Global warming intensified the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast six years ago. Now Alaska is facing its own freak superstorm. The storm threatens thousands of miles of Alaska coastline. “Currently there are 35-foot waves and 100 mph winds in the open waters as the storm moves at 60 mph toward the western Alaska coastline,” the National Weather Service reports. The National Ocean Service has activated systems normally only used for tropical storms. Excerpts from the National Weather Service special weather statement issued Tuesday morning give a sense of the severity of the threat:

…ALASKA WEST COAST TO BE HIT BY ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE BERING SEA STORMS ON RECORD…

A POWERFUL AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS STORM OF NEAR RECORD OR RECORD MAGNITUDE IS BEARING DOWN ON THE WEST COAST OF ALASKA. . . .

. . . THIS INCLUDES THE VILLAGES OF NOME AND KIVALINA WHERE MAJOR DAMAGE FROM COASTAL FLOODING AND STRONG WINDS IS EXPECTED . . .

AGAIN…THIS WILL BE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS AND LIFE THREATENING STORM OF AN EPIC MAGNITUDE RARELY EXPERIENCED. ALL PEOPLE IN THE AREA SHOULD TAKE PRECAUTIONS TO SAFEGUARD THEIR LIVES AND PROPERTY.

“The current lack of sea ice in the Bering Sea will allow this storm to maximize its impact,” the Weather Channel’s Tim Ballisty writes. Alaskans are also bracing for the threat of oil spilled by ships rammed ashore, pipelines broken, and by coastal oil facilities hit by waves and large chunks of ice.

In 2008, Kivalina sued Exxon Mobil and other top carbon polluters because climate change is destroying the village. In 2009, a judge dismissed the case, saying the damages are a “political question.” The case is now on appeal.

by Chris Mooney, in a DeSmogBlog cross-post

Over the last year here at DeSmogBlog, my writings have converged around a set of common themes. On the one hand, I’ve shown just how factually incorrect today’s political conservatives are, documenting the disproportionate amount of misinformation believed by Fox News watchers and the disproportionate wrongness of the right when it comes to science.

At the same time, I’ve advanced a variety of psychological explanations for why we might be seeing so much political and scientific misinformation today on the right wing. For instance, I’ve unpacked the theory of motivated reasoning; and I’ve also talked about why conservative white males in particular seem to be such strong deniers of climate science.

All of this, I’m now prepared to say, is just the iceberg tip. You see, for the last year, I’ve been working on a book on the same topic, which explains why conservatives are so factually incorrect—drawing on the latest research in social psychology, political science, cognitive neuroscience, and other fields.

The book is now finished in draft form—due out next year with Wiley—and it is long past time to formally announce its existence. After all, it is already up on Amazon. But I can go farther by showing the draft cover image (the current subtitle is likely to change, as this phenomenon goes far, far beyond science, as does the book).  I can also share the text that will soon go up to Amazon and elsewhere. Eat your heart out, Ann Coulter:

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This weekend’s 12,000-person protest in Washington against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline proved that the environmental movement has a strong presence in the coming elections.

But for all that strength, the movement is missing one key ingredient: A tangible plan for our economy without the tar sands pipeline.

Sure, activists have clear demands for greater support of clean energy, effective clean air and water standards, strong local land rights, and national action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But the short-term economic arguments in favor of this pipeline — no matter how grossly inflated — may outweigh some of those environmental concerns. No one has yet presented a comprehensive, business-focused vision for the U.S. without the pipeline. Until now.

The Rocky Mountain Institute just released it’s latest book, Reinventing Fire, which provides a “grand synthesis” of decades-long research on how to create a profitable transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to an efficient, clean energy economy by 2050 that is 150% bigger than today — with no major technological breakthroughs and no major act of Congress.

Yes, you read that correctly.

We had a chance to sit down with RMI’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Amory Lovins, to chat about how the plan came together:

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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) is a bottomless source of slipshod attacks on environmental protections and the EPA. This year, Paul insisted that the EPA “turns everyday life into a federal crime” and regulations like the Clean Air Act have somehow “done more harm than good.”

Continuing his crusade against breathing, Paul is forcing a vote on a resolution this Thursday to overturn the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, a regulation that “seeks to reduce smog and particulate-forming pollution from power plants in 27 eastern states.” But not all Republicans are falling in line. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) announced yesterday that he would vote against Paul’s resolution, “a rare instance of a split within the Republican party over environmental policy.” His reason is simple: Air pollution “makes our citizens sick“:

“Air pollution blowing in from other states makes our citizens sick, especially children and older Tennesseans,” Al[e]xander said. “It is also a jobs issue — pollution makes our mountains smoggy, driving away tourists. And it makes it harder for communities to secure the air-quality permits that allow auto suppliers and other manufacturers to locate in, and bring jobs to, our state.”

Alexander is correct. The EPA notes that this protection actually prevents “as many as 34,000 premature deaths by limiting harmful air pollution that crosses state lines.” As an economic driver, clean air regulations pushed the GDP in 2010 to “1.5 percent higher than it would have been without the Clean Air Act.” The Institute for Clean Air Companies estimated that complying with just one clean air standard created about 29,000 full time jobs each year for the past seven years.

The White House threatened to veto this resolution that “would cause substantial harm to public health and undermine our Nation’s longstanding commitment to clean up pollution from power plants.” Noting that the rule also prevents “more than ten thousand heart attacks and hospital visits for respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and alleviate hundreds of thousands of childhood asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses,” the White House points out the rule “will yield hundreds of billions of dollars in net benefits each year.”

by Kate Gordon

The Occupy Wall Street protests are focusing Americans’ attention on the fact that power is increasingly consolidated into the hands of very few individuals and corporations. This is especially true in the energy sector. Just last week the country’s five largest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—released their third-quarter profits and once again revealed that high gas prices are bad for consumers but great for Big Oil, which pulled in a staggering $101 billion in profits during the first nine months of 2011.

Today Washington politicians publicly bicker over renewable energy credit programs that will only cost taxpayers $2.5 billion while the oil-and-gas industry quietly pulls in $7 billion in annual subsidies. But even that is not enough for Big Oil. These companies are now lobbying hard for even more federal government support, for even more of the public’s waters and lands to be opened up for drilling rigs or pipelines, and for even fewer health and safety standards to govern those projects.

At the same time, those of us who pay the taxes that subsidize Big Oil—call us the 99 percent, though in reality we’re more like the 99.99 percent—must continue paying out precious dollars at the pump and must suffer from the ill-health effects of fossil-fuel pollution because we have very little choice in how we power, or fuel, our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have the power to choose a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future.

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The American Petroleum Institute, a umbrella lobbying group for the oil industry, has new ads out thanking GOP members of the super committee for preserving billions in oil subsidies. The ads, posted on the industry group’s YouTube page last night, thank GOP super committee members Sens. Rob Portman (OH) and Pat Toomey (PA) and Reps. Dave Camp (MI) and Fred Upton (MI), and for opposing efforts to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies to oil companies. API, which represents ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Chevron, and other major oil corporations, calls the attempt to cut the subsidies “new job-crushing energy taxes!” Watch a sample of the Orwellian ads below:

As NPR has reported, the oil industry is moving into hyperdrive to crush any attempt to get rid of its subsidies.

Meanwhile, the world’s largest oil companies recently posted quarterly profits of $24 billion.

A common argument against global warming is that the climate has always varied. Temperatures rise sometimes and this is perfectly natural is the usual line.

However, Svante Björck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20,000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments. Svante Björck’s study thus goes 14,000 years further back in time than previous studies have done. “What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective,” he says.

So begins the news release for a recent study, “Current global warming appears anomalous in relation to the climate of the last 20,000 years.”  That study finds clear evidence recent human-caused global warming is unprecedented in the past 20 millennia:

… considering that climate trends during the last millennia in different parts of the world have, in the last century or so, changed direction into a globally warming trend, we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle in the general global environment.

… we have no past analogues to a situation with abruptly rising GHGs more than 10,000 yr into an interglacial period. We should therefore be cautious about how and to what degree we contaminate our environment and both directly and indirectly influence natural climate processes: the dangers of crossing climate thresholds in a greenhouse world have been pointed out by many scientists.

Multiple, independent analyses confirm recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause for the past 1600 to 2000 years (see links below).  Now an analysis finds that the kind of global warming we are seeing now hasn’t been seen for at least 20,000 years.

Climatologist Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading experts on paleoclimate reconstructions, emails me:
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How can it be that the richest nation in the history of the Earth has a deficit crisis? In “The Story of Broke,” Annie Leonard, the maker of the viral video “The Story of Stuff” explains that the taxes we pay to “invest in a better future” are instead diverted to “corporate tax loopholes and unprecedented tax breaks for the richest 1 percent,” and to pay for wars and the “dinosaur economy“:

Then hundreds of billions more go to propping up the dinosaur economy. You know, the obsolete system we talked about in The Story of Stuff — the one that produces more pollution, greenhouse gases and garbage than any other on Earth — and doesn’t even make us happy. In so many ways, it’s just not working, but we’re keeping it in on life support instead of building something better. A lot of that life support comes in the form of subsidies. A subsidy is a giveaway that gives some companies a lift over others. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — we should help companies that are building a better future. The problem is the government keeps lifting up companies that are actually dragging us down. Everywhere you look along the dinosaur economy, you’ll find these subsidies.

Watch it:

“So next time you have an idea for a better future and someone tells you, ‘that’s nice, but there’s no money for that,’ you tell them we’re not broke,” Leonard concludes. “There is money, it’s ours, and it’s time to invest it right.”

An editorial in the Washington Examiner, owned by oil billionaire Philip Anschutz, claims that the fight whether President Obama will approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline pits environmentalists against labor:

The pipeline creates opposition between two of Obama’s most important groups of political supporters: environmentalists who want to force Americans to stop using fossil fuels, and Big Labor, which wants the construction jobs.

In reality, this is a fight with environmentalists, climate activists, progressives, ranchers, farmers, and unions on one side and the oil industry on the other. The environmental movement is unified against the tar sands pipeline, whereas labor is split — AFL-CIO’s member unions are in disagreement about the project, with the Building Trades in favor and the Transit Unions opposed. The Building Trades signed a labor agreement with TransCanada in 2010, and were promised 13,000 jobs. Now independent analyses expect about 1,000 temporary construction jobs to be created, a meager benefit for civilizational risks.

The chances that President Obama will  delay a decision on permitting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline grow by the day — so climate hawks need to keep the pressure on.

Last week, Obama asserted that he would make the decision, not the State Department, and he explicitly cited risks to drinking water and public health.  Sunday’s anti-pipeline rally was the largest White House protest since the invasion of Iraq and a clear signal that the environmental community would hold Obama accountable for his decision.

Now TP Green reports:

In response to a congressional request, the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General has launched a review of the Keystone XL pipeline approval process. The State Department is tasked with conducting the environmental review of TransCanada’s proposed tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas for a Presidential Permit decision. Beginning with the Bush administration, the process has been largely outsourced to a contractor chosen and paid for by TransCanada, with only a single staffer overseeing the work. Meanwhile, lobbyists with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have aggressively pushed for approval on behalf of the foreign oil company. The request for an investigation was made by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and eleven Democratic members of the House of Representatives.

Here is the audit letter:

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Many of the threats made against the Environmental Protection Agency this election season have been pretty bizarre. I mean, really, why would anyone make it a major campaign platform to “padlock the doors” of the agency tasked with keeping our environment clean? It boggles the mind.

But a new campaign video from a North Dakota Republican running for Congress, Bette Grande, has taken this Bizarro-world to a whole new level:

One can imagine Grande picking out a team of producers from her local middle-school AV club and telling them: “Think ‘Tomb Raider 4′ meets ‘Night of the Living Dead’ meets ‘Lord of the Rings’ meets ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Fox News.’ Can you do that for me?” And voilà, this incredibly strange video was produced.

I have to give whoever made this film credit, they did a damn good job re-creating Michele Bachmann’s dreams.

Last Wednesday, the National Audubon Society awarded former EPA Administrator Carol Browner the organization’s Annual Keesee Conservation Award, recognizing her commitment to protecting the environment.

Browner, who was also director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, has one of the strongest environmental records — working to strengthen the Clean Air Act, pass the Safe Drinking Water and Food Quality Protection Acts, and secure the largest U.S. investment ever in clean energy.

Here’s a video tribute that Audubon put together featuring interviews with Al Gore and Madeleine Albright:

Other stories below: Permafrost May Unleash Greenhouse-Gas Spewing Microbes; Russia Sees New Urgency on Climate Deal

Australia Passes Landmark Carbon Price Laws

Australia passed landmark laws on Tuesday to impose a price on carbon emissions in one of the biggest economic reforms in a decade and injecting new impetus into December’s global climate talks in South Africa.

Tuesday’s vote in the upper house Senate made Australia the second major economy behind the European Union to pass carbon-limiting legislation. Tiny New Zealand has a similar scheme.

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