No, this absurd piece is not (intentional) satire.  But the “headline could just as well be found at the Onion,” as one of the many exasperated New York Times readers puts it.

Obviously any paper, but most especially the New York Times, has little value to society if it knowingly prints lies — or if it fails to do the minimal investigative reporting and fact-checking needed to determine if a statement by a newsmaker or, say, a global warming denier, is false.

The public editor is “the readers’ representative,” which is to say he has no power whatsoever except the public platform to shame the paper of record.  That in theory makes him the “conscience” of the paper, but by not clearly stating the obvious here he has mostly provided cover for journalists to continue doing the lousy job they are doing.

This is not an abstract question.  We’ve seen the media described as “stenographers” by one of the country’s leading journalists in a major Harvard study — see How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics — “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has harshly slammed his fawning, stenographic colleagues in his piece, “Rotten to the press corps”:

[Fired Issa press aide Kurt] Bardella also disclosed contempt for reporters he described as “lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity.”

The issue of reporters simply repeating what they have heard with little or no fact checking is one of many flaws that go to the heart of the demise of modern journalism, of which climate coverage is but the most important subset.  There is a related flaw of getting that quote from a global warming denier to provide balance in a story when the reporter or their editor should know that the denier is a widely debunked purveyor of falsehoods, something that still happens at the Times (see below).

And the issue comes up with respect to columnists — see “The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages.”

Now that would be an interesting topic for Brisbane — should the NY Times fact-check its opinion pieces?  Right now, like most other newspapers, it publishes the most absurd, error riddled nonsense that would hardly withstand even a few minutes of fact-checking online — see, for instance, “Small IS Beautiful”! Robert Bryce Pushes Nuclear Power by Quoting Famous Author Who Called It “an Ethical, Spiritual, and Metaphysical Monstrosity”

Brisbane tries to explain his original column as poor word choice in his weak follow-up, “Update to my Previous Post on Truth Vigilantes“:

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A climate denier running for Congress in Connecticut has attacked a non-partisan panel tasked to prepare Connecticut in the wake of record damage from extreme storms in 2011 for recognizing the growing threat of global warming. State Rep. Chris Coutu, who denies not only man-made global warming but even the fact of the warming itself, rejects the recommendations of the Two Storm Panel because it dared to mention the “pseudo-science” of climate change:

Chris Coutu, who is running for Congress in the 2nd District, said the Two Storm Panel strayed “far from its non-political mission and into the political minefield of global warming.” “The “Two Storm Panel” had a simple, non-political task: determining how Connecticut can better prepare for and respond to major storms. Instead of simply focusing on solutions, the panel veered into politics with its recommendations for global warming,” Coutu said in a press release issued a few hours after the panel released its report.

“I don’t believe global warming’s occurring,” Coutu told the Hartford Courant. “There’s climate changes every year, there’s weather changes.”

Of course, it’s radical anti-science ideologues like Coutu who have made the scientific fact of global warming into a political issue, putting the residents of his state, our nation, and the entire planet at deadly risk. This panel is taking long-delayed action to protect Americans from the impacts of global warming caused by political inability to stop the fossil fuel pollution driving it.

“It’s global warming,” Sue Gress of New Canaan, Connecticut, told the New York Times in November. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.”

The Two Storm Panel’s report states that rising sea levels brought on by a warming planet “raises serious concerns about the need to protect critical infrastructure along the coast and adjacent to rivers.” Experts told the group that sea levels are expected to rise about 1.5 feet by the middle of the century and from 3 to 5 feet by the century’s end. The panel recommended new engineering standards to “better protect the built environment from the effects of extreme weather.”

“There is a reality that comes with the trend in climate change that we have to be better prepared for the future,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said. “We’re in a warming cycle,” James Skiff, the retired U.S. Air Force Major General who co-chairs the panel, told the Courant. “Sea levels are going to rise, that creates a higher storm surge.”

Speaking at the 2012 United Nations Investor Summit on Climate Risk & Energy Solutions, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka blasted climate deniers in Congress for threatening the free enterprise system and the future of civilization. Trumka began his speech laying out the stark challenge of global warming: a “stable climate is the foundation of our global civilization,” and thus “the prerequisite for a profitable investment environment”:

Today, as we meet together, scientists tell us we are headed ever more swiftly toward irreversible climate change—with catastrophic consequences for human civilization. We must have a stable climate to feed the planet, to ensure there is drinking water for our cities but not floodwaters at our doors. A stable climate is the foundation of our global civilization, of our global economy—the prerequisite for a profitable investment environment.

Because “Congress is effectively controlled by climate change deniers,” crucial national policy to fight greenhouse pollution has been killed, but we “must take action ourselves,” Trumka said. The AFL-CIO has worked with other unions to build a green jobs infrastructure:

But it is clear that as long as Congress is effectively controlled by climate change deniers, all of us—investors, companies, workers and the broader public, must take action ourselves. So a year ago, as the climate bill failed in Congress, as the jobs crisis deepened, and as workers’ pension funds continued to suffer from microscopic fixed income yields, the American labor movement decided we couldn’t wait—we had to act to help advance profitable, risk weighted investments that would create jobs and address climate change.

Trumka also recognized that the crippled economy and our strong ties to fossil fuels make the necessary change difficult, especially for workers in coal and oil regions. In that context, he talked about the Keystone XL pipeline, which some of AFL-CIO’s unions support and some oppose.

“The AFL-CIO has not taken a position on the Keystone pipeline,” he said, “unions don’t agree among ourselves. But we cannot have a trust building conversation about it unless opponents of the pipeline recognize that construction jobs are real jobs, good jobs, and supporters of the pipeline recognize that tar sands oil raises real issues in terms of climate change.”

Trumka’s speech acts as a strong rebuke to the polluted vision of the global economy presented this morning by US Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue.

Read the transcript of Trumka’s speech: Read more

by Zachary Rybarczyk

Is Al Gore a secret gamer?

Known for advocating climate protection measures through books, movies, TV shows and concerts, the Nobel Laureate is venturing into a new medium to spread his message: video games.

Gore’s nonprofit climate education and advocacy organization, the Climate Reality Project, recently teamed up with global brand and trend consultants at PSFK to challenge design firms to create an interactive video game that uses the momentum of social media and gaming to advocate taking action on climate change and quash misinformation.

Video games and social media will play a key role in the future of fighting climate change, Gore says, as policies needed to accelerate the transition to clean technologies are blocked by oil, gas, and coal industry’s influence on our government.

“The architecture of the public square on the internet is very similar to when the country was founded, when the print-based media were dominant.  Individuals have easy access, almost no barriers to access, ideas matter.”

Watch a short speech and roundtable with Gore on the subject:

Gaming For Good from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

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The top ten biggest polluters contribute a combined 187.3 million metric tons of GHG pollution each year – equal to the average annual emissions for over 36 million cars.

by Jackie Weidman

For the first time, Americans have access to comprehensive data from industrial sources that are responsible for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution.

This pollution data highlights the nation’s top climate polluters, including the number one emitting power plant in the United States: Georgia’s Scherer coal-fired power station. Owned by Southern Company, Scherer pumped out nearly 23 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2010.

Two other plants operated by Southern Company in the Southeastern U.S. — the Bowen plant in Bowen, Georgia and the James H. Miller, Jr. plant in Quinton, Alabama — were the second and third largest polluters in America.

The EPA database includes 80 percent of total U.S. global warming pollution, including emissions from over 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.  The EPA defines these emitters as “big emissions sources,” contributing a minimum of 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

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Our fact-checking revealed that empirical estimates of energy rebound cited by the Breakthrough Institute are over-estimated or wrong, and they contradict the technological reality of energy efficiency gains observed in many industrial sectors.  For journalists, the Rebound Effect is a trap—it is a man-bites-dog story that never happened.

Energy efficiency policies work, a new study finds, especially when they are broad and deep and sustained, as in the case of California.

by Shakeb Afsah and Kendyl Salcito and Chris Wielga, in a report for CO2 Scorecard

Summary

Energy efficiency is an over-rated policy tool when it comes to cutting energy use and CO2 emissions—that’s the basic message promoted by the US think tank the Breakthrough Institute (BTI), and amplified in major news outlets like the New Yorker and the New York Times. Their logic is that every action to conserve energy through efficient use leads to an opposite reaction to consume more energy—a “rebound” mechanism, which, according to the BTI, can negate as much as 60-100% of saved energy, and in some cases can backfire to increase net energy consumption.

In this research note we refute this policy message and show that the BTI, as well as its champions in the media, have overplayed their hand, supporting their case with anecdotes and analysis that don’t measure up against theory and data….

We provide new statistical evidence to show that energy efficiency policies and programs can reliably cut energy use—a finding that is consistent with the policy stance of leading experts and organizations like the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) and the World Bank. Additionally, we take our policy message one step further—by using new insights from the emerging multi-disciplinary literature on “energy efficiency gap,” we recommend that the world needs more energy efficiency policies and programs to cut greenhouse gases—not less as implied by the BTI and its cohorts in the media.

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The New York State legislature is debating whether to allow hydrofracking in the state. The natural gas industry is hoping to have its say, contributing $1.34 million to state politicians and parties over the last four years, including Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The industry is pushing for the drilling process, also known as fracking, to take place not far from the Syracuse and New York City watersheds. This has caused some concern since fracking can harm the surrounding environment, poison nearby water sources, and even cause earthquakes. But the New York Daily News reports that drillers and utilities really want this to get started:

In pushing for state approval of hydrofracking, the natural gas industry has pumped $1.34 million into the coffers of New York politicians and their parties, a new study revealed. The donations were sprinkled around over the last four years as lawmakers and state officials debated whether to allow the controversial drilling process, formally known as hydraulic fracturing, in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation upstate, Common Cause New York said in its report.[...]

Common Cause’s study included not only gas drillers and producers, but some public utilities — including Con Edison and National Grid — that have stakes in gas distribution networks, Lerner said. The bulk of gas industry donations — some 75% — went to candidates for state legislature, including $448,359 given to Republican state Senate candidates and their campaign organizations. Another $217,901 was spent on Democratic candidates for state Senate and their campaign organizations. Gov. Cuomo’s campaign committee took in $153,816 from the gas industry, according to Common Cause.

The top ten recipients combined took in $231,557 in industry cash from January 2007 to October 2011, including $38,532 to the George Maziarz (R-Buffalo-Rochester), chair of the Senate’s Energy Committee, and $26,800 to Kevin Cahill (D-Ulster County), the chair of the Assembly’s Energy Committee.

The industry says it is only making these contributions to combat a well-funded effort on the other side. But as the donations show, they are also having to deal with a hesitant legislature which is discussing the extension of a fracking moratorium, not to mention some public pressure against the procedure.

The deadline for public comments on proposed fracking plans was Wednesday, January 11th. Environmental and pro-drilling groups submitted thousands of comments to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. A report is expected from the agency some time this year.

– Zachary Bernstein

Congressional commitment to action on clean energy policy in 2012 is about as secure as Kim Kardashian’s wedding vows.

So with states once again representing the major driver for renewable energy, how can they keep the momentum going at a time when federal enthusiasm is at its lowest level in years? The key, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution, is for states to focus not just on project-level deployment, but to shift some funds toward support broader sustainable economic goals that foster the clean energy economy from the ground up.

And there are still a fair amount of funds to work with on the state level, as the below map illustrates:

What do “broader sustainable economic goals” mean exactly?

Historically, states with clean energy funds have focused expenditures on rebates, direct loans or performance-based incentives in order to encourage development of commercial and residential projects. The funds are raised through electricity surcharges, carbon auctions, utility penalties for not meeting clean energy targets, issuing bonds, and a variety of other methods.

These funds are found in 20 states and represent about $500 million of per year in revenues to support renewable energy and efficiency. They’re extraordinarily important tools for encouraging project activity — ultimately helping ratepayers and businesses invest in projects themselves. But they don’t always help create the “bottom-up” solutions that help multiply the economic impact, say analysts at the Brookings Institution:

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This morning, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue argued that “free enterprise” requires a future of accelerated, unending global warming. Supporting expanded fracking, shale oil, and tar sands development including the Keystone XL pipeline, Donohue said that the United States should burn hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels for hundreds of years:

We have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years. We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years—and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.

Burning that amount of fossil fuel would generate 444 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the oil, 135 billion tons from the natural gas, and 1.258 trillion tons from the coal. To maintain a climate compatible with civilization all of humanity needs to limit future greenhouse pollution to less than 650 billion tons.

Far from “keeping the American Dream alive for generation after generation,” as Donohue claims, his promotion of catastrophic global warming would grant a diminished, deadly world to future generations.

Read Donohue’s remarks promoting the destruction of civilization:
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Today, two opposing visions are being crafted for the future of American jobs, international competitiveness and environmental stewardship.

This morning in Washington, DC, Tom Donohue, president of the Chamber of Commerce, spoke about his organization’s vision for job creation. Focusing heavily on tearing down environmental regulations building up the Keystone XL pipeline in their place, the Chamber of Commerce is putting all its chips in fossil fuels — pushing a backward vision for the energy future of America that pushes us further away from addressing climate change.

“Our nation is on the cusp of an energy boom that is already creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, revitalizing entire communities, and reinvigorating American manufacturing,” said Donohue. But what did he mean?

“Unconventional oil and natural gas development,” which he called “the next big thing.”

Of course, nothing about renewable energy and nothing about climate change — quickly becoming two of the most important drivers for business decisions in the 21st century.

Meanwhile, in New York City, hundreds of global investors representing a cumulative portfolio worth tens of trillions of dollars are meeting at the United Nations to discuss ongoing trends in sustainable investing and highlight why strong government support of clean energy technologies is so important for driving activity in the private sector.

So which vision is America going to choose? The vision from the Chamber of Commerce — which has seen some of the most forward-thinking companies like Apple and Yahoo quit the organization due to its aggressive prevention of action on climate change?

Or the vision of hundreds of investors who say embracing renewable energy, efficiency and conservation “will yield substantial economic benefits including creating new jobs and businesses, stimulating technological innovation, and providing a robust foundation for economic recovery and sustainable long-term economic growth”?

The roads are starting to diverge. In 2011, global investment in renewable energy surpassed fossil fuels for the first time.

With record low natural gas prices, financial distress hitting countries across the world, and a very mature, incumbent fossil fuel infrastructure to compete with, it’s still an incredibly difficult uphill battle for renewable energy. But new investment figures released by Bloomberg New Energy Finance at today’s UN investor summit show continued progress in spite of the continued head winds.

According to BNEF, global investments in renewables reached a new record of $260 billion in 2011, a modest 5% increase over 2010. However, those investment figures are roughly five times what they were in 2004. Last year also saw the one trillionth dollar invested in the sector since tracking began seven years ago:

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Other stories below: Super fracking goes deeper to pump up natural gas production; Rick Santorum’s Big Coal buddies

Business groups, Republicans launch onslaught on president over Keystone

The nation’s most powerful business groups are dialing up the political pressure on the White House to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

December’s payroll-tax-cut deal gives the administration 60 days to approve or reject TransCanada Corp.’s pipeline to bring oil from Alberta’s tar sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue plans to highlight the pipeline in his closely watched annual speech Thursday on the state of American business.

“Keystone — and energy as a whole — will be a major element of Tom’s speech tomorrow,” a spokesman for the business group said Wednesday.

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by Jorge Madrid and Arpita Bhattacharyya

From the EPA to the Keystone pipeline, the Chamber of Commerce has left no stone unturned in their quest to pit economic growth against the environment and public health.  This morning’s “State of American Business Address” by the Chamber of Commerce’s President and CEO, Thomas J. Donohue, will likely repeat the barrage of misleading statements.

Here are five pieces of misleading rhetoric to listen for and the facts that prove them wrong.

1. Environmental regulations hurt businesses’ bottom line.

“We wholeheartedly share this and previous administrations’ goals of protecting public health and the environment, but the rushed implementation of this rule could undermine the nation’s economic recovery.” (Tom Donohue, 12/22/11, on EPA Utility MACT)

FACT: Illness and missed days of work are bad for business productivity and overall bottom line, particularly for small businesses and entrepreneurs with fewer than 20 employees.  We know from the EPA’s peer-reviewed analysis that U.S. clean air protections from particulates and smog alone prevented 13 million missed work days IN 2010, and are projected to prevent 17 million lost days of productivity in 2020.  This increased productivity does not include the benefits from the Cross State and Air Toxics Reductions rules that will lower smog, acid rain, and toxic pollution from power plants.  It also does not take into account the added healthcare costs that clean air regulations have prevented (in the ballpark of $2 trillion by 2020).

2. Environmental regulations stall investment and create uncertainty for businesses.

Question: Why are U.S. companies sitting on so much money?

Donohue: “Uncertainty. Businesses have questions about energy costs. Tell me about the EPA stuff? What about labor regulations? Are the consumers there? What are the trade-offs?” (12/19/11, PJStar)

FACT:  Blocking or delaying the newly promulgated power plant pollution reduction rules would almost certainly increase uncertainty for utilities and thus stall new investments in cleaner and more efficient equipment, resulting in fewer jobs created.  Constellation Energy, the largest wholesale and retail power seller in the country, has already invested in a $885 million installation that has vastly reduced emissions from two giant coal-burning units. By delaying these rules that have been in the works since the second Bush Administration, we are creating uncertainty, harming business, and creating unfair advantages for the “free-riders” who pollute without consequence.

3. The Keystone XL pipeline is a magic bullet for creating tens of thousands (even hundreds of thousands) of jobs.

“The pipeline project is expected to create more than 20,000 high-paying construction and manufacturing jobs in the near term and more than 250,000 permanent jobs in the long run”. (Press Release, 7/22/11)

FACT: There are glaring discrepancies in the job creation numbers reported by both TransCanada and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Yet, an independent analysis, conducted by Cornell University, found that between 500 and 1,400 temporary construction jobs will be created, with a negative long-term economic impact as gas prices rise in the Midwest.  Further, the State Department’s analysis finds that the project will create no more than 2,500-4,650 temporary direct construction jobs, and that TransCanada and the Chamber’s job claims are “not substantiated.”

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