In September 2010, Munich Re one of the world’s leading reinsurers, wrote “the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.”

In January, they summed up 2010 this way:  “The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change.”

Last week meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters analyzed 2011, “Fourteen U.S. billion-dollar weather disasters in 2011: a new record,” which I excerpt below:

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JR:  ABC News is starting to build out their climate website, which was started by Bill Blakemore 4 years ago.  He just launched “Nature’s Edge Notebook,” a weekly column on climate change.  ABC News has given me permission to repost the whole piece.  So be sure to bookmark the site or like the new Facebook page.  Also, there is a great video interview of climatologist Richard Somerville below.

by Bill Blakemore, in an ABC News cross-post

Imagine you’re reading Shakespeare on an unseasonably warm evening while sitting on a dune looking west across the sea at sunset.

Who really wrote that poetry, what caused that extra heat, and what’s really happening out on the horizon?

You’ll need experts for all that.

On sunset, scientists now have news this reporter finds it hard to keep a grip on.

You watch the reddening sun move down toward the horizon until the bottom edge of the bright disc drops behind the rim of the sea. The still visible portion of the sun morphs into various shapes as it moves inexorably down until it’s just a tiny point of light. Then, as you can plainly see, it is suddenly gone as the sun travels even further below the horizon.

Experts now tell us none of that is true. The sun isn’t moving down at all!

Instead, the earth beneath you is rolling backwards so that its rounded bulk is slowly rising up between you and the sun.

Incredible. You don’t sense this motion. The earth seems to be the steady one.

Of course, experts have long told us this — ever since Galileo’s trial in 1633 for concurring with astronomer Copernicus on the matter. And we believe them.

And yet, I still need to remind myself each time (if I think of it at all) when watching the sun set that it doesn’t.

You too?

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Tax breaks and subsidies for energy companies have gotten so extreme that dozens of top companies have made billions in profits while having negative taxes, actually receiving taxpayer welfare instead of paying anything to the federal treasury. An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found dozens of companies that had a negative tax balance between 2008 and 2010, while making billions in profits. Because of tax breaks and questionable tax dodging, these companies reported higher post-tax profits than pretax profits, often actually getting checks from the Internal Revenue Service.

During these years of negative taxation, 32 companies in the fossil-fuel industry — from Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy to ConEd and PG&E — transformed a tax responsibility of $17.3 billion on $49.4 billion in pretax profits into tax benefits of $6.5 billion, a $24 billion windfall:

The official corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, but subsidies and dodges make that figure meaningless. The overall tax rate for top utility companies from 2008 to 2010 was 3.7 percent, the report found. Companies in the oil, gas, and pipelines sector paid 15.7 percent. The report’s authors comment:

It seems rather odd, not to mention highly wasteful, that the industries with the largest subsidies (driven in part by their large share of total profits) are ones that would seem to need them least.

Regulated utilities, for example, make investment decisions in concert with their regulators based on the needs of the communities they serve. Oil and gas companies are so profitable that even President George W. Bush said they did not need tax breaks.

DC-area utility Pepco had the highest negative tax rate of the 280 companies surveyed in the report, with negative taxes of $508 billion on $882 pretax profits, a whopping -57 percent effective tax rate. Pepco chairman, president, and CEO Joe Rigby made $3.6 million in 2010.

The 99 percent is subsidizing welfare for the 1 percent. First the corporations profit from the utility bills and gas prices that take a disproportionate chunk of working families’ budgets, then they get another cut from a corporate-friendly tax code. The lion’s share of the profits are kept for the benefit of overpaid executives and superwealthy shareholders. Furthermore, these corporations are profiting from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, giving them the triple subsidy of the long-term costs of pollution being paid primarily by children and the elderly.
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Photo Credit: Shadia Fayne Wood

by Jessica Goad and Stephen Lacey

“Hey, Obama, we don’t want no climate drama.”

That was one of the rallying cries from the estimated 12,000-person crowd protesting outside the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline yesterday afternoon.

After a series of high-energy speeches from James Hansen, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Mark Ruffalo and many others, demonstrators poured onto Pennsylvania Avenue and created a human chain around the White House, chanting, “two, four, six, eight, stop XL, it’s not too late.”

Christine James of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, was one of a dozen protesters interviewed by Climate Progress outside the White House who saw approval of the Keystone pipeline — a 1,700 mile pipeline that would bring environmentally-disastrous crude from Alberta’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries — as a major litmus test for President Obama.

“Those of us who helped to get him elected are here to encourage him to live up to the promises that he made us to clean up the environment and switch us over to cleaner sources of energy. By circling the White House, we’re there to catch him if he falls in doing the right thing. And we’re also there to watch him and make sure he does the right thing,” explained James.

Watch some of our footage from the protest:

The Keystone XL pipeline has become a rallying cry for a broad spectrum of environmental interests — climate, land protection, clean water, and environmental justice. Although the Obama Administration has taken important steps on environmental issues such as crafting rules for mercury emissions, establishing aggressive fuel efficiency standards for heavy and light vehicles, and considering EPA regulation of carbon emissions, the Keystone XL pipeline is seen by environmental groups as “a line in the tar sands.”

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… special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles.

… will our political system delay the [solar] energy transformation now within reach?

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman has another good column in the NY Times today, “Here Comes the Sun.”  He makes three key points.  First, solar is rapidly coming down the cost curve — I’ve  sprinkled a couple of the Climate Progress charts on this throughout this post.  Second, fracking is over-hyped.  Third,  the only thing that can stop the solar revolution in this country is fossil-fuel-driven politics:

We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives….

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

And don’t forget the traditional media, who overhype the output of  that propaganda machine (see Solyndra Is “the Royal Wedding of Energy Stories”)

But the cost drops are real and impressive:

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Being from New England, I’m a Patriots fan. After watching thousands gather outside the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, I tuned into last night’s nail-biting loss against the New York Giants on television. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the banner that the League of Conservation Voters flew over Gillette Stadium.

LCV has been hitting Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown hard over the last couple of months with a media campaign designed to bring attention to his poor environmental record. This is one of the organization’s most creative yet:

Solar power is advancing at a remarkable rate. Major investments by the Obama administration and much greater investment by the Chinese government have accelerated competition, driving down prices for high-quality solar modules. Installation of solar projects in China has exploded. In China, 195 projects, with a total capacity of over 1.8 GW, will be installed within 2011, comparable to installations in the United States. In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman describes how the fossil fuel industry and its allies are attacking solar’s success:

We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives. [...]

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

Solar powered-electricity is getting close to the price of coal-fired electricity, Krugman notes. “And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.”

Man Scraping Barrel

JR:  Another day, another inane attack on the IPCC.  Here are two debunkings, one from Media Matters and, for those who like science snark, one from Brooke LaFlamme, grad student: “An open letter to Donna Laframboise (or, You have got to be F*!$*%@&! kidding me).”  First, MM:

Fox Scraping the Barrel for Attacks on UN Climate Panel

by Jocelyn Fong & Shauna Theel of Media Matters

Citing what it calls “a scathing new expose on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change,” Fox News is trumpeting claims that IPCC reports “have often been written by graduate students with little or no experience in their field of study.” Fox’s article, titled “U.N. Hires Grad Students to Author Key Climate Report,” comes as the IPCC prepares to issue a new report on weather extremes.

by Cole Mellino

Urban homesteading, in which households grow their own food and often raise animals for food in an urban environment, is becoming more and more popular as people decide to opt out of our globalized, industrialized agricultural system.

Concerned about the state of agriculture and the impact our farming methods are having on the environment, a growing number of people are doing it themselves — often in the urban setting. But growing large amounts of food and raising animals in an urban or suburban area can cause conflict too.

There is mounting pressure on cities to update old zoning laws that place restrictions on urban homesteading. In many cities, practices such as beekeeping, selling produce, and raising and slaughtering animals for food are outlawed. Those who want to change the laws argue that it’s a basic right to be able to produce one’s food. Those who are opposed raise concerns about animal welfare, cleanliness, safety, noise and general unsightliness.

Oakland has become the key battleground between these competing groups.

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There’s just a deadly synergy between beetles, blister rust and climate change,” said Jesse Logan, a whitebark expert in Montana.

Other key stories below: Secret ‘Watch List’ Reveals Failure to Curb Toxic Air; Wind Power Surges in the Third Quarter

Climate Change, Beetle May Doom Rugged Pine

The bug lady scoots through stick-straight lodgepole and ponderosa, and marches uphill toward the gnarled trunk of a troubled species: the whitebark pine.

The ghostly conifers found on chilly, wind-swept peaks like this may well be among the earliest victims of a warming climate. Even in the Northwest, rising temperatures at higher elevations have brought hundreds of thousands of whitebark pines in contact with a deadly predator — the mountain pine beetle — that is helping drive this odd tree toward extinction.

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