Read all the ThinkProgress coverage from the Durban climate talks.

The delegates assembled in Durban, South Africa to tackle the civilizational challenge of manmade climate destruction burst into sustained applause on Thursday when a young American interrupted the proceedings to speak on behalf of the United States people. Abigail Borah, a 21-year-old student from Middlebury College and member of the youth climate delegation, spoke out in the plenary hall as US climate envoy Todd Stern prepared to address the assembled environmental ministers. “I am scared for my future,” she said, because of the “obstructionist Congress” and the “empty rhetoric” of President Obama:

I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot. The obstructionist Congress has shackled justice and delayed ambition for far too long. I am scared for my future. 2020 is too late to wait. We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty. We need leaders who will commit to real change, not empty rhetoric. Keep your promises. Keep our hope alive.

Watch her speak, from Democracy Now:

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Our guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

So much for the oil and gas industry claim that the practice of hydraulic fracturing has never polluted a drinking water well.

On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency officially threw that claim in the waste pit. It announced that an investigation of water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming had linked the chemicals found in a ground water aquifer that was a source of drinking water in private wells to the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of nearby natural gas wells.

The agency said in a news release:

EPA’s analysis of samples taken from the Agency’s deep monitoring wells in the aquifer indicates detection of synthetic chemicals, like glycols and alcohols consistent with gas production and hydraulic fracturing fluids, benzene concentrations well above Safe Drinking Water Act standards and high methane levels.

Fracking is a widely used industry practice to stimulate production of oil and gas from deep wells. It involves the pumping at high pressure of large quantities of water mixed with sand and chemicals to fracture underground rock formations and release oil and gas.

The oil and gas industry – along with some prominent federal officials – have long claimed that because fracking occurs so far below groundwater aquifers that migration of the chemicals used in fracking into drinking water supplies was not possible and had never occurred.

Last May, for example, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified on Capitol Hill that she was not aware “of any proven case where the fracking process itself affected water.”

Now it looks like she’s going to have to revise and extend those remarks. And it looks like the industry is facing some tough times ahead as it seeks to keep up a rush of shale gas development in fields stretching from New York to Texas.

For more information about the need for greater scrutiny on fracking, see Kenworthy’s report on “Bringing Fracking to the Surface“

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday for the first time that fracking — a controversial method of improving the productivity of oil and gas wells — may be to blame for causing groundwater pollution.

The draft finding could have a chilling effect in states trying to determine how to regulate the process.

The practice is called hydraulic fracturing and involves pumping pressurized water, sand and chemicals underground to open fissures and improve the flow of oil or gas to the surface.

The EPA’s found that compounds likely associated with fracking chemicals had been detected in the groundwater beneath a Wyoming community where residents say their well water reeks of chemicals.

Health officials advised them not to drink their water after the EPA found hydrocarbons in their wells.

This APNewsBreak is certainly a bombshell for an industry whose favorite (very dubious) talking point had been “we’ve never had one confirmed case of groundwater contamination.”

Of course, the important and influential NY Times series on natural gas fracking reported back in February that “The dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.”

And the industry insiders who made up the DOE Fracking Panel warned last month of “a Real Risk of Serious Environmental Consequences” Absent Regulation:

It is the Subcommittee’s judgment that if action is not taken to reduce the environmental impact accompanying the very considerable expansion of shale gas production expected across the country – perhaps as many as 100,000 wells over the next several decades – there is a real risk of serious environmental consequences and a loss of public confidence that could delay or stop this activity.

The new EPA finding certainly supports that warning.

Here is more from the AP story on the implications of the preliminary finding:

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In the last 24 hours, historic weather bombs have struck North America and Scotland, powered by unchecked levels of carbon pollution. The freak weather disasters are another deadly reminder to the Durban climate talks that dangerous interference with the climate system is an urgent reality.

Yesterday, Washington, D.C. facd a severe storm that “had it all: heavy mountain snow, raging wind, and severe thunderstorms” that went down as the wettest December 7th on record. In Canada, a nasty snowstorm has left 30,000 without power. Scotland and Britain are facing the fiercest storm since 2007, a “red warning” “weather bomb”:

Scotland battened down the hatches with school, offices and attraction not opening or closing early … The storm’s winds were so strong as its pressure dropped by 44mb, almost double the qualifying amount for a weather bomb, in the 24 hours to 6am this morning. The winds today were stronger than the 80mph gusts seen when Hurricane Katia hit in September … WeatherOnline forecaster Simon Keeling said: ‘The weather machine has thrown absolutely everything at us, from wind to snow. Just about anything that can be mustered has been on the cards.‘

At the Durban talks Environment Minister Peter Kent acknowledged Canada is well past safe temperatures:

Time is really running short in terms of the 2 degrees, and in Canada we’re already past that in the Arctic, and we really do need to find a way to get meaningful significant reductions from the major developing economies.

Back in Canada, Stephen Harper’s right-wing government demonstrated Kent’s words are meaningless. It gave the go-ahead today for a major tar sands project that is the equivalent to 270,000 more cars on the road.

As global greenhouse pollution increases at record rates, the U.S. has experienced an unprecedented 12 billion-dollar weather disasters this year. The extreme weather hitting the countries making key decisions regarding tar sands and pollution regulations serves as a forewarning of the disasters we face with insufficient action on climate action.

The United States should continue its progress toward approval of a new fund for global mitigation and adaptation.

by Richard Caperton and Andrew Light

As this year’s U.N. climate summit in Durban comes into the home stretch we continue to hear good things about the development of the final implementing document for the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

This is good news for those interested in an outcome in Durban that could impact mitigation and adaptation efforts through this decade.  The GCF is part of the pledge made in the Cancun agreements to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation efforts world wide.  While the Fund itself is not tasked with mobilizing all of this financing it will nonetheless be a key component of those efforts.

Confidence that the GCF will also come together is also good new for those observing the evolution of the U.S.’s negotiating position the past two weeks.  While the U.S. had approved the agreement at the Cancun summit last year to create the fund, recently its confidence in the fund had been in question.

In Cancun an official “Transition Committee” of 40 countries had been created  to meet over the course of the last year to create an implementing document to make the GCF a reality.  The “TC,” as it came to be called, met four times, with the last meeting to the west of here in Cape Town in mid-October.  At that meeting the U.S. dissented in the final hours with the other members of the TC and, along with Saudi Arabia, withheld its consent to the implementing document.

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Speaking at the Durban climate talks, Grenada environment minister and Alliance of Small Island States chair Karl Hood responded to a reporter who said climate scientists believe it is impossible to keep global warming below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which threatens the future inhabitability of the small island states of the world. Hood asked if that is a prescription for “annihilation“:

If they’re saying that 1.5 isn’t possible, are you asking us then to accept annihilation?

Watch it:

“I would love for these scientists to speak to the negotiators who are asking us to wait until 2020,” Hood said, making reference to consensus emerging by major polluters — including the European Union, China, the United States, and India — that stronger climate targets can’t go into effect before then. He concluded that “we have to increase the ambition, not decrease the ambition” as the scientific assessment of the greenhouse pollution threat grows more dire.

Climate scientists interviewed by ThinkProgress Green confirm that that they believe it is “impossible” to keep warming below 1.5°C, as there has already been nearly 1°C of warming, there is a multi-decadal delay in the atmospheric response to greenhouse pollution, and there’s no sign of the total global effort that would need to start immediately to have even a small chance of averting such a rise. If warming were somehow to be limited to 1.5°C, scientists found earlier this year, long-term sea level rise would be at least a foot — far better than the several meters possible under higher pollution.

“There are forces acting that are willing to chance the future of the islands because they are unwilling to take meaningful action to stop climate change,” climate scientist John Abraham told ThinkProgress Green, when asked for his candid opinion of Minister Hood’s question.

Yesterday, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said that he considers the 2°C goal codified by the G8 and the Cancun Accords to be a “guidepost,” not a “cap that you must meet.”

Read all of the ThinkProgress coverage of the Durban climate talks.

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has separated himself from his party by boldly acknowledging the existence of climate change.

The only problem? He’s unwilling to do anything to stop it.

Appearing on the Laura Ingraham radio show, Huntsman professed his faith in climate scientists, in stark contrast to his competitors for the GOP presidential nomination. However, when Ingraham then pressed him what he would do about it, Huntsman balked, saying that he “will not allow this country to…unilaterally disarm” unless China and India address climate change as well.

INGRAHAM: How are we going to make America strong if we walk into these problems with this idea of, “we’ve got to cap emissions, otherwise if we don’t do that, the climate’s going to change.” That’s just a jobs killer.

HUNTSMAN: You hit right on exactly the key point here, and that is, what are you going to do about it? I’m not one who’s going to disadvantage this economy or hobble job creators by doing something that clearly is an international problem. Unless you’ve got China and India and others who are willing to address their issue as well, you are unilaterally disarming, and I will not allow this country to do that.

Listen to it:

His declaration that the United States will not “unilaterally disarm” follows the rhetoric of one of the leading anti-climate forces in the Senate, James Inhofe (R-OK). In 2004, Inhofe warned that “the alarmists continue to claim we should unilaterally disarm America’s economy based on Mann’s unbelievable – literally unbelievable – results.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) also used the same excuse earlier this year, saying that “it’s crazy for us to unilaterally disarm ourselves when we’re in competition with the rest of the world.”

As Obama’s former ambassador to China, Huntsman should be well aware that China is taking significant action to limit its carbon footprint.

Though Huntsman professes to accept climate science, his refusal to combat it makes his professed respect nothing more than hot air. Americans and people around the world need, in the words of Toby Keith, “a little less talk and a lot more action.”

by Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

We are a week away from the December 16^th deadline for the Obama Administration to issue its final toxic air pollution reduction rules for coal fired power plants.  This comes more than two decades after President George H.W. Bush signed this public health protection into law as part of the Clean Air Act of 1990.

There is escalating pressure from dirty utilities and coal companies to weaken or delay the pollution reduction standards even though they support from other companies.  Six coalitions representing 125,000 businesses, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, sent a letter to President Obama strongly supporting a timely promulgation and implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules.  Led by Ceres and the Small Business Majority, urge that caving to the polluters’ demands would jeopardize much needed jobs and postpone innovation and investment.  These diverse businesses emphasize that “the Clean Air Act yields substantial benefits to the economy and to business, and that these benefits consistently outweigh the costs of pollution reductions.”

These pollution reductions are long overdue.  The dirtiest power plants in the U.S. account for a disproportionately large amount of toxic pollutants, according to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) released on December 7th.  The report concludes that coal fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas have the most toxic emissions.

Ilan Levin, associate director of Environmental Integrity Project, said

“The only thing more shocking than the large amounts of toxic chemicals released into the air each year … is the fact that these emissions have been allowed for so many years.  There is no reason for Americans to continue to live with unnecessary risks to their health and to the environment. “

These rules will remove millions of pounds of mercury, lead, arsenic and other dangerous pollutants from coal plants, preventing 17,000 premature deaths annually.   Although EPA estimates that it will cost utilities $10.9 billion to clean up, it will save at least $59 billion in fewer premature deaths, lower health care costs, and fewer absences from work or school.  Despite these benefits, the companies most affected by the rules– with the dirtiest power plants – and their allies are launching a serious rear guard action to weaken or delay these reductions.

Anti-pollution control forces have encouraged their allies to advocate on their behalf.  For instance, an editorial by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal from December 6^th misleadingly diminished EPA’s benefit projections for the rules.

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The Winning Aussie Strategy: Fighting Back Against Deniers and Talking About Climate Change

If President Obama needs a role model for his stance (or lack thereof) on climate change, he should look no further than the Deputy Leader of Australia’s Green Party, Christine Milne.

In a wide-ranging interview with Climate Progress at the COP 17 climate talks in Durban today, Senator Milne outlined her strategy for helping pass a comprehensive climate bill in Australia this year — even when faced with “a massive campaign against the climate science” that rivals the War on Science being waged in America (see Aussie Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”)

One of the main reasons the Australian Parliament was able to pass a price on carbon, said Milne, is because proponents actually led by talking about climate change. And they didn’t back down or shift their talking points when the attacks picked up.

“We fought back. It was a totally committed strategy,” Milne told Climate Progress. “This is about saving the planet’s climate. That is what we are here for. This is why you need real leadership and not just a response to the populist views echoed from the vested, self interests.”

In other words, the exact opposite strategy of the Obama Administration in 2009 and 2010 as it let a climate bill slip down the legislative priority list and allowed the Tea Party to hijack the issue as a completely bogus War on Freedom (see Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

Unlike Obama and Congressional allies of the 2009 climate bill, Milne has explicitly called out the organizations working overtime to derail action on climate policy. The same players funding the Denier Industrial Complex in America — the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heartland Institute and the Murdoch Press, among others — exported their tactics to Australia to battle the climate bill, said Milne:

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Federal regulators and Alpha Natural Resources this week reached an “unprecedented” settlement regarding the tragic explosion that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine outside Beckley, West Virginia in 2010, and though the deal has hardly pleased victims’ families, members of Congress were quick to pile on Massey (which was sold to Alpha Natural Resources earlier this year).

Among those members was Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the chairman of the House workforce committee, who slammed Massey’s “reckless disregard for critical worker safety protections” and for making its workers “face greater danger in an inherently hazardous profession.” But while Kline has repeatedly rebuked Massey, he and his GOP colleagues have done little to address mine safety. Congress, in fact, hasn’t passed a mine safety law since 2006, despite numerous deadly accidents since, as the GOP claims such laws will inhibit job creation — despite evidence showing that increasing mining regulation does just the opposite.

Instead, he has heaped blame on the the agency charged with enforcing mining regulations, as he did in June, when the original Massey report was issued:

“As we have said time and again, the strongest laws on the books will not protect workers if those laws are not obeyed and enforced,” he said. “We will continue to follow this ongoing investigation closely and work to ensure mine safety laws are being followed by mine operators and aggressively enforced by federal officials.”

Kline is correct in stating that even the most stringent laws won’t prevent disasters if they aren’t enforced. What he ignores in blaming regulators, however, is that years of Republican policies made federal mine regulators virtually impotent in efforts to prevent such tragedies. It was a Bush-era policy that urged the Mine Safety and Health Administration to “point out safety violations and help mine operators comply with the rules,” The Hill notes, instead of issuing safety violations and citations. Even so, MSHA issued thousands of violations and citations at Upper Big Branch before the tragedy, to no avail.

Close relationships between politicians and coal officials often prevent regulators from being effective as well. President Bush, for instance, appointed a former Massey official to an MSHA review commission in 2002, despite the company’s already-deadly record. And Bush’s MSHA chief was a former coal exec whose company had amassed injury rates at double the national average. In coal states like Kentucky, officials on the state mine safety board are former coal executives from companies with shoddy safety histories.

Mine safety legislation, meanwhile, continues to go nowhere. The latest effort, a bill introduced in April 2010, was never taken up in the Senate, likely because it couldn’t break a Republican filibuster, and failed to pass the Republican-controlled House.

by Katherine O’Konski, in a Climate Science Watch cross-post

Shawn Lawrence Otto’s Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America is a fascinating look at the status of science in American society. Otto’s explanation of the climate change denial machine provides a compelling narrative that places the ‘controversy’ in the context of science’s slipping authority vis-a-vis political rhetoric and pseudoscience that passes for fact.  However, the book’s greatest merit lies in the analysis and resulting suggestions for positive reform – an effort that will require the contributions of politicians, scientists, the media, and the general public.

CSW caught up with Otto at the Union of Concerned Scientists Washington, DC, office for a discussion of Fool Me Twice last Thursday, December 1.

“Whenever people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  Wise and famous words from Thomas Jefferson imply troubling questions as the opening line of Otto’s publication.  Are Americans well-informed on important problems facing society?  If we are not well-informed (and even if we are), are we capable of creating and implementing policies to deal with these problems responsibly?  Otto’s book is compelling as it addresses the conflicting opinions on issues that Americans must sort through on a daily basis.

Debates over climate change are just the beginning, yet it is exemplary in that preconceived ideologies and political rhetoric are elevated to the point where they can confront peer-reviewed scientific findings.  And how has this happened? Otto outlines American society’s tumultuous relationship with scientific inquiry since the days of the founding fathers, coming to the conclusion that science has been gradually forced out of political discussion.  “American democracy relies on a plurality of voices representing economic, scientific, and religious perspectives to arrive at balanced public policy,” he maintains. “With the voice of science going silent in our political dialogue, America no longer has that plurality.”

Science has been ghettoized and pushed aside, Otto maintains, absent from policy debates despite the fact that scientific issues have such huge and lasting impacts on American lives. The cause of this unfortunate reality is attributed to an amalgamation of factors, the most prominent of which seem to be the pervasiveness of campaigns, motivated by monetary investment or a conflicting religious ideology, to subvert the value society places on scientific information.  The media’s tendency to seek out conflicting opinions, even opinions that are not scientifically legitimate; scientists’ tendency to operate as though their respective fields are not political; and the general public’s tendency to ignore the importance of science education, all play a part.

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Emilee Pierce, in a Political Correction cross-post

The cover story of this week’s National Journal takes a deeper dive into a question we’ve explored before: What happened to the Republican consensus on climate change?

Three years ago, prominent Republicans including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Tim Pawlenty, and Sarah Palin all expressed belief in human-caused climate change. Several even voiced strong support for policies to cap and reduce carbon pollution. Today, all six of these leaders have joined the rest of the Republican Party in a sudden and near-unified retreat to silence or denial.

When contacted by the National Journal, only 65 out of all 289 GOP lawmakers in Congress would agree to be interviewed on the topic. Of those interviewed, only 19 said they believed that human activities are at least partly responsible for climate change. Of the 19, only five (or fewer than 2 percent of GOP lawmakers) attributed a “significant amount” of climate change to human activity.

So, what happened?

It’s not the science that has changed — it’s only gotten stronger. As Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council, said: The level of scientific certainty that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change is comparable to the strength of our understanding that vaccines prevent measles and polio.

What have changed, according to the National Journal, are the types and relative strengths of pressures on GOP lawmakers. Namely, “the rise of the Tea Party, its crusade against regulations, and the influx of vast sums of money into electoral politics from energy companies and sympathetic interest groups.”

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At a press conference on Wednesday, top U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern explained to reporters in Durban that he sees the goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — more than double the amount of existing warming — as a “guidepost,” instead of “some kind of mandatory obligation”:

I think that we look at two degrees as an important and serious goal which ought to guide what we do, which ought to guide the action that we take in order to try and attain it. That is — so it’s important, it’s serious, and it’s a guidepost I would say. That is still different from looking at it as an operational cap that you must meet, and that if you, you know, see yourself off of it based on science, then you have some kind of mandatory obligation to change what you’re doing, whether you’re in the United States, or Europe, or China, wherever you might be. I think you have — I mean, I think as we look at science, and we see the trajectories, it ought to inform our sense of what needs to be done. It might well cause us or anybody else to say, jeez, we need to do more. But we don’t see it as akin to a national target.

Watch it:

At the beginning of the Durban climate talks, U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing brushed aside concerns that commitments made under the Cancun agreements in 2010 put the world on a pathway much higher than 2°C, arguing there are “essentially an infinite number of pathways” that allow stronger cuts starting in 2020 to “stay below 2 degrees.” Pershing later conceded that it is “desirable to do a great deal earlier” but argued the negotiators have to be “politically pragmatic.”

With less than 1°C warming, we are already experiencing dangerous climate change, as evidenced by the rapid increase in catastrophic extreme weather, rapid changes in ecosystems, rapid sea level rise, rapid ocean acidification, agricultural productivity decline, rapid polar and glacial ice loss, and other guideposts for the viability of modern human civilization and global biodiversity. Although 2°C warming — which would involve much greater local warming in the Northern hemisphere — is “not safe,” going higher would make “large-scale discontinuities” likely that create conditions “incompatible with an organized global community.”

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by Adam James

This is the second article in a series examining the debates around the Smart Grid raging inside what are often highly technical circles. The Smart Grid is going to influence almost every aspect of daily life. So it’s important to get a grip on the potentially controversial decisions that will be made over the next few years in creating this new web of energy consumers and suppliers.

Issue 2: The Fast standards vs. The Right standards

What are ‘interoperability standards’ and why do they matter?

In the last issue we discussed how the “smart” in Smart Grid are the revolutionary communications technologies that allow different parts of the grid to communicate with each other. Interoperability standards are the rules of the road that make this communication possible, and ensure that the technologies are able to work in synchronization.

As a consumer, you want the product you purchase to fit into the overall package of energy efficiency for your home. For example, if you purchase a smart thermometer, you would expect it to be able to signal temperature changes to your AC/heating system. You would also expect those changes to be reflected in your energy use as tracked by the meter. Unless the companies who make all those technologies conform to a standard, nothing can function effectively. Interoperability is like the universal remote for operating all these technologies.

Getting the technical details right, particularly for issues like Phasor Measurement Systems for time synchronized energy prices, are going to be essential in moving forward in every aspect of the grid. Without corresponding technologies, new pricing structures can’t take root. And while regulatory bodies are doing their best to establish a framework for demand response compensation (the mechanisms which help curtail consumer demand at peak hours), there have to be fundamental changes in our system to make the right things happen.

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