Government’s Support for the Fossil Fuel Contradicts Its Pledge to Reduce Global Warming Pollution

The House GOP has said it will pass a bill holding the payroll tax cut extension hostage to accelerating the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline decision.  House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) predicted Monday that measure would pass the House.

At the State Department’s daily briefing, a reporter asked about this and the answer was a firm, “go ahead, make my day”:

QUESTION: Do you have any comment on the proposed Congressional action requiring the State Department to make a determination on the Keystone pipeline within 60 days of enactment of the House version of the payroll tax cut bill?

ANSWER: It is the President’s prerogative to lead and manage the foreign policy of the United States, and in the case of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project, our relations with Canada. This historical prerogative encompasses the President’s long-established authority to supervise the permitting process for transboundary pipelines.

The President has delegated his authority to supervise this permitting process, by executive order, to the Department of the State. This process for determining whether to issue permits for transborder pipelines has been in place for more than 40 years.

In determining whether a permit is in the national interest, this process requires consideration of a myriad of factors, including environmental and safety issues, energy security, economic impact, and foreign policy, as well as consultation with at least 8 federal agencies and inputs from the public and stakeholders – including Congress.

The State Department has led a rigorous, thorough, and transparent process that must run its course to obtain the necessary information to make an informed decision on behalf of the national interest. Should Congress impose an arbitrary deadline for the permit decision, its actions would not only compromise the process, it would prohibit the Department from acting consistently with National Environmental Policy Act requirements by not allowing sufficient time for the development of this information. In the absence of properly completing the process, the Department would be unable to make a determination to issue a permit for this project.

The State Department is currently in the process of obtaining additional information regarding alternate routes that avoid the Sand Hills in Nebraska. Based on preliminary consultations with the State of Nebraska and the permit applicant, the Department believes the review process could be completed in time for a decision to be made in first quarter 2013.

Bang. Bang.

It’s worth noting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said last week: “If the House sends us their bill with Keystone in it, they are just wasting valuable time because it will not pass the Senate.” And President Obama said: “Any Effort to Tie Keystone to the Payroll Tax Cut, I Will Reject.”

Good to see the State Department switch from Kops to Cops.

Figure 1. Departure of precipitation from average for 2011, as of December 6, 2011.  Remarkably, more than half of the country (56%) experienced either a top-ten driest or top-ten wettest year, a new record. Image credit: NOAA/HPC.

– Dr. Jeff Masters in a WunderBlog repost (with added material at the end)

This year is now the wettest year in nearly 200 years of record keeping in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A large, wet low pressure system soaked the Northeast U.S. on Wednesday and early Thursday, bringing 2.31 inches of rain to the City of Brotherly Love, bringing this year’s precipitation total in Philly to 62.26 inches. This breaks the old yearly precipitation record of 61.20 inches, set in 1867. In a normal year, Philadelphia receives about 40 inches.

According to wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt, this is one of the most difficult U.S. city records to break, since rainfall records in Philadelphia go back to 1820. The only other sites with a longer continuous precipitation record in the U.S. are Charleston, SC (1738 -) and New Bedford, MA (1816 -).

20+ inches above average precipitation in Ohio Valley, Northeast

Philadelphia is not alone in setting a wettest year in recorded history mark in 2011. Over a dozen major cities in the Ohio Valley and Northeast have set a new wettest year record, or are close to doing so. Thanks to rains associated with this year’s tremendous tornado outbreaks in April in May, plus exceptionally heavy summer thunderstorm rains, combined with rains from Tropical Storm Lee and Hurricane Irene, portions of at least twelve states have seen rains more than twenty inches above average during 2011.

The fraction of the country covered by extremely wet conditions (top 10% historically) was 32% during the period January through November, ranking as the 2nd highest such coverage in the past 100 years. And if you weren’t washing away in a flood, you were baking in a drought in 2011–portions of sixteen states had precipitation more than twenty inches below average (Figure 1.)

The fraction of the country covered by extremely dry conditions (top 10% historically) was 22% during the period January through November, ranking as the 8th highest in the past 100 years. The combined fraction of the country experiencing either severe drought or extremely wet conditions was 56% averaged over the January – November period–the highest in a century of record keeping [see Figure 2 below].

Climate change science predicts that if the Earth continues to warm as expected, wet areas will tend to get wetter, and dry areas will tend to get drier–so this year’s side-by-side extremes of very wet and very dry conditions should grow increasingly common in the coming decades.

Read more

A sequel to Newt Gingrich’s 2007 book Contract with the Earth is in the works, though not until after the 2012 elections. The book, being edited by Contract co-author Terry Maple, is provisionally titled Environmental Entrepreneurs and will contain “essays by various businesspeople and scientists” on how to fight climate change. One of the essayists is climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, asked by Maple to provide “a good opening chapter that lays out the facts on global climate change.” Hayhoe is a Texas Tech climate scientist and conservative evangelical Christian, who has written A Climate for Change, calling on her fellow evangelicals to stand up to the climate crisis. According to the Los Angeles Times, Maple believes “Gingrich is still interested in doing the book“:

Hayhoe submitted her climate science chapter in mid-2009 but never heard back from the authors. Maple said the book has been delayed because he has been too busy to focus on it. He said Gingrich is still interested in doing the book and has not asked him to slow walk it. The Gingrich campaign did not answer emails seeking comment about the project.

“Humans are altering the average conditions of the planet,” Dr. Hayhoe wrote for ThinkProgress Green in August, responding to Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) contention that global warming is “phony.” “We can continue to challenge the reality of the issue; or we can seize this as an opportunity to wean ourselves off our dependence on the old, dirty, inefficient, and limited fuels of the past.”

At the moment, Gingrich questions whether global warming is occurring.

I come from the energy world. If you’ve ever been to an energy conference — particularly one revolving around fossil fuels — the first thing you’ll notice is that the scene is dominated by old, white males. Depending on the renewable energy conference, the crowd gets much more diverse in age and ethnicity.

The COP climate conference is a whole different scene. Of course, it’s an international UN sponsored event, so it’s inherently diverse. What’s unique is the large number of young people in attendance.

It’s easy to get bogged down by the fact that the international negotiations are slow moving and, despite the last-minute deal brokered in Durban, still haven’t gotten us to close to where we need to be scientifically.

I remember one young woman in a background briefing with American negotiators last week saying “you’ve been negotiating this issue my entire life.”

If you’re still feeling down by the pace of action, one thing should give you hope about the process: the active presence of younger generations at these conferences — tracking negotiations, asking pointed questions, setting up meetings with diplomats, organizing protests, and doing anything they can to get youth voices heard.

I know this isn’t particularly new. Youth delegations have been coming to these meetings in greater numbers each year. But as a newcomer to the climate negotiation scene, it’s been pretty remarkable for me to see.

Two of these young adults particularly struck me: 24-year old American Ellie Johnston and 22-year old Chinese Songquio Yao, who went to Durban to “build bridges” and do what so many negotiators were unable to do for years. Johnston was part of a 14-member delegation representing SustainUS, a national youth coalition devoted to sustainability issues. And Yao was with a 13-member delegation from the China Youth Climate Action Network.

The Chinese and American youth delegations both met with their respective negotiators to express their passion for the issues.

Read more

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has the latest ad that piles on with Solyndra smears, seeking to scapegoat clean energy investment for political points. The Crossroads ad “Typical,” released in a national buy, attacks Solyndra — a company once backed by private investors of all political stripes and the Bush administration — as an opportunity for the Obama administration to supply handouts to donors:

Rove’s ad follows a similar one from the Koch brothers, part of a disturbing trend of fossil-driven politics that attacks not only environmental protection but even clean energy business.

Contrary to the ad’s fear-mongering tone and surrounding media witch hunt, the consequences of Solyndra’s bankruptcy have been completely distorted. A recent Bloomberg Government report found Solyndra’s loan constitutes less than one percent of all federal loan guarantees, concluding “the focus on Solyndra is not proportional to its impact.” If conservatives’ witch-hunt cut off federal commitment to renewable energy, it may “jeopardize the remaining projects under review, calling into question the potential of new-to-market energy projects” for renewable energy. Bloomberg reports that ending investment in renewables would generate no budget savings, but it would cause great harm to the industry.

John Broder had this remarkable sentence in his Sunday New York Times dispatch from Durban:

Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life.

This is uncharacteristically blunt for the Times.  It reflects a worldview that is generally not reflected in their overall coverage, as I discussed in “The New York Times Abandons the Story of the Century and Joins the Energy and Climate Ignorati.”

Broder’s point is that the UN process is simply not up to the task of addressing the climate problem:

It is simply too big a job for those who have gathered for these talks under the 1992 United Nations treaty that began this grinding process.

“There is a fundamental disconnect in having environment ministers negotiating geopolitics and macroeconomics,” said Nick Robins, an energy and climate change analyst at HSBC, the London-based global bank.

Unfortunately, most economics ministers are pretty clueless about the subject.  That said, I’ve never been a big fan of the current process, which requires near-unanimous consent by nearly 200 countries.

What’s most blocking action, from my perspective, isn’t the process so much as the failure of the media and policymakers here and around the globe to realize that failing to address climate change will lead to an even bigger remaking of what’s left of modern life in a world of 10°F warming (see An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Inaction will create the almost impossible task of feeding 9+ billion in “the face of a rapidly worsening climate.”  And avoiding mass starvation and general chaos  will certainly require a fundamental remaking of the world.  The NYT‘s science reporter Justin Gillis gets this, as you see in articles like “Food Supply Under Strain on a Warming Planet” and “Global Warming Hinders Crop Yields, Study Finds.”

We cannot escape fundamentally remaking the sinews of modern life over the coming decades — in a sustainable way if we act on climate and in a catastrophic way if we don’t.  Now is the time for major media outlets like the New York Times to remake their coverage to inform the public of this far more clearly and unambiguously.

Related Post:

• Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”

By Daniel J. Weiss

There are reports that on December 19^th the Environmental Protection Agency will promulgate the long awaited standards to require coal fired power plants to reduce their mercury, arsenic, lead, and other toxic pollution.  The dirtiest utilities and big coal companies have launched an eleventh hour pressure campaign to convince President Obama to delay or weaken the implementation of these safeguards that would prevent 1,400 premature deaths per month.

One of the major false claims about these vital health protections is that they would make our electricity system less reliable.   On December 10^th, two major utilities rebutted these claims in letters published in the Wall St. Journal in response to its misleading editorial.   Ralph Izzo, Chairman, CEO, and President of Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) responded

“As CEO of an energy company with nuclear, coal and natural gas-fueled power plants, I found the alarms raised in your editorial about a ‘looming threat to electric reliability’ to be exaggerated. You won’t get an argument from me about the importance of reliability. However, the report you cite concludes that the EPA’s proposed clean-air rules will have a modest impact on plant retirements.

“No one disputes that mercury is harmful to human health or that the technology is available now to reduce mercury emissions dramatically. Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. invested $1.5 billion in our coal-fired power plants, reducing emissions of mercury and acid gases by 90% or more. Those projects created jobs for 1,600 construction workers and added permanent positions at our plants. We are not alone. Nearly 60% of the U.S. coal fleet has mercury-control equipment installed or under construction. The EPA’s air rules will provide the certainty to move forward with large, job-creating investments to modernize America’s electric power infrastructure.”

Jack Fusco, CEO and President of Calpine Corp., with 92 power plants in 20 states, also rebutted the WSJ’s claims.

Read more

Republicans in the House and Senate are pushing hard for two polluter poison-pill provisions in the payroll tax cut extension bill. Guaranteeing a year-end flood of contributions from the fossil fuel industry, the GOP has attached language to override the Obama administration’s actions on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and air-pollution rules for industrial boilers, known as the Boiler MACT rules. In a striking but incomplete victory for the climate movement, the Obama administration has extended the review of the Keystone XL pipeline until 2013. Fighting intense polluter lobbyist pressure, EPA has announced watered-down Boiler MACT rules that exempt 99 percent of industrial boilers from having stricter limits on mercury, dioxin, particulate matter, hydrogen chloride, and carbon monoxide.

If passed, these love-letters to the oil and coal industries would be devastating to public health and the environment, risking infant brain damage and poisoned aquifers.

On Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) admitted the Keystone XL and Boiler MACT poison pills threaten the passage of the payroll bill. He told Wallace that the payroll tax cut extension “obviously” will pass, but claimed Republicans have added these pollution poison pills on a “bipartisan basis“:

But we also need to have something in there that prevents the loss of jobs and something that will create the jobs. And that’s why we inserted Boiler MACT, supported on a bipartisan basis and the Keystone pipeline supported on a bipartisan basis. One would save jobs, one would create jobs right now.

McConnell is technically not lying about the bipartisan support, as there are a handful of Democrats who have cast their lot in with polluter interests instead of people’s health like the Republicans on both issues. However, neither the Keystone nor Boiler MACT poison pills would save or create jobs — studies have found that the economic and societal impact of their increased pollution would far outweigh any short-term benefits of allowing polluters to keep dumping waste into the atmosphere and water without consequence.

President Obama has said unequivocally that he will “reject” any attempt to include the Keystone language in the payroll bill, but has not issued a similar veto threat on Boiler MACT.

With weary determination, COP17′s climate negotiators brokered a deal after more than two weeks of grinding political debates. The despair, anger, and resignation felt by almost all parties at the Durban climate summit reflected the knowledge that the power vested in the environment ministers and climate envoys by their respective governments is insufficient to protect human civilization from the exponentially growing onslaught of fossil-fueled climate change. As the New York Times writes — as a simple statement of fact — it is “simply too big a job“:

Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life. It is simply too big a job for those who have gathered for these talks under the 1992 United Nations treaty that began this grinding process.

It is important to recognize, however, that grappling with the climate crisis isn’t simply too big a challenge for environment ministers. When the heads of state of the entire world gathered in Copenhagen in 2009, they too could not redirect the “sinews of modern life.” Although on paper the governments of the United States and other nations command the corporations that run the economy, the evidence is that the multinational corporations have, if not dominance, an equal footing on the world stage. Yet Exxon Mobil, Cargill, Koch Industries, CNOOC, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank don’t have any direct accountability in the United Nations negotiations.

Either the nations of the world need to rein in the corporate powers that extract ungodly profit from the very future well-being of mankind, or there needs to be the formal recognition that the financiers and fossil polluters have a greater voice than the people, and thus should have the political accountability that comes from being a member of the league of nations.

Again, given the authority the delegates in Durban actually wield, the resulting agreement was a significant achievement. Given the reality of climate change, the agreement is grossly insufficient.

If the objectives of the UNFCCC treaty signed by the nations of the world to preserve civilization from the destruction of global warming are to be achieved, every local, national, and international institution must play their part, from the Major Economies Forum to the International Monetary Fund, from Davos to OPEC. That may seem to be beyond the realm of political possibility, but as Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.”

by Rebecca Lefton, Andrew Light, Melanie Hart, and Adam James

It is clear that focusing on the international climate change negotiations process in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change alone is not enough to put us on a pathway to limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050, which is what scientists say we need to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. That’s why the Center for American Progress proposes a “multiple multilateralism” approach as a complement to the UNFCCC process.

This column introduces that approach, which identifies where emissions reductions can be realized in existing multilateral forums outside the UNFCCC. An upcoming CAP analysis expands on the approach and indicates the emissions reductions we could achieve through various paths outside the UNFCCC that can be harmonized with the goal of achieving climate safety.

But first, we will show why the UNFCCC’s reductions, even if successful and assisted by increased climate finance, will not get us where we need to be.
Read more

It’s getting a bit hard to keep track of Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moments on the campaign trail. In the last week alone, he’s fumbled the name of a Supreme Court justice, the number of judges on the court, and the age of eligibility to run for president (just as he didn’t know the voting age).

Perry has tumbled so low in the polls his comic displays of ignorance are beginning to avoid notice, but he made another doozy in Iowa yesterday, CNN reports:

While criticizing President Barack Obama for picking winners and losers in the energy industry, he bungled the name of the most famous energy company to go under despite government assistance.

“No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money,” Perry began. “I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda.”

Perry not only confused Solyndra with a country, he got the name of the company wrong, calling it “Solynda.”

As ThinkProgress Green has been reporting, the Solyndra story is a manufactured scandal Republicans have kept alive to try to smear the Obama administration.

Subscribe to ThinkProgress Green.

by Adam James

This is the third article in a series exploring various issues within the evolution Smart Grid and provide some insight into the conditions shaping the debate. This article will discuss the impact of electric vehicles — particularly the chicken-or-egg problem of whether the infrastructure needs to be in place to support EVs before they can impact the market or whether significant market penetration should precede investment in structural changes.

Issue 3: “Infrastructure Build out vs. Market Penetration”

Consumer choice: or “why am I not charging my electric car right now?”

Read more

As CAP’s Andrew Light and Joe Romm discuss, the deal crafted in Durban, South Africa preserved the international climate negotiating process and moved several critical institutions forward, most notably the Green Climate Fund to finance the self-preservation of the most vulnerable nations against climate disasters.

However, for the first time the negotiators explicitly and formally recognized the cold fact of the insufficiency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreements, coming into their 20th year:

Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, and acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,

Noting with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

This formal admission that the combined effect of Kyoto Protocol and the Cancun Agreements leaves a “significant gap” from the “urgent and potentially irreversible threat” of further warming is a critical admission. This marks a dramatic shift from earlier statements made by the United States team, who questioned the urgency of greater cuts to carbon pollution than already agreed in Kyoto and Cancun.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol set mandatory limits on carbon pollution covering the industrialized world other than the United States, and the Cancun Accords adopted in 2010 sets voluntary limits covering the United States, China, and other major polluters. Together, their insufficient ambition leaves the world hurtling on a path towards unimaginable suffering, a terrible statement about the futility of negotiating with the laws of nature, and the stark contrast between political and physical reality.

The formal admission of this insufficiency is a small but crucial step towards the required global mobilization to survive on our changing planet.

CNN reports on Rick Perry campaigning in Iowa:

“I’m for pulling all of those tax credits, or subsidies or however you refer to them out of the energy industry,” Perry said….

But his attempt to turn this tough talk into an attack on the current administration came with a few of the verbal misstatements that have plagued other public appearances by Perry. While criticizing President Barack Obama for picking winners and losers in the energy industry, he bungled the name of the most famous energy company to go under despite government assistance.

“No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money,” Perry began. “I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda.”

Darn you Obama for making three mistakes — losing all that money, funneling it to an imaginary foreign country … and I forgot the third….