The multi-hundred-millionaire (MHM) won the New Hampshire primary handily over the multi-ten-millionaire (MTM) and the other multimillionaires (MMs) in the race.  Outside experts credit the Supreme Court’s recent “Corporations United” ruling , which found that since money is speech, money should get to vote, and so began the doctrine of “1 dollar, 1 vote.”

Speaking at his private yacht club, MHM told supporters, “The corporations and money of New Hampshire have exercised their God-given rights tonight.  They have said they want a President who likes to fire people, who isn’t afraid to make $10,000 bets, a President who likes to strap his dog on the roof of the car for family trips, even after it had “a bout of diarrhea, which could be seen running down the rear window.”  You want someone who understands it’s more important to end the regulations that harm corporations than it is to reduce air and water pollution that harms people.  Why?  Corporations are people, my friend.  People are corporations, my friend.  Corporations are friends, my people!  Oh, and release the hounds. Seriously, I can’t stand you people.  You call that a yacht?  I have life boats bigger than that.”

With his disappointing third-place finish, MTM told supporters at his exclusive country club, “in the end, MHM isn’t electable because the President has $1 billion to spend and that means 1 billion votes under these new rules, and sure MHM may be able to buy 200 million votes, but I was ambassador to China and the Chinese have real money, if you know what I mean.”

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, MM told his supporters at a book-signing, “MHM made his money plundering American corporations, extracting cash from them while destroying jobs.  That should be truly revolting to all South Carolina voters.  I made my money the old-fashioned way, selling influence to government-sponsored entities who took my advice and then destroyed the entire economy.  I made my money extracting cash from Big Oil and corporate polluters and any other corporation dumb enough to think that I have any influence in Congress whatsoever.  I’m not against MHM because he is a vulture capitalist, I’m against him because I think he lacks the genius needed to truly bleed the 99% dry.  I’d put poor kids in orphanages — even if they still had parents — and feed them Soylent Green.”

In unrelated news, poverty and income inequality hit record levels.

Related Post:

• Breaking: Climate Science Denier Wins Iowa Caucuses

 

Because of you, across the board, we’re cutting down on acid rain and air pollution.  We’re making our drinking water cleaner and safer.  We’re creating healthier communities.  But that’s not all.  Safeguarding our environment is also about strengthening our economy.  I do not buy the notion that we have to make a choice between having clean air and clean water and growing this economy in a robust way.  I think that is a false debate.  (Applause.)

Think about it:  We established new fuel economy standards, a historic accomplishment that is going to slash oil consumption by about 12 billion barrels, dramatically reduces pollution that contributes to climate change, and saves consumers thousands of dollars at the pump, which they can then go spend on something else.

President Barack Obama spoke to the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency today, thanking them for his work.  The last sentence above is all you are going to get from him on the greatest environmental threat the nation and the world have ever known.

Other than that ongoing, epic failure by the ‘leader’ of the free world, the speech isn’t bad, particularly if it means he will actually seriously defend environmental protection from the onslaught it will face this year in Congress and in his reelection fight.  Here are his full remarks.

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Republicans, including the GOP-led House of Representatives and presidential field, have tried battering record clean air and water standards set this year by the Environmental Protection Agency. Speaking to EPA staff today, President Obama discussed his commitment to efforts toward cleaner air. In his remarks, Obama highlighted EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s leadership in creating a major new EPA rule that cuts mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants:

See the president’s comments:

Over the past three years, because of your hard work, we’ve made historic progress on all these fronts. Just a few weeks ago, thanks to the hard work of so many of you, Lisa and I was able to announce new common-sense standards to better protect the air we breathe from mercury and other harmful air pollution. And that was a big deal. And part of the reason it was a big deal was because, for over 20 years, special interest groups had successfully delayed implementing these standards when it came to our nation’s power plants. And what we said was: “Enough.” It’s time to get this done. [...]

Because of you, across the board, we’re cutting down on acid rain and air pollution. We’re making our drinking water cleaner and safer. We’re creating healthier communities. But that’s not all. Safeguarding our environment is also about strengthening our economy. I do not buy the notion that we have to make a choice between having clean air and clean water and growing this economy in a robust way. I think that is a false debate.

While the administration received major criticism for delaying an EPA-set smog standard in September, Obama said today, “I want you to know that you’ve got a president who is grateful for your work and will stand with you every inch of the way as you carry out your mission.”

And the Germans did it at roughly half the price.

In the lead up to another 15% reduction in Germany’s feed-in tariff (the price paid for solar electricity fed into the grid), the German solar industry finished 2011 off with a bang — installing 3,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic systems in December.

Let’s put those figures in perspective: In just one month, Germany installed almost twice as many megawatts of solar than the entire U.S. developed during all of 2011. Preliminary figures show Germany ended the year with roughly 7,500 MW of installations; the U.S. ended up with about 1,700 megawatts, according to GTM Research.

Oh, and I should probably mention that the Germans installed all of that solar at almost half the price. The average price of an installed solar system in Germany came to $2.80 in the third quarter of 2011. In the U.S., it was about $5.20 in the third quarter.

Why the disparity? The Germans have a much more mature solar market. The country’s simple, long-term feed-in tariff makes financing projects less expensive, and has created a sophisticated supply chain that allows companies to source product, generate leads and get systems on rooftops efficiently.

Some criticize feed-in tariffs for not creating a “market” like we imagine in the U.S. The activity we saw at the end of 2011 is representative of what happens every year in Germany: because the incentives are dropped down to meet market pricing, there is always a rush in December to install systems quickly. But isn’t that what we do in the U.S. when tax credits and rebates are about to expire?

It’s fair to criticize feed-in tariffs like those in Spain and the Czech Republic which caused an unsustainable boom before crashing down. But when looking at the numbers and pricing that the German solar market continues to post, there’s still a very compelling argument for states and municipalities to consider moderate, long-term pricing mechanisms like feed-in tariffs.

When Congress finally approved the payroll tax cut extension in December, it had a policy rider attached requiring President Obama to make a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days. But the requirement is now causing confusion that could slow the review process because the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) said it will take at least six months to choose and approve a new route — much more than Obama’s 60-day window. State officials will work with TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to build the pipeline, to find an alternate route for the pipeline to avoid a major water source in the state, the Ogalala aquifer.

But Inside Climate News reports that before a new route can be set, DEQ and TransCanada need a memorandum from the State Department that outlines the agency’s involvement in the process, which could slow the process while they wait on it:

TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard said the company conducted some aerial flyovers in early December, along with on-the-ground surveys on public roads. “[But] we’re not really in the full-blown field stage yet,” he said. “We have to have that memorandum of understanding … there’s just been too many surprises. We don’t want to look at potential routes if we don’t understand the process.”

DEQ spokesman Brian McManus said the State Department is working with the DEQ to draft the memorandum, but he does not know when it will be finalized. [...]

McManus said his agency will proceed with the reroute regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C.

“We’re just carrying out the role that was described to us by the Nebraska legislature,” he said. “We’ll deal with the federal [implications] in late February, depending on what decisions are made.”

Before Republicans attached the Keystone rider to the payroll tax cut, Obama had pushed back making a decision on the pipeline so that the State Department could consider alternate routes and other impacts. The pipeline would carry 830,000 gallons of heavy crude oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast, and despite lofty claims about the jobs the pipeline will create, the Keystone XL project is unlikely to be a job creator.

Bad news for the Gulf of Mexico: a study released this week sheds new light on the toxicity of oil in aquatic environments, and shows that environmental impact studies currently in use may be inadequate….

The key finding involved the embryos of Pacific herring that spawn in the [San Francisco Bay, which was hit by an oil spill in 2007]. The fish embryos absorbed the oil and then, when exposed to UV rays in sunlight, physically disintegrated. This is called phototoxicity, and has not previously been taken into account when talking about oil spills. 

Photos from a UC Davis/NOAA study show the effects of phototoxicity in Pacific herring embryos. Embryos on the left are unexposed to oil; those on the right have been in oil and then exposed to sunlight and show cells destroyed.

After the BP oil disaster, I wrote about the toxicity of oil (see “BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil“).  Turns out oil is even more toxic than we thought, as a new study from the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in collaboration with NOAA finds.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study is titled, “Unexpectedly high mortality in Pacific herring embryos exposed to the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay” (subs. req’d).  That spill occurred when a “tanker hit the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 54,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay.”

Here’s more from the L. A. Times on the phototoxicity study:

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by Donald A. Brown, cross-posted from the Penn State Climate Ethics Blog

Over the next few weeks, ClimateEthics will take a deeper look at what has been referred to as the “climate change disinformation campaign” through an ethical lens. Although ClimateEthics has examined these issues briefly before, see: An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity?, this is the first in a series of posts that will examine this phenomenon in depth.

Later entries will look in more detail at specific tactics used by this movement. Because skepticism in science should be encouraged rather than vilified, the last entry in this series will make recommendations about norms that should guide responsible skepticism in climate science.

The climate disinformation campaign can be understood as a movement of organizations and individuals that can be counted on to systematically attack mainstream climate change science in ways that radically depart from responsible scientific skepticism. In the next entry we will look more closely at what we mean by a “campaign” or “movement.”

This series is based upon the assumption that skepticism in science is essential to increase understanding of the natural world. Yet, ideologically based disinformation is ethically abhorrent particularly in regard to behaviors about which there is credible scientific support for the conclusion that human activities threaten life and the ecological systems on which life depend. This report focuses on specific tactics that have been deployed in the climate change disinformation campaign. It is not a critique of responsible skepticism. The tactics that will be examined in detail include:

• Lying Or Reckless Disregard For the Truth
• Focusing On Unknowns While Ignoring The Knowns
• Specious Claims Of “Bad” Science
• Creation of Front Groups
• Manufacturing Bogus Climate Science
• Think Tank Campaigns
• Misleading PR Campaigns.
• Creation of Astroturf Groups
• Cyber-bullying Scientists and Journalists

The series will demonstrate that the controversy over climate change science that has unfolded in the last twenty years is a strong example of the urgent need to create new societal norms about how to deal with scientific uncertainty for human problems about which there is a justifiable scientific basis for great concern but uncertainty about the consequences of human actions.

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News of White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley’s resignation yesterday comes as good news for many environmentalists. Daley — a former bank executive and Commerce Secretary for the Clinton administration — drew major criticism from environmental activists last year after a White House decision to delay new Environmental Protection Agency smog standards.

In the weeks leading up to the reversal siding with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute, Daley took several meetings with business leaders. At one meeting in August, Daley met with several CEOs and business lobbyists hours before entertaining public health and environmental groups:

Mr. Daley listened politely, then asked, “What are the health impacts of unemployment?” It was a question straight out of the industry playbook.

Another member of the group introduced polling data showing strong public support for tougher air rules. Mr. Daley cut him off with an expletive, saying he was not interested in polls.

Daniel J. Weiss of the Center for American Progress presented data showing little difference in employment and economic growth in areas required to adopt stricter ozone standards than those that did not. Mr. Daley nodded but said nothing.

As the meeting was breaking up, Mr. Daley said, “As you know, it’s a very difficult economic time.”

A Center for American Progress analysis found the economic concerns Daley raised to be unsubstantiated, finding “the standard unlikely to have much negative economic impact, but will save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in lower health care costs.” Daley’s role, presumably in support of big business, chafed many environmentalists, who labeled the delay “a major blow to public health.” President of Clean Air Watch Frank O’Donnell said “good riddance” to Daley, and he “hopes that EPA will be permitted to do its job without Daley-style political interference on behalf of big business.”

-Fatima Najiy

Fair, Effective, and Efficient Tax Policy Is Key for Driving Renewable Energy Growth

by Richard W. Caperton

Budget deficits drove the conversation in Washington in 2011 with the daily news dominated by government shutdown threats, the “super committee,” continuing resolutions, and arcane budgeting practices. Unfortunately, this left Americans convinced that government investments in the future are off the table because of large federal budget deficits that need to be reduced.

Americans were misled. As the Center for American Progress points out, the United States can balance our budget, reduce our long-term debt, and make key investments in our future all at the same time. CAP’s plan works toward a more vibrant economy where all Americans are better off and clean energy is an integral part of this future. Best of all, the investments that government needs to make are relatively modest and can be paid for by ending wasteful spending in the same energy sector.

There is no doubt that Americans need clean energy because it’s vital to our nation’s economic competitiveness, security, and health.

There is also no doubt that government will play an important role in making the transition to clean energy.

Why? Because the federal government always has been—and always will be—a player in energy markets. The federal government has made investments in energy for more than a century, by granting access to resources on public lands, helping build railroads and waterways to transport fuels, building dams to provide electricity, subsidizing exploration and extraction of fossil fuels, providing financing to electrify rural America, taking on risk in nuclear power, and conducting research and development in virtually all energy sources. There’s no reason that Washington should stop making new investments.

Considering the history, government investment has led to amazing developments, including universal access to reliable and affordable electricity, lasting economic development, and industrial growth. This success story alone could justify continued government engagement of vibrant energy markets.

When we consider that investments in clean energy are investments in America’s future, it’s clear that the smart choice is to make these investments to meet the next generation of energy challenges and to produce a foundation of affordable, reliable, and clean energy alternatives for future waves of investment and opportunity. At the same time we can no longer afford indiscriminate or wasteful subsidies. It is essential that government’s investments in energy be fair, effective, and efficient.

This issue brief examines how the government currently invests in renewable energy, when those investments are effective, and how those investments should work in the future.

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By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Members of Congress and other elected officials who’ve been pushing to open millions of acres of protected public lands to commercial development and who doubt the economic value of land conservation and outdoor recreation should have come to the annual International Sportsmen’s Exposition at the Denver Convention Center last weekend.

An annual event that draws huge crowds and this year featured almost 500 exhibitors ranging from trophy elk hunting outfitters to sunglasses purveyors, the Sportsmen’s Expo is a vivid demonstration of the economic power of the great outdoors and protected federal and state lands that sustain local, rural economies across the U.S.

Just ask Jenni Sopsic, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Montrose, Colorado. The region around her western Colorado city with a population of around 18,000 people is about three-quarters public land, and includes major recreation and tourist attractions like the San Juan Mountains, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, and the Uncompahgre Plateau. As she greeted visitors to the chamber’s booth at the Sportsmen’s Expo, she stated:

“This is a great market for us.” Public lands have a “substantial economic impact” in Montrose, where the jobs of nearly 1,000 people are directly tied to recreation and tourism.

At a booth located not far away, the town of Moab, Utah was making the same point. A gateway to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and a recreational haven for mountain bikers, river runners, and hikers eager to explore the red rock canyons of southern Utah, Moab is virtually an advertisement for the economic benefits or land conservation. Nearly three-quarters of the land in Grand County, where Moab is the largest city, is managed by federal government agencies such as the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Marian DeLay, executive director of the Moab Area Travel Council, put it this way:

As far as outdoor recreation is concerned, as an economic engine for this community, it’s enormous. We would like to think that everybody in the world knows about Moab, and wants to come to Moab, but the reality is everybody doesn’t.

An economic profile of Grand County, Utah – where Moab is the county seat and largest community – tells the tale. With a population of about 9,500 people, the county has about 1,500 people whose employment is travel and tourism related. Visitors here – nearly 1.5 million a year at Arches and Canyonlands alone — spend more than $100 million a year.

Montrose and Moab aren’t isolated examples, as the Center for American Progress pointed out in a September report titled “The Jobs Case for Conservation.”

As strong as the land conservation economy in the West is, some of the region’s public officials still don’t get it.

Last year, testifying at a hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter reached into his golf bag for his sarcastic iron to mock the notion that federally protected wilderness has much of an economic impact.

“There are more people in one day, probably, that play golf on the floating green in Coeur d’Alene Idaho than visit the Frank Church-River of No Return [Wilderness] in a year,” said Otter, a Republican and former House member.

Fact checkers quickly set Otter straight, pointing out that the Frank Church in 2010 attracted more than 33,000 river runners, elk hunters, and steelhead anglers (a number that does not include thousands of hikers and horseback packers).

Despite that kind of evidence, many Republicans in the House would rather hand over our heritage of protected public lands to corporate interests like the uranium mining industry than protect lands that can provide sustained economic benefits forever.

Responding to a courageous decision by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to impose a 20-year ban uranium mining on a million acres around the Grand Canyon, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) this week nonsensically said the Obama administration had “caved to political pressure from radical special interest groups.”

Ahead of today’s hearings on the controversial Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver called opponents to tar sands development foes of Canada who undermine national interest.

Oliver’s unexpectedly frank open letter charged that environmental groups attract “funding from foreign special interest groups” and draw “jet-setting celebrities,” referring to donations from U.S. charitable foundations. His flippant treatment of tar sands opponents highlight the divide between national self-interest and environmental concern on the issue:

These [environmental] groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.

Now, the pro-oil sands group Ethical Oil is seeking to ban all foreigners from the discussion. An Ethical Oil spokesperson bluntly said, “Foreigners and their foreign hired hands should butt out.” However, many foreign companies are involved in the tar sands and the issue reaches far beyond Canada. NASA climatologist James Hansen has said if they are developed as planned, it’s “essentially game over” for the climate.

by Peter Sinclair, cross-posted from the Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Since we have such an active community of armchair oceanographers and spreadsheet Glaciologists here, I thought it would be useful to speak to the real thing, the people who actually spend time on the ocean, on the ice sheets, do the measurements, and come back to share that knowledge with us. I had just that opportunity at the American Geophysical conference in December.

I spoke to Josh Willis, Oceanographer with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Josh is one of best known young ocean scientists on the planet. He pointed me to the recent Kemp et al study of tidal marshes on the US East coast, which has produced a long record of sea level over the last 2000 years, complete with a very Hockey-stickish uptick during the last 200 or so.

[JR:  For more on that study, see "NSF Study: Fastest Sea-Level Rise in Two Millennia Linked to Increasing Global Temperatures."]

Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Center at Ohio State was there, presenting evidence of acceleration in Greenland ice loss over the last 200 years. His bottom line: “If we talk 10 years from now, my expectation is that Greenland will be losing roughly double what it is now.”

I round out the video with takes from old pros lead NASA scientist Jim Hansen and Admiral David Titley, the US Navy’s Chief Oceanographer: 

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Republican presidential front runner Mitt Romney is catching a lot of flak for his comment in New Hampshire yesterday that he “likes to fire people” who provide him services he doesn’t think adequate.

While everyone was busy interpreting the meaning of that comment, Romney made a more decidedly firm — and bizarrely false — statement about solar investment. While the solar industry saw a record amount of installations and investment in 2011, bringing in more venture capital dollars ($1.81 billion) than any other cleantech sector, Romney claimed that investors “pulled back in that industry” after the Solyndra debacle:

He compared the way Bain Capital helped start Staples, a company that acted lean for its first years and received just $5 million of capital investment, with the way Solyndra acted after receiving $530 million from Washington, getting fancy corporate offices.

“When people saw what Staples was doing, they got into the same market too. But when other solar companies saw Solyndra get $530 million from the government, investors pulled back in that industry,” he said. “So instead of encouraging solar development, the Obama administration hurt it.”

Actually, the exact opposite happened — U.S. solar installations more than doubled in 2011, with last year seeing a $1 billion investment from Bank of America for the single largest residential solar project ever.

If Romney were being graded on the PolitiFact scale Truth-O-Meter scale, the Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire meter would be completely off the charts.

At this point, with the Solyndra debacle fading out of the headlines, why pay attention to a ridiculous statement like this at one at a campaign stop in New Hampshire? Because this was at a meeting with 300 members of Nashua, New Hampshire’s Chamber of Commerce — a group of people who have enormous influence over the business decisions of the state’s second-largest city.

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Other stories below: Climate change’s threat to the ski industry; Farmers bear the brunt of climate change

Global warming: European species lag in habitat shift

Fast-track warming in Europe is making butterflies and birds fall behind in the move to cooler habitats and prompting a worrying turnover in alpine plant species, studies published Sunday said.

The papers, both published by the journal Nature Climate Change, are the biggest endeavour yet to pinpoint impacts on European biodiversity from accelerating global temperatures.

A team led by Vincent Devictor of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) found that from 1990 to 2008, average temperatures in Europe rose by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

This is extremely high, being around 25 percent greater than the global average for all of the last century.

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