Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports — and editorializes — on the grim news:

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

Feeble indeed.  You go, Seth.  You’re an honorary blogger now!

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

That means worse than the A1FI scenario (1000 ppm).  It means 10F warming (this century) give or take — and multiple, simultaneous catastrophes.

Here are more details of the sorry situation we find ourselves in:

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As ThinkProgress Green first reported, the State Department’s review of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has actually been run by Cardno Entrix, a company paid to do the job by TransCanada itself. For years, the State Department’s involvement in this project that would run across the nation’s heartland with millions of gallons of toxic crude was limited to a single junior-level staffer. Under the Bush administration, foreign service officer Betsy Orlando was the Keystone Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Project Manager. Continuing for years in the Obama administration, she represented the entire involvement of the State Department in investigating the impact of $7 billion project, outsourced to contractors who worked for TransCanada, the Huffington Post reveals:

At a public hearing in Oklahoma during summer 2010, Kimberly Demuth, a vice president at CardnoEntrix, described the State Department’s capacity as “a staff of one person, Betsy Orlando, who’s in charge of this project.”

During the Bush administration, Orlando oversaw the approval process of the earlier Keystone pipeline beginning in 2006. That pipeline, which ships tar sands crude across the US-Canada border, gained a Presidential Permit in March, 2008. After that success, TransCanada filed its application to construct the Keystone XL pipeline at the tail end of the Bush administration.

Orlando, who has no formal background that would help her assess the risks of such a pipeline or judge the work of oil industry contractors, moved to a new tour of service in Nigeria in October 2010.

“The people I worked with at State were good, honest people, and they were very inexperienced and naive about environmental laws,” a federal environmental compliance officer told the Huffington Post. “They did not have a senior expert on their environmental impact study, and I’ve never seen that before.”

As criticism from other agencies and grassroots activists of the corrupt draft impact statement has poured in, Clinton’s State Department has called for more work, but with the same conflicts of interest. An analysis of greenhouse gas impacts in response to EPA concerns was done by ICF International under contract to Cardno Entrix, not the State Department. However, the Department of Energy did directly commission contractor Ensys Energy to assess the “impacts on U.S. and global refining, trade and oil markets of the Keystone XL project.” Both reports include the caveat that the “views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.”

Drying of northern wetlands has led to much more severe peatland wildfires and nine times as much carbon released into the atmosphere, according to new research.

The most dangerous amplifying carbon-cycle feedback we face in the near term is, I believe, the thawing northern tundra.  It is poised to turn the Arctic from a carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100, according to a 2011 study.

That study found, conservatively, that carbon emissions from a thawing permafrost are “strong enough to cancel 42-88% of the total global land sink. The thaw and decay of permafrost carbon is irreversible” and accounting for it “will require larger reductions in fossil fuel emissions to reach a [given] target atmospheric CO2 concentration.“

But there are a host of other very serious amplifying feedbacks — or vicious circles — whereby an initial warming leads to changes that cause more emissions, which in turn lead to more warming (see partial list at end).  One of those involves the drying of the peatlands.

Most of the world’s wetlands are peat, which are better known as bogs, moors, mires, and swamp forests. Wikipedia notes, “Under the proper conditions, peat is the earliest stage in the formation of coal.” Here’s why peatlands contain so much carbon:

Peat is the accumulation of partially decayed vegetation in very wet places and it covers about two percent of global land mass. Peatlands store large amounts of carbon owing to the low rates of carbon breakdown in cold, waterlogged soils.

A 2008 Nature Geoscience study — “High sensitivity of peat decomposition to climate change through water-table feedback” — projects that “a warming of 4°C causes a 40% loss of soil organic carbon from the shallow peat and 86% from the deep peat” of Northern peatlands. And that amplifying carbon cycle feedback is dangerous for three reasons:

1. The northern peatlands are believed to store some 320 (+/- 140) billion metric tons of carbon, roughly half of what the atmosphere contains.
2. Peatlands tend to emit much of their carbon in the form of methane, which is more than 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide (and 100 times more powerful over a 20-year period).
3. A warming of 4°C this century is all but inevitable if we don’t sharply reverse emissions trends quickly (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).

Now, a new study does some experiments and makes some observations to look at the impact of drying on peatlands.  A coauthor sums it up:

“Currently, peatlands are considered important global stores for carbon. But we’ve shown that human disturbance or climate-induced drying can switch peatlands from sinks to potentially huge sources of carbon, with losses associated with severe burning far outweighing long-term rates of sequestration.”

The full study is behind a firewall here.  The University of Guelph news release does a good job of explaining what they did and what they found:

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A new debate is picking up within the clean energy industry: Is the sector facing a crisis? Or is it still on an upward curve?

The bankruptcy of Solyndra and the political wrangling over the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program have heightened the debate, causing people to ask if there are deeper troubles below the surface. That, combined with a shift in the venture capital community away from early-stage investments, is raising concerns.

Are they founded? Yes and no. But it would a stretch to call this a crisis.

Earlier this week, the think tank Third Way released a report called “Nothing Ventured: The Crisis in Clean Tech Investment,” which calls the shift away from early-stage VC investments a “quiet but severe crisis” that “suggest stark consequences” for the future of the industry.

The report’s goal — to raise awareness about the need for VCs to make bolder moves in cleantech — is certainly an important one. But right after it was released, the latest figures for venture investments in clean energy showed a 73% jump in Q3 over last year’s figures, which showed that “confidence in cleantech continues,” according to Ernst and Young, the firm tracking the figures.

Yes, a lot of that money is going into later stage rounds for more mature companies. But as Ernst and Young Cleantech Director Jay Spencer explains, that’s because “cleantech has reached its deployment phase,” making new sets of investments far more capital intensive than in the past. In the energy market, you don’t make a dent until you get to the billion and trillion dollar scale.

“VC Money does not indicate the success of this industry,” said Jigar Shah, CEO of the Carbon War Room, in an interview with Climate Progress. “There is a huge pipeline of projects and technologies that are now scaling and will continue to drive down costs in the next decade. We are already approaching $2 a watt installed for solar PV — when you get there, you’ll be able to supply up to 30% of global electricity needs cost-competitively.” (For a detailed talk with Shah on deployment strategies, listen to our interview on the Climate Progress podcast.)

Third Way sees things quite differently:

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House Energy and Commerce ranking member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) slammed Republicans for taking the extreme step of issuing subpoenas to the White House for all communication related to the solar company Solyndra. At the committee’s business meeting, Waxman noted that the Republican chairs, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL), rejected offers from the White House Counsel to offer all communications related to specific accusations lobbed by critics of the Department of Energy loan guarantee to the bankrupt solar company. “Our focus should be jobs,” he said:

Apparently what the committee really wants is a confrontation with the president, not information for the investigation. No wonder the public holds this Congress in such low regard. Our focus should be jobs. Our attention should be on rebuilding our economy, not manufacturing controversies with our president.

Watch it:

Waxman also criticized the extraordinary decision to subpoena the White House, something he never did as chair of either the House oversight committee or energy committee during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. With the House in Republican hands, public approval of Congress has plummeted to 9 percent.

Our Nobel-Prize-winning Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, gave a blunt speech to the Washington Post Live Smart Energy Conference today.

Of course the WashPost event is sponsored in part by Shell Oil.

And you can watch it here through about 2 pm (DC time).

Here are some highlights of Chu’s remarks:

Once again, there is a huge opportunity before us – a global clean energy market that is already worth an estimated $240 billion and is growing rapidly.  In fact, a very reasonable estimate is that solar photovoltaic systems alone represent a global market worth more than $80 billion this year.

China – like many countries – has learned from the U.S. how government can support critical emerging industries.  Last year, China offered roughly $30 billion in government financing to its solar companies, including $7 billion to Suntech.  At least 10 countries have adopted renewable electricity standards, and more than 50 countries offer some type of public financing for clean energy projects.  For example, Germany and Canada operate government-backed clean energy lending programs, and in the last several months, the UK, Australia, and India have announced plans to do the same.

America faces a choice today: Are we going to recognize the opportunity and compete in the clean energy race or will we wave the white flag and watch all of these jobs go to China, Korea, Germany and other countries?

The global competition is fierce, and support for innovative technologies comes with inherent risk. Not every company or every product will succeed, but that is no reason to sit on the sidelines and concede leadership in clean energy. Some in Washington are ready to throw in the towel and write off the clean energy industry.  They don’t think America can compete or they don’t think it’s worth trying. Others think that the best thing we can do is for the government to get out of the way and let the free market work.

To those in Washington who say we cannot or should not compete, I say: that’s not who we are.  In America, when we fall behind, we don’t give up. We dig in and come back. Why should we concede one of the biggest growing markets in the world that is in our sweet spot: technological and manufacturing innovation? America has the opportunity to lead the world in clean energy technologies and provide the foundation for our prosperity. We remain the most innovative country in the world … but “Invented in America” is not good enough. We need to ensure that these technologies are invented in America, made in America and sold around the world.  That’s how we’ll prosper in the 21st century.

Chu used a different metaphor than “white flag” last year — see Video: Chu on why China’s bid for clean energy leadership should be our “Sputnik Moment.” Either way, it’s great to see a scientist use metaphors, a cornerstone of persuasive messaging — see “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor”: How to be as persuasive as Lincoln.

The speech only disappoints because Chu never once mentions global warming, which is clearly a major reason why other countries are putting so much money in renewables and why clean energy is ensured of staggering market growth in the coming decades.  Chu used to be blunt on this, too, back in early 2009 — see Chu on climate change: “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

I suspect the White House communications shop has, subtly or not, told Chu they (idiotically) believe climate change is not a winning political issue, which is the exact opposite of the truth — see Bombshell: Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent.

Here are Chu’s full remarks (with links to sources):

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UpStart [uhp-stahrt]n. 1. A company or organization with innovative approaches to energy use, carbon pollution, resource consumption, and/or social equity, 2. A company or organization overcoming market barriers to build the new clean energy economy.

by Adam James

In 2009, America earned a D- in drinking water, according to the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card. Why? Every day leaking pipes lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clean drinking water (over 11,000 swimming pools). That, combined with the $11 billion annual shortfall to replace aging water facilities, makes the U.S. a very water-inefficient country.

By 2020, California estimates it will incur “water shortages equal to the needs of 4-12 million families of four.” Sadly, with a growing population, increased migration to urban areas, and global warming, these shortages promise to become far more common. A study released by the NRDC found that more than 1,100 U.S. counties face water shortages as a result of climate change. Of those, 400 are in the “extreme risk” category, representing a 14x increase over previous estimates.  The agricultural value of the crops in those 400 counties represents over $105 billion in GDP.

Compounding the problem is that the emissions from the 7,000,000 gallons for water lost from leakage are estimated to contribute 13.5 million kg of CO2e to the atmosphere daily — accelerating climate change and further exacerbating the vicious cycle.

The UpStart Solution:

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

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced plans to withdraw 1 million acres around Grand Canyon National Park from new mining claims for 20 years. After a two-year stakeholder involvement process, nearly 300,000 public comments were received on this proposal, 90 percent of which were in favor of the full withdrawal according to Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey. But that has only caused Republicans from both chambers to hurriedly introduce bills that would prevent the Department of the Interior from taking this action and throw open the areas to new mining.

One such bill is Congressman Trent Franks’ (R-AZ) Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011. This morning the House’s Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands held a hearing on the bill, and Rep. Rob Bishop, chairman of the subcommittee, downplayed the threat of mining near the Grand Canyon. He described the great distance between the Grand Canyon National Park and the new mining claims by stating that the administration’s decision to withdraw 1 million acres around it was:

…something akin to saying that if there was a terrorist threat to the Statue of Liberty they would close down the boardwalk of Atlantic City.

As this map from the Pew Environment Group shows, mining claims have actually been staked right up against the border of the park. Indeed, exploratory mining on one claim just three miles from a lookout into the park began in 2008. Much closer than the 122 miles that separate Liberty Island and Marvin Gardens.

Republicans have been on a warpath in their efforts to allow uranium and other mining around the Grand Canyon to continue. Indeed this is the third time a bill or amendment has been introduced in this Congress to achieve such a purpose — others are S. 1690 from Senator John McCain (R-Z) and a portion of the budget bill H.R. 1 inserted by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). Because Flake proposed throwing open 1 million acres to mining companies on a budget bill, Rep. Jesse Jackson referred to that section of the bill as the “Flake earmark for the mining industry.” Flake has already accepted $47,750 from mining interests in the 2012 election cycle.

ThinkProgress reported last week that Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the subcommittee in charge of this bill, called the size of the area that would be mined under Frank’s bill “the size of the state of New Jersey” and that “whether we mine or not will have no impact on the Grand Canyon water or tourism that happens to be there.” In today’s hearing Flake called the administration’s decision to protect the Grand Canyon “regulatory overreach based on specious environmental concerns.”

Contamination and discarded waste from uranium mining in the Colorado River and surrounding areas has plagued the national park for years — the contaminated water leaking from the Orphan Mine Site on the South Rim of the canyon is just one example of the legacy of uranium mining. Additionally, in May, the representatives from water authorities in Arizona, California, and Nevada wrote to the committee saying “federal agencies with oversight over mineral exploration and mining operations in the Lower Colorado River Basin must use their authority to prevent any potential for deterioration of this critical water supply for millions of people.”

Fears of Fission Rise at Stricken Japanese Plant

TOKYO — Nuclear workers at the crippled Fukushima power plant raced to inject boric acid into the plant’s No. 2 reactor early Wednesday after telltale radioactive elements were detected there, and the plant’s owner admitted for the first time that fuel deep inside three stricken reactors was probably continuing to experience bursts of fission.

Sure, it only merits page A17 in today’s New York Times, but the story is still a bombshell for the troubled nukes:

On Wednesday, the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that gas from Reactor No. 2 indicated the presence of radioactive xenon and other substances that could be byproducts of nuclear fission. The presence of xenon 135 in particular, which has a half-life of just nine hours, seemed to indicate that fission took place very recently.

Trade Minister Yukuo Edano censured Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, for failing to report the discovery to the prime minister’s office for hours, according to local media reports.

The developments added to disquiet over how information related to the disaster has been handled. For almost two months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems, setting the stage for disaster, both company and government officials declared it was unlikely that any meltdowns had occurred. They finally conceded that melted fuel had likely breached containments in three reactors, and that it was likely pooled at the bottom of the vessels.

A 12-mile exclusion zone is still in effect around the plant. More than 80,000 households were displaced.

I should say upfront that cost, not safety, is the real problem with nuclear power as a climate solution today (see “Does Nuclear Have a Negative Learning Curve?” and “An introduction to nuclear power.”

But safety is a genuine concern.  Here’s the “good news” on Fukushima’s fears of fission:

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Two important pieces of legislation have been introduced in the House and Senate that would provide long-term certainty to the clean energy industry by extending tax credits for wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass facilities.

Yesterday in the House, Washington Republican Dave Reichert and Oregon Democrat Earl Blumenauer introduced a piece of legislation that would extend the production tax credit (PTC) for a suite of renewable energy technologies through 2016. The PTC provides a credit of 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by a qualifying facility. The PTC for wind is set to expire at the end of 2012, and the PTC for geothermal, hydro and bioenergy would expire the following year.

Because projects take years to plan and develop, the prospect of an expiration frequently causes a “boom-bust” cycle. In the lead-up to the expiration date, there’s a frenzy of activity to take advantage of the credit. Then project levels fall drastically the following year. This is happening today in the wind industry as companies anticipate the end of the Treasury Grant Program this year, and the potential lapsing of the PTC next year.

In a statement after the bill was introduced, Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, explained that companies in the geothermal sector are seeing a similar problem.

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The rapidly worsening climate system, destabilized by billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution, is ripping apart the security of the American people, one “freak” storm, drought, flood, fire at a time. In a piece inspired by the October snow storm, the New York Times describes how a broad swath of middle-class America — the millions of suburban and rural residents who rely on the above-ground electricity grid — is suffering from the new era of regular power outages from intense storms and floods that physically damage utility poles and lines:

Along with the now-familiar candles, downed trees across the driveway and the thawing hamburger meat taken from the freezer and tossed in the trash, the region’s latest freak storm, which left three million people without electricity, has left something else in its wake: increasing unease about just what is going on and what it means for the vast majority outside the relative stability of an underground urban power grid.

No one can know for sure if this is just the eternally unpredictable chaos of weather on earth or it is something more ominous; call it the new abnormal. But in recent years, suburban and rural residents have found themselves facing multiple disruptions like Mr. Frohne’s. Experts say the violent weather of the past few years in the Northeast is stressing the 20th century above-ground utility grid as never before, along with the people who depend on it.

Although the New York Times writer Peter Applebome pleaded ignorance about the “eternally unpredictable chaos of weather,” he at least quoted one suffering American who offered a cogent rebuke to his avoidance of climate reality.

“It’s global warming,” Sue Gress of New Canaan, Connecticut, told the Times. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.”

Gress has the science right. The existing increase in extreme precipitation events in the United States is unequivocal, and strongly linked to greenhouse pollution. The future — driven by the hyperexponential increase in greenhouse concentrations in recent decades — is guaranteed to bring even more devastating weather. The only uncertainty is in how quickly weather will become more extreme, and wherethe storms, floods, droughts, and heat waves of unprecedented ferocity will strike.

At the GreenGov conference in Washington on Wednesday, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official David Kaufman agreed with that sentiment. He explained climate change is a significant driver of disaster vulnerability, but the real threat comes from the combination of climate change with other risk factors: migration into vulnerable areas, an aging population, and a overtaxed and declining infrastructure. Kaufman cautioned that too much disaster planning relies on a retrospective look at patterns of weather in the past, instead of recognizing the reality of changing climate risks.

Much of the suffering of the American families described in the New York Times story was avoidable. The fundamental responsibility lies at the feet of the fossil fuel industry that for decades has blocked the scientific urgency of reducing carbon pollution from becoming policy. The failure to address the consequences is similarly grave. “A report by the Edison Electric Institute updated at the end of 2010 said that over the past 10 years, at least 11 states studied putting utility lines underground — usually after devastating storms — only to find it too expensive,” Applebome writes. Of course, the report cautions that “underground is not completely immune to storm damage (e.g., flooding and damage to cables from uprooted trees).”

Economists who have attempted to assess the exposure of the American economy to climate change have generally delivered insane underestimates based on a naive presupposition that wealth insulates the nation against significant damage, ignoring the systemic risks from the rapidly growing, unprecedented global threat. Most climate scientists haven’t bothered to translate the data from their circulation models into information useful for policy makers. However, some scientists and economists are beginning to work together to provide a more realistic assessment of our nation’s unavoidable exposure to severe climate damages.

The next challenge is for the essential disciplines and industries involved in climate resilience, such as civil engineering, urban planning, journalism, and insurance, to throw out risk management tools based on the now-false assumption of a stable climate, and to work collectively to protect our society from the coming onslaught of the “angry beast” of a superheated climate.

If the next U.S. President is a Republican, chances are good that he or she will be a climate change denier. After all, there’s only one candidate, Jon Huntsman, who embraces the established science of climate change. The rest have made it a central platform to openly deny the scientific consensus that human activity is heating up the planet.

So if a climate denier steps into the White House, what happens to international climate negotiations? Will the U.S. completely pull out of the process? Probably not. Chances are, that President — no matter how extreme their campaign rhetoric today — will have to face up to the realities of today’s global negotiations. (And not to mention the science.)

“I am certain that there would be members of the administration who are not isolationists on foreign policy,” says Andrew Light, a senior fellow and director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress.

“Of course, there is always that worst case scenario that a Republican president leaves negotiations. But climate negotiations are coming close to breaking out of their silo, making climate a central driver of broader foreign policy. In that case, leaving the negotiations behind would escalate into a much bigger problem,” Light tells Climate Progress.

A recent poll of “insiders” released this week by National Journal echoed this sentiment. Once the campaign ends and reality sets in, a Republican president may find it hard to back down:

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Other key stories below: Belgium Looks to Phase out Nuclear Power by 2025; Is Carbon Capture and Storage Storage on Track, Despite Setbacks?

Obama Questions China’s Clean Energy Practices

President Obama, asked about a trade case U.S. solar manufacturers have filed against China, said China has “questionable competitive practices” on clean energy and his administration has fought “these kinds of dumping activities.”

Oregon-based SolarWorld Industries America Inc., the largest U.S. maker of solar cells and panels, and six unnamed U.S. solar manufacturers petitioned the U.S. government Oct. 19 to halt what they said was the dumping of heavily subsidized products by China’s state-supported solar industry into the U.S. market.

Obama, in an interview Tuesday with KGW NewsChannel 8 of Portland, Ore., responded to a question about whether he’d be willing to look at “any kind of actions” to protect green jobs in the U.S. He answered:

“We have seen a lot of questionable competitive practices coming out of China when it comes to the clean energy space, and I have been more aggressive than previous administrations in enforcing our trade laws. We have filed actions against them when we see these kinds of dumping activities, and we’re going to look very carefully at this stuff and potentially bring actions if we find that the basic rules of the road have been violated.”

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