (making air travel expensive) together with a shrinking season will seriously undermine profitability.

The latest science says that we are losing our snow mass — and the primary cause is human emissions (see “USGS: Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply“).

And no, one snowy winter doesn’t change that, as USGS scientist and co-author Julio Betancourt explained, “The La Niña episode this year is an example with lots of snow in the north while severe drought afflicts the south. But, in the north, this year’s gains are only a small blip on a century-long snowpack decline.”

The lead author, USGS scientist Gregory Pederson, explained, “What we have seen in the last few decades may signal a fundamental shift from precipitation to temperature as the dominant influence on western snowpack.

What’s particularly worrisome is that we’ve seen these dramatic and harmful changes already — and we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half century.  We are on track to warm ten times times that this century.  At the same time, the Southwest is drying out.

I’ve been told that losing just another few weeks from the ski season would make many if not most resorts unprofitable.

So, what should a ski company that cares about sustainability be doing — in its last few decades of profitability?

Is climate science denier Lord Monckton really just another act by Sacha Baron Cohen — creator of Ali G, Borat and Bruno?

That is the “mistake” Australian satirists make in this must-see video — which the UK Guardian calls “buttock-clenchingly embarrassing and hilarious in equal measure” – already seen by 800,000 Australians and now more than 300,000 viewers on YouTube:

In their post, DeSmogBlog puts in the disclaimer “(just to be absolutely clear here folks, he isn’t!)”

In the real world, the science-based world of “facts,” I suppose that is a reasonable statement.  But what about in Monckton’s world of pseudoscience?

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