An investigation into enforcement in the nation’s largest oil and gas producing states finds that companies have “little to fear from the inspectors and agencies regulating” the industry.  This comes days after a panel of experts released a report warning that poor regulatory oversight of natural gas fracking could risk “serious environmental consequences and a loss of public confidence.”

The investigation of state-level data, conducted by Greenwire, shows that only a very small fraction of violations are enforced with fines. And when companies are fined, the penalties are “puny.”

In Texas, 96 percent of the 80,000 violations by oil and gas drillers in 2009 resulted in no enforcement action. West Virginia, a state with 56,000 wells, issued 19 penalties last year. And Wyoming, the center of Rocky Mountain energy, collected $15,500 in fines in 2010.

Pennsylvania, the most aggressive about fining violators, sought penalties for more than a quarter of the violations found last year. It levied fines for 4 percent of the violations, with the penalties totaling $3.7 million. The largest of those was a $900,000 fine against a drilling company that contaminated the water of 16 homes.

That was less than the profits the company makes in three hours.

Some states don’t even track key enforcement data, so regulators don’t know which companies have already been fined repeatedly.

This comes at a time of intense debate over how — or if — federal regulators should do more to monitor natural gas fracking. With the industry growing at around 50% a year, states are struggling to keep pace with the rate of expansion. A recent panel composed of industry professionals, put together by the Department of Energy, recently recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency finalize rules for regulating the practice:

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On an average yearly basis, renewables represent a small fraction of the total government investments in the energy sector (O&G is Oil & Gas)

Can you write a 2300-word article trashing clean energy subsidies that is so utterly devoid of crucial context for the readers that it

• Ignores the vast, documented benefits of clean energy
• Never discusses the large cost of dirty energy to human health
• Never compares clean energy subsidies to dirty energy ones
• Never compares U.S. clean energy subsidies to those of China, Germany and other countries.
• Ignores climate change (yet again)
• Utterly misunderstands the difference between a loan guarantee and a direct subsidy, among myriad other basic blunders?

You can if you are Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss of the New York Times.  Their Friday piece “A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search” joins the pantheon of recent one-sided, error-riddled, climate-free NYT pieces attacking clean energy or promoting dirty energy — see The NY Times Abandons the Story of the Century and Joins the Energy and Climate Ignorati.

The story is truly context free.  Again, you’d never know that the top U.S. economists (center-right non-environmentalists, just like the NYT editors appear to be) have provided a strong justification for clean energy subsidies — see Economics Stunner: “Oil and Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added”; Natural Gas Damage Larger Than Its Value Added For Even Low CO2 Prices.  So have public health experts (see Life-cycle study : Accounting for total harm from coal would add “close to 17.8¢/kWh of electricity generated”).

NOTE:  The lead author of that last study was Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.  My old friend Hunter Lovins just tweeted, “Very sad loss: my friend Paul Epstein has died. World’s foremost expert on health impacts of global warming. Damn…. The world needed him.”  Paul was a compassionate visionary.  The world did need him, since his message about the health impacts of climate change obviously has not reached all the people who need to hear it.

You’d never know that China provides vastly more subsidies for clean energy (see “Solar Trade War?“).  Again, in late October, the Times published an article titled, “China Takes a Loss to Get Ahead in the Business of Fresh Water.”  But apparently the editors seem to think that only China should invest in emerging industries that are going to be massive job creators in the coming years.  For New York Times editors, China’s short-term losses to achieve long-term gains are smart business but America’s are boondoggles.

Other than a couple of brief quotes by clean energy advocates, the only accurate part of the story is the analogy to gold rush.  Clean energy is indeed gold.

Every NY Times reporter and editor should have this excerpt from the recent International Energy Agency report on their desk:

“… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]….  Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

Where on Earth can you get a return on investment like that?  Ideally we would have a price on global warming pollution, but failing that it’s obvious that our problem isn’t that subsidies for clean energy are too high, but that they are far, far too low.

As for debunking the myriad errors in this piece, NRG Energy, the major victim of the Times’ egregious reporting, has taken the unusual step of issuing a major rebuttal, which I repost below:

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We cannot repeal the laws of nature. If we continue to do nothing, the floods, wildfires, heat waves and extreme weather that have wreaked havoc across our nation — at a cost of tens of billions of dollars annually — will increase and intensify. And future generations will never understand why we squandered our shrinking opportunity to protect the planet.

by Henry Waxman (D-CA), first published in the Politico

Last Congress, the Democratic-controlled House took dramatic action to protect American families and our economy from the immense challenges posed by global climate change. We enacted new programs to invest in America’s clean energy future, and we passed a comprehensive energy bill, which stalled in the Senate, to reduce weather-altering carbon pollution.

This Congress, the Republican-controlled House has reversed course. It has voted 21 times to block actions to address climate change, including a vote to deny that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.”

History will look back on this U-turn with profound regret.

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Economists have debunked the myth that environment regulations stall job growth again and again. Even as Mitt Romney calls to “tear down the vast edifice of regulations the Obama administration has imposed,” data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show regulations haven’t hurt the economy. In 2010, only 0.3 percent of layoffs were due to higher costs from government regulations/intervention. By comparison, lower business demand caused 25 percent of layoffs.

Past studies also confirm that regulations have virtually no impact on jobs. Richard Morgenstern’s landmark study found that over a decade of regulations on heavily polluting industries didn’t cause “a significant change” in employment:

According to the study, when jobs were lost, they were often made up elsewhere in the same industry. For every $1 million companies spent, as many as 11 / 2 net jobs were added to the economy.

Overall, the research shows that the GOP field’s hyperbolic calls to eliminate regulation would have minimal impact on the unemployment rate.

“We have to hire plumbers, electricians, painters, folks who do that kind of work when you retrofit a plant. Jobs are created in the process — no question about that.” — Mike Morris, CEO, American Electric Power

What happens when the GOP mantra that environmental regulations kill jobs is proven false? In politics, that usually means doubling down on the original false argument.

Even after losing a bid to roll back EPA’s cross-state air pollution rule last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul vowed to keep fighting federal air pollution standards, saying that he would not “let this administration continue to pass job-killing regulations.”

But those regulations aren’t killing jobs. And as we’ve pointed out several times, strong, well-designed environmental regulations have never killed jobs. The entire anti-environmental regulation platform of the Republican party is based on a made up scenario that has somehow trumped reality.

In fact, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that regulations are having virtually no impact on job losses. In 2010, only 0.3% of job losses occurred because of government regulation, according to the figures.

What about coming EPA regulation of mercury and carbon emissions? Won’t that cause a “train wreck” that will kill tens of thousands of jobs? Well, estimates vary on the precise jobs impact. One report from the University of Massachusetts estimates that more than 250,000 jobs will be created through installation of new equipment at existing power plants and construction of new clean energy facilities.

Net job creation is a bit harder to gauge, as there will be jobs lost in some areas of the industry in a shift away from coal to natural gas and renewables. But leading power providers are contradicting GOP “job-killing” talking points by explaining that new air-quality regulations will have an overall positive impact on job creation. The Washington Post just ran a piece on the impact of EPA rules:

The best wind farms in the world are already competitive with coal, gas and nuclear plants. But over the next five years, continued performance improvements and cost reductions will bring the average onshore wind plant in line with cheap natural gas, even without a price on carbon, according analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

After analyzing the cost curve for wind projects since the mind-1980′s, BNEF researchers showed that the cost of wind-generated electricity has fallen 14% for every doubling of installation capacity. These cost reductions are due to a number of factors: more sophisticated manufacturing, better materials, larger turbines, and more experience with plant operations and maintenance. Those improvements, combined with an oversupply of turbines on the global market, will bring the average cost of wind electricity down another 12% by 2016.

These two changes will drive the cost of wind energy down further, to parity with conventional energy sources. Assuming specific learning rates for these components, we expect wind to become fully competitive with energy produced from combined-cycle gas turbines by 2016 in most regions offering fair wind conditions. That would be the case with wind turbine prices at EUR 0.80m/MW by then. Any increase in the cost of gas, which will consequently raise the cost of energy of gas-fired turbines, would bring forward the timing of grid parity for wind.

The wind industry has a conflicted relationship with natural gas. As a “dancing partner” for wind projects, natural gas can offer firm back-up when the wind isn’t blowing. However, the boom in shale gas extraction has dropped natural gas prices substantially, nudging out wind developers in large markets like Texas.

But the industry is still moving on an experience curve that is bringing the wind farms at cost parity with historically low natural gas prices — even without a price on carbon:

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The decadal land-surface average temperature (relative to the 1950 – 1979 mean) using a 10-year moving average.  The grey band indicates 95% uncertainty interval.

The news release for today’s briefing, which will be webcast (here) at 2 pm DC time, explains:

Congressional Climate Briefing to Push “End of Climate Change Skepticism”

Dr. Richard Muller, Author of Berkeley Temperature Study, Makes First Appearance on Hill After Releasing Results; Drs. Ben Santer, William Chameides to Present Latest Research on Global Warming

WASHINGTON – Three prominent scientists will present the best case yet for the end of climate skepticism in Washington and the world over the fact that the world is warming at a congressional briefing held by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

It remains to be seen whether Muller will flip flop for the umpteenth time on whether he is pushing the “end to skepticism … over the fact that the world is warming.”

He has already returned to form as a confusionist.  On the one hand, today he told MSNBC’s Morning Joe today that “we’re getting very steep warming” and that because “we are dumping enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we’re working in a dangerous realm, I realm where I think, we may really have trouble in the next coming decades.”

But in a just-published interview he claimed absurdly:

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Speaking at a ceremony celebrating a new electric car company headquartered in Los Angeles, Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) said investments in the future must be made even in times of austerity. On Thursday, Brown, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and other top city officials celebrated the opening of the 100,000-square-foot global headquarters of electric carmaker CODA Automotive. The company this year has expanded from 75 to 225 employees, and will be offering a full-electric sedan that gets up to 150 miles per charge, on proprietary battery technology. CODA is also selling its batteries to electric utilities to help manage storage for renewable electricity, and will offer a home product to help maximize charging of their vehicles.

“A lot of people say California is a failed state,” Brown said. “Well, they’re wrong, and here’s another example of how California is on the move.” Brown also explained how government regulations, so often pilloried by the right, are what created the markets for this job-creating industry:

This is the state of innovation. It’s the place where things happen, from the gold rush, to those oil wells in . Lots of new stuff happens. Yes, we’ve got regulations. Some of these regulations are why car companies and the solar industry is expanding here in California. So you need some rules.

Watch Brown’s speech, recorded by ThinkProgress Green:

Brown praised the former Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for pushing clean energy. The state’s success doesn’t depend on one party, Brown said, but on “the creativity of the people that come to California.”

Brown cautioned that the state budget is going to be harsh, as he tries to rein in the state’s deficits, but that key investments in the future must be made. “In the midst of austerity, we also need dynamic innovation,” he said. “Even as we tuck in our belts, we’ll expand our imagination.”

Irasshaimase!

Those in the sushi cognoscenti already know that the only appropriate way to open a column about the now-ubiquitous Japanese cuisine is with the equally ubiquitous greeting shouted by restaurant employees to customers as they enter. Literally translated, it means “come in” or “welcome.” So welcome to our take on sushi.

The term “sushi” actually refers to the deftly seasoned pillows of rice that support the main attraction at any sushi bar—the fish. Think of it like “Seinfeld” with eponymous Jerry serving as the solid base, while the real flavor and variety is supplied by George, Elaine, Kramer, Newman, Crazy Joe Davola, Jackie Chiles, Uncle Leo, and the rest of the transient cast of characters such as Jerry’s rhyme-time ex-girlfriend, Dolores.

But how sustainable is your sushi? In many cases there are nuances, so take the descriptions below with a big grain of salt (or dollop of wasabi). We’ve based these assessments on the most common traits of the most frequently used fish in each category. For more in-depth info on specific species, the best resource I have found is Casson Trenor’s book Sustainable Sushi. And as always, remember that the simplest rule is always: Buy American.

Now, here are our 10 tickets to a spectacular, sustainable sushi experience.

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Other stories below: Africa’s Nile at Risk from Climate Change

Eurozone Crisis May Cloud Durban Climate Talks

Ahead of the Durban climate change talks beginning Nov 28, experts are worried that Eurozone crisis may curtail the billions of dollars of funding from industrialised countries to their poorer counterparts to adapt to climate change.

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