House Speaker John Boehner conceded to the inevitable and agreed to approve the Senate compromise that extends the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance two months.

That bill also includes, at the GOP’s insistence, a requirement that Obama make a decision within 60 days on the tar sands pipeline, which is likely fatal to Keystone XL (see “GOP Threaten to Harm the Economy If Obama Won’t Embrace Tar Sands Pipeline“).

Jeremy Symons of National Wildlife Federation has the latest, including quotes from Bill McKibben of 350.org, Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska:

So what does this mean for the pipeline?  Speaker Boehner is trying to satisfy Big Oil’s lobbyists and some of the GOP’s top corporate donors by forcing the president to make a hasty decision, but it will backfire.   I am confident that President Obama will stand up to big oil and reject this dangerous and unnecessary pipeline because it is the right thing to do, and that the American public will support him.  Americans understand that it is wrong to play political games and strip families of our right to protect our land and our clean water from foreign oil companies, because you can’t drink oil.

I asked  Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska and Bill McKibben of 350.org, two of the leading fighters to stop this pipeline,  for their reaction today as well. Here is what they wrote me:

Bill McKibben:  ”The administration’s promise to deny this permit, if fulfilled, will be one of the rare pieces of good news for the climate in a year which saw America shatter all records for billion-dollar weather disasters. The president campaigned hard in 2008 on trying to slow the climate crisis, and this would be a strong sign he meant what he said.”

Jane Kleeb: “The pipeline is unnecessary and a scam that would export the oil while burdening our families with all the risks.”

Precisely.

JR:  There’s been a lot of confusion this year on how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases (see Media Misleads On Flawed Climate Sensitivity Study: Avoiding “Drastic Changes Over Land” Requires Emissions Cuts ASAP).  Given all the media attention given to one (flawed) study, a little attention to other studies seems worthwhile.

by Rolf Schuttenhelm, reposted from Bits of Science

An international research group led by Gothenburg University looked at the impact of organic aerosol feedbacks on climate sensitivity

It serves to show individual climate sensitivity studies are never conclusive but add up bits of fresh understanding to an already enormous pile of data and knowledge.

Right in the middle of that pile is the IPCC. Should the entire pile shift or change shape – rest assured, then the official IPCC climate sensitivity range [now around 3 degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric CO2] will do the same in their 2013 climate report.

The new Swedish climate sensitivity research has just been published (PDF) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union.

The authors argue that climate sensitivity could be ‘greater than previously believed’ because in the initial phases of the current CO2-induced warming plant life has emitted larger amounts of precursor gases that lead to the formation of reflective or blocking* secondary organic aerosols (SOA) in the atmosphere, thereby acting as a negative climate feedback, and masking part of the ‘warming’ that’s occurring underneath.

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by Jill Fitzsimmons, cross-posted from Media Matters

As winter descends, Fox is keeping with its annual tradition of using snowstorms and cold temperatures to mock global warming.

The suggestion that local winter weather somehow disproves global, long-term warming trends is a recurring theme at Fox, despite its faulty logic. During the hot summer months, Fox News’ silence on global warming is deafening. But like clockwork, when the snow starts to accumulate so does Fox’s climate coverage.

Here are some of the highlights from recent years:

These attempts to downplay the threat of global warming should come as no surprise coming from Fox, which routinely ignores evidence of climate change, but goes out of its way to spread misinformation and hype “scandals” in an attempt to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.

But as meteorologist Jeff Masters explained, “heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet. In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons.”

A 2009 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program stated that “strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent” in the Northeast and upper Midwest as a result of climate change.

So for all of Fox’s misguided sarcasm, it’s likely that some big snowstorms in the U.S. are, in part, a symptom of a changing climate.

– Jill Fitzsimmons is a researcher with Media Matters for America, where this piece was originally published.

Related Post:

• An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact: We get more snow storms in warm years!

What an odd year. While businesses around the world were making record level investments in renewables and efficiency, a growing number of conservative politicians and members of the American media punditry — lead by the outrageously ignorant “reporting” by Fox News — have been foolishly projecting (even cheering on) the demise of the sector.

Aside from the mind-boggling disparity between the science and politics of climate change, I’ve never seen such a large gap between perception and what’s actually happening on the ground.

Of course, we can’t ignore the enormous challenges — from cheap natural gas to relentless competition in manufacturing — that will lead to the death of many of the companies we know today. That is part of the natural (and sometimes violent) shake-out we can expect to see in years to come.

However, in order to add to our “climate solutions menu” on this site and cut through some of the recent political attacks, we’ve added more stories on the positive trends in clean energy. Here are some of our favorites from the last year (with some of our best clean energy charts of the year):

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CAPAF’s Public Lands Project today released an original video on Think Progress highlighting this year’s top oddest and dirtiest moments in the House Committee on Natural Resources.

Watch it:

From the beginning of the 112th Congress, it was suspected that Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) would lead the committee on an “oil above all” mission, and that proved to be the case — 20 out of 65 oversight hearings were held on how to do more oil and gas drilling, while just four were held on spurring renewable energy development. Hearings weren’t the only way Republicans attempted to prioritize the bottom line of their corporate contributors over the public lands that belong to all Americans — indeed, they went so far as to push extreme measures to mine uranium next to the Grand Canyon and deny the existence of an entire industry of green jobs, both of which are shown in this video.

The House of Representatives in the 112th Congress as a whole has the dubious distinction of being “the most anti-environment House in the history of Congress,” averaging more than one anti-environmental vote for every day the House was in session in 2011. Much of that legislation started in the House Committee on Natural Resources, where CAPAF’s Public Lands Project spent the year highlighting mistruths about oil and gas subsidies, exposing nefarious motivations for mining and drilling our public lands, and standing up for policies that protect the lands that belong to all of us.

In Brazil’s latest power auction earlier this week — a process in which developers bid for contracts with the country’s national electricity agency — more than 80% of contracts were for wind projects. This follows an auction in August that brought in power contracts for wind that were below the bidding price of natural gas plants.

The National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) signed contracts with 42 new power plants worth 1,200 MW — including 39 wind projects totaling more than 976 MW that agreed to an average selling price of US $55 per megawatt-hour, or 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s a 1.2 cent per kWh decrease over the average selling price in the August auction.

A combination of resources and policy have helped grow Brazil’s domestic wind market by more than 50% since 2009. With an import on foreign wind turbines, major manufacturers have set up operations within the country that have helped bring down the cost of developing projects. Brazil’s estimated exploitable wind resources are about 143,000 MW of capacity — far surpassing the roughly 100,000 MW of total installed electricity capacity today.

However, wind still only plays a small role in Brazil’s electricity mix, representing only 0.5% of generation. The country has historically focused on large hydropower projects, which make up roughly 80% of generation.

But things are picking up. After a slow start to Brazil’s wind procurement program, the country has proven itself as a reliable growth market in the last few years. The Global Wind Energy Council projects that an additional 3,300 MW of wind projects will be built in Brazil over the next two years.

Related Posts:

• In Brazil Auction, Wind Power is Cheaper than Natural Gas
• Wind Electricity To Be Fully Competitive With Natural Gas by 2016, Says Bloomberg New Energy Finance

Other stories below: Tsunami Reveals Durability of Nissan’s Leaf; U.S. Solar Companies Urge SolarWorld to Drop China Case

Toward Healthier Air (NY Times Editorial)

Resisting strenuous last-minute lobbying by some of the nation’s biggest utilities, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday a final rule requiring power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants by roughly 90 percent within the next five years.

This is a big victory for environmentalists and scientists who have worked for 20 years to regulate these pollutants — and an even bigger one for the public. When fully effective, the rule could save as many as 11,000 premature deaths a year and avoid countless unnecessary illnesses.

The decision compensates, at least in part, for the White House’s lamentable decision two months ago to reject stricter health standards for smog. That and the administration’s failure to give full-throated support to climate change legislation last year had disheartened many of the president’s environmental supporters.

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by Chris Mooney, cross-posted from DeSmogBlog

Just last week, I wrote about the core problem facing the new breed of political fact-checkers: The political right is more factually wrong, meaning that taking a strictly “bipartisan” approach will inevitably leave the fact-checkers themselves guilty of phony “balance.” And it will also lead to them occasionally having their lunches eaten by left-leaning sites like Media Matters, as well as by sensible liberal bloggers.

Little did I know that PolitiFact, arguably the leading fact-checker, would immediately come through with a stunning validation of this point.

PolitiFact just announced its “lie of the year,” the Democratic claim that “Republicans voted to end Medicare.” However, if you peruse analyses from Paul Krugman, Steven Benen, Jason Linkins, and others, you’ll find that the very notion that this is a lie at all is highly debatable. Frankly, the repeated fact-checks of this Democratic assertion seem to boil down to little more than a matter of definition.

It all depends on what the meaning of the word “end” is.

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