This week, the U.S. Senate is considering whether to add language forcing approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to major transportation legislation. In a C-SPAN interview on Friday, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the chair of the Senate energy committee, indicated his support for the construction of the risky project after sufficient environmental review. After agreeing with the Obama administration’s decision to require a full environmental review of the pipeline, Bingaman claimed that “the American public would like to see us go ahead with the project to the extent they know what the project entails,” calling it “meritorious”:

They shouldn’t be forced to issue a permit until they are satisfied on the environmental effects involved. So I think that point is valid. Whether that requires another six or eight months, that’s open to question. It is a good issue to try to get resolved some way or another. The American public would like to see us go ahead with the project to the extent they know what the project entails. It sounds meritorious. We’ve got pipelines all over the country. That is true with most members of Congress, too. I think most members of Congress probably would like to go ahead to get the issue resolved.

Watch it:

Bingaman’s claim about the American public’s support for the foreign tar sands project is incorrect. A recent poll from Hart Research Associates found that Americans who are informed about the pros and cons of the pipeline don’t want it built by a 14-point margin. Americans without this information — influenced by the extreme pro-pipeline bias in corporate media — support the pipeline by an 11-point margin.

Bingaman also rejected Republican claims that there is an “urgency about getting this permit approved,” because oil production is so high that the United States is a net exporter of petroleum products.

If built, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would put six states at risk of toxic oil spills along its 1700-mile route, and would add about five billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere over its intended 50-year lifespan of bringing dirty crude from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for foreign export.

Other Democratic senators who have expressed support for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline include finance chair Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), budget chair Kent Conrad (D-ND), Jon Tester (D-MT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Mark Begich (D-AK), Ben Nelson (D-NE), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Nelson and Baucus have criticized Republican attempts to speed approval, while Manchin has signed on with the GOP.

Transcript:

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The most vindicated climate scientist in America, Michael Mann, has published an excellent new book.  So of course the climate science disinformers have launched an attack on the book and on the positive reviews on Amazon.com.

So here are 3 things you can do for Mann:

1. Buy and read his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
2. Fight the denier attack at Amazon.com.
3. Friend “I Heart Climate Scientists” on Facebook [more on that later]

I’m about halfway through the book and can say its target audience is the exact same people who read Climate Progress — readers who want to be informed about real climate science and the state of the climate fight.

Mann is one of our top climate scientists, and so it shouldn’t be any surprise that he’s a good writer.  I’ll do a full review when the book comes out in hardcover (right now you can buy the Kindle eBook).

Here are two completely independent reviews that are much sought after by authors:

• “In this meticulous and engaging brief on climate change research and the political backlash to legitimate scientific work, Penn State professor Mann narrates the fight against misinformation from the inside.” — Publishers Weekly
• “An important and disturbing account of the fossil-fuel industry’s well-funded public-relations campaign to sow doubt about the validity of the science of climate change.” — Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)

As CP readers know, the climate war is waged everywhere online, including Amazon book reviews.  So I’m reprinting below a post from Get Energy Smart Now on the subject and a full book review from Prof. Scott Mandia.

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Our guest blogger is Ed Dolan, an economist and author of TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch), a book that outlines the libertarian case for a cleaner environment.

Joe Nocera replies to his Keystone XL critics in “The Politics of Keystone, Take 2” in Saturday’s New York Times. He still doesn’t get it. Like many people, Nocera doesn’t seem to understand the relationship between energy use and energy prices. He writes:

The seemingly inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions is the result of deeply ingrained human habits, which will not change if the pipeline is ultimately blocked.

The truth of the matter is that human habits are not really all that deeply ingrained. In countries where energy prices are higher, people systematically use less of it. How much less is shown dramatically in the chart attached to my response to Nocera’s first defense of KXL. Wealthy countries like Japan and Germany that have much higher fuel prices than the United States use only a half to a third as much per capita:

Nocera plunges even more deeply into economic confusion when he writes, “The benefits of the oil we stand to get from Canada, via Keystone, far outweigh the environmental risks,” and then goes on to list, as one of the benefits, the fact that Canadian oil is currently selling at a discount from Saudi crude.

Yes, Canadian oil is currently selling at a discount, but that is not a valid argument for building KXL. An especially low price on oil from a relatively dirty source is not a “benefit” — it is bad energy policy and bad environmental policy. What is more, even fans of underpriced energy need to recognize that building more pipelines would allow oil from Canadian sands to mix more thoroughly into the world oil market, so its price would go up.

Nocera’s “Take 2” does make some valid points. One is that the oil export issue is a red herring. If KXL is good, then it is good whether the products refined from it are consumed in the United States or exported. The same goes if KXL is bad. The fact that some of it would be re-exported doesn’t make it any worse.

Nocera also catches out Robert Redford for saying that oil from Canadian sands is “the dirtiest oil on the planet.” The truth is more nuanced. Andrew Leach and other observers point out that not all oil sands are alike. Oil from some deposits, recovered using some techniques, is much dirtier than others. The worst of it is pretty bad; the best is cleaner than some U.S. domestic oil, for example, thermally extracted heavy oil from California.

Whether Canadian oil is or is not the dirtiest on the planet is not the real point. The real point has always been that we need a comprehensive energy policy that encompasses economic, security and environmental dimensions. At a minimum, such a policy would raise energy prices across the board by enough to cover all environmental costs. At best, it would use price signals based on carbon content that would provide incentives to use energy from the cleanest sources first, and at the same time, develop even cleaner technologies for the future.

That is the part Nocera just doesn’t seem to get.

As the sovereign debt crisis unfolds in Europe, onlookers have questioned whether the region will stay committed to renewable energy. The answer so far is “yes.”

Even with a few countries pulling back on government support of the industry because of fiscal troubles, 2011 was still a huge year for deployment — with wind and solar alone representing almost 70% of new capacity.

That’s almost a 10-fold increase over deployment in 2000, when only 3.5 GW of renewable energy projects were installed. Last year, 32 GW of renewables — mostly wind and solar — were deployed across European countries.

The figures come from the European Wind Energy Association, which just released a report on industry growth.

Growth in Europe has consistently outstripped forecasts. The EU currently has a target of getting 20% of its final energy (heat, electricity and fuels) from renewable energy. Numerous countries have already surpassed their needed targets in the electricity and heating sectors, and it’s likely that the entire region will move past the goal well ahead of schedule.

It’s expected that renewable electricity sources will meet 34% of demand in Europe by 2020, with 25 of 27 countries to surpass their targets beforehand.

In 2011, solar PV accounted for 26.7% of capacity additions, wind power accounted for 21.4% of additions, and natural gas made up 22% of installations. Below that was coal at 4.8%, fuel oil at 1.6%, large hydro at 1.3%, and concentrating solar power at 1.1% of capacity.

(A side note to anyone confused by terms: It is always important to remember that “capacity” is the ability to do work. It is completely different than actual electricity generation. Just because 68% of new capacity was added in 2011, doesn’t mean that Europe will get 68% more electricity from renewables. Hence, the major differences in generation figures).

So what does Europe’s power capacity mix look like today?

Notice the stunning increase in wind, solar and natural gas — by far the top three choices for developers in the region. However, coal and fuel oil still have a very large market share. Some experts are concerned that a roll back of nuclear in various countries will increase the share of fossil fuels, particularly coal.

But with wind, solar and gas prices all declining to record lows, the combination of those three resources could prevent a sizable increase in coal development.

Related Posts:

• Offshore Wind Could Meet 14% of Europe’s Energy Demand by 2030, Leveraging $193 Billion in Investments
• Clean Energy Stunner: Renewable Power Tops Fossil Fuels for First Time

The House push for oil shale is a terrible idea for the arid West.

by RL Miller, reposted from Daily Kos

On Feb. 1, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a three-headed monster of an energy bill: drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling off the California coast, and expansion of oil shale drilling. But hey, the bill has the magic word “jobs” in the label, so it’s all good! The committee’s press release trumpets the quantity of oil shale lurking deep under the Green River formation (Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) and the need for job creators’ certainty.

The committee doesn’t bother with the thirsty facts of oil shale mining. If drilling for easy oil can be analogized to sticking a straw into a lemon and watching juice seep up, obtaining oil from oil shale involves digging up fossilized lemons, reconstituting them with a lot of water – some estimates are 5 gallons of water for every gallon of oil – using vast quantities of energy to boil the watery dried out lemons, catching the vapor, distilling lemon juice vapor from water vapor, and dumping all that contaminated waste water somewhere. All these activities will be taking place in western Colorado and eastern Utah, not exactly known for their abundance of water.

The committee also doesn’t bother with the economics of oil shale mining. The technology isn’t in place for commercial oil shale mining and may never be. Oil shale, like nuclear fusion, has been “10 years away from commercial development” for much longer than 10 years; the Checks and Balances Project has compiled oil shale industry boosters’ promises (PDF) going back to 1916. Unlike Canadian oil sands (aka tar sands), oil shale has never been produced commercially in the United States.

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