Does the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have any significant energy security benefits?  No.

In my recent reply to Joe Nocera, I said a line he borrowed from Michael Levi, “may be the lamest analogy in the history of energy and climate.”  Levi, who blogs for the Council on Foreign Relations, has doubled down with a modification/clarification of his original line that makes it much worse.

Explaining why will, I think, get to the heart of much of the hand-waving by Keystone advocates. First, though, let me repost the central chart that can’t be ignored:

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts.  Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands — represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.

Levi writes (emphasis added):

Nocera’s Saturday column quotes me thusly:

“The argument you hear is that because [Keystone XL] increases greenhouse gas emissions, we shouldn’t tolerate it.  Well, so do the lights in my house.  You have to be discriminating.”

Here’s Romm’s response:

“Seriously. That may be the lamest analogy in the history of energy and climate. Nocera is actually analogizing the GHG emissions increase from 900,000 barrels a day of dirty tar sands oil with flicking on the lights in your house!”

Yes, seriously. Upon reflection, the analogy turns out to be even better than I previously thought.

Let’s do some numbers. The GHG emissions increase from substituting 900,000 barrels a day of “dirty tar sands oil” for the typical barrel of oil consumed in the United States is, at most, about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. This estimate is based on assuming a 15% increase in per-barrel emissions, which is the upper limit given by the expert that Romm cites; I’m setting aside the fact that we’re actually talking about less than 900,000 barrels, since part of what would be carried isn’t bitumen, but rather lower-carbon dilluent.

On the other hand, residential lighting generated (PDF) 137 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions for the United States in 2008. So yes, flicking on the lights in our houses is actually a lot worse for the climate than substituting “dirty tar sands oil” into the energy mix.

(Side note: If you believe that the circa 900,000 barrels would not back out any other oil – something that, to be blunt, is totally implausible – then the maximum emissions increase from adding that oil works out to about the same as the annual emissions from U.S. residential lighting.)

Seriously! Upon reflection, the analogy is considerably worse than I thought.

Note: If Levi had meant to compare Keystone to turning on “the light in (all) our houses” he should have said that first.

My critique was of the original analogy — “so do the lights in my house” — which was between the lights in Levi’s house and Keystone’s oil.  Levi also cut out the second half of my response:  “How bad is this analogy?  Many people choose to get their electricity from renewable sources — so for them turning on the lights don’t even increase GHGs.  The point is people don’t have any choice about  the dirty tar sands oil — but Obama does.”

But whereas the original analogy was absurd, Levi’s modification/clarification is worse in every respect.

First, residential lighting has obvious and large benefits to us all, unlike Keystone. This kills the analogy by itself. Advocates simply have failed to identify any benefit to Keystone that deserves to be in the same sentence, paragraph, or article as the benefits of residential lighting (see below).  Levi immediately asserts:

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In a new ad for the Virginia U.S. Senate race, Republican candidate George Allen implausibly argues that the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport Canadian tar sands crude from Montana to Texas refineries, would benefit the state of Virginia.

The unnarrated 75-second spot, entitled “Unabashed,” laments that the nation has endured “35 straight months of unemployment above 8%” and highlights President Barack Obama’s administration’s rejection of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Then, it shows a lengthy series of video clips and newspaper headlines tying likely Democratic nominee, former Gov. Tim Kaine, to the administration’s position and backing the tar sands project:

– “Obama’s decision will cost the U.S. jobs” [Chicago Tribune, 1/19/12]
– “Obama’s Keystone pipeline rejection is hard to accept” [Washington Post, 1/18/12]
– “Obama’s Keystone pipeline nix worries small business” [CNNMoney.com, 1/19/12]
– “Obama’s pipeline decision delays energy security” [USA Today, 1/18/12]

Watch the spot:

The ad ends with the text “Tim Kaine. President Obama’s Senator. NOT VIRGINA’S.”

The claims that the Keystone XL pipeline would be a significant job creator have been widely debunked and the media citations reference stories that relied on flawed information. But even if you believed the industry’s inflated claims of tens of thousands of jobs, is hard to imagine that a construction project nearly 1,000 miles away from even the Commonwealth’s western-most point would put a significant number of Virginians to work.

More likely to benefit, however, would be the big oil and other energy companies whose multi-million-dollar lobbying campaigns have focused heavily on pushing the pipeline’s construction. And, as it happens, that sector has heavily funded former Sen. Allen’s campaign. Though the campaign has refused to disclose the list clients at Allen’s company or what he did for the energy industry as a consultant in the time between his last campaign and this one, ThinkProgress reported last year that Allen founded an industry-tied group to oppose clean energy reforms, spoke at a global-warming deniers hosted by the Heartland Institute, and toured Virginia with the Koch Industries-funded Americans for Prosperity.

A more truthful ad would say: George Allen. Big Oil’s Senator. NOT VIRGINIA’S.

An action plan for boosting weatherization efforts in low-income communities

by Jorge Madrid and Adam James

Energy efficiency upgrades to low-income homes help struggling families use less energy and lower their utility bills while still meeting their daily energy needs. A family living in an older home, for example, could cut their yearly energy bill in half with a full home weatherization.

Despite the clear benefits of energy efficiency upgrades, only a small portion of America’s low-income homes, which qualify for assistance based on the Department of Energy’s weatherization metric, have been retrofitted with such upgrades to date. Why is this the case?

In this issue brief we will examine three barriers to weatherization in low-income communities and discuss three strategies to unlocking widespread energy efficiency in low-income households, among them:

• Generating greater access to energy-efficient products
• Paying for the purchase and installation of these products
• Boosting demand for energy-efficient upgrades through innovative community outreach and education programs

Clearly identifying and overcoming barriers is crucial to expanding the use of energy-efficiency programs and measures in low-income communities. While the strategies discussed here are not necessarily the definitive answer to overcoming all barriers—other effective programs certainly exist—they nonetheless represent a crucial and much-needed step forward.

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1. TransCanada Used Aggressive Tactics With Landowners
2. TransCanada Didn’t Deliver On Previously Promised Tax Revenue
3. TransCanada Reversed Its Position On Rerouting
4. TransCanada Will Import Much Of The Steel For The Pipeline
5. TransCanada Said Its Pipeline Would Increase Oil Prices In The Midwest

by Jill Fitzsimmons and Emilee Pierce, reposted from Media Matters

In the media storm surrounding TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, news outlets have largely focused on the employment impacts of the project, often parroting discredited industry statistics in the process. But jobs are only a part of the story.  A review of recent testimonies, tax records and local news reports shows that, on many other important issues at stake, TransCanada has been advertising one thing to its stakeholders and delivering another. What follows is a list of stories that many national news outlets missed:

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The second in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green.

Questions about the authenticity of the leaked Heartland Institute documents are fading, as projects described therein are confirmed. Heartland’s senior fellow James Taylor confirmed the existence of the climate-denier classroom curriculum project to ThinkProgress Green yesterday. Now, anti-science blogger Anthony Watts has confirmed that Heartland is funding his project to display weather station data, detailed in the leaked fundraising plan. In a comment at Andrew Montford’s Bishop Hill blog, Watts claims there are no “nefarious motives” in his project:

Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. . . . DeSmog, as part of their public relations for hire methodology to demonize skeptics, will of course try to find nefarious motives for this project. But there simply are none here. It’s something that needs doing because NOAA hasn’t made this new data available in a user friendly visual format.

The secret Heartland document explains that Watts isn’t just trying to present “new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form.” Watts, the document explains, has been “exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that the Heartland Institute supported and promoted),” based on his hypothesis that “many of the temperature stations relied on by weathermen are compromised by heat radiating from nearby buildings, machines, or paved surfaces.” These stations generate “spurious records” which are “used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming or the more ambiguous ‘climate change.’”

Like the rest of Heartland’s climate denial work, this project is anonymously funded.

Although it is important to calibrate weather stations, Watts’ idea that the record of rising temperatures is a result of bad data has been repeatedly debunked. In fact, Richard Mueller, a physicist funded by the Koch brothers to study “flawed” weather stations, confirmed that temperature data is “excellent” and “global warming is real.” Watts is now just another conspiracy theorist for hire.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does not have the resources to present their data in a more public-friendly form because of the endless assault on government by groups like the Heartland Institute and their right-wing funders. Last November, Republicans even killed a no-cost plan to streamline the agency to provide better services to the public.

Heat and aridity together make for increasingly brutal global-warming-type droughts

Some brutal droughts are raging around the world.  The one in Texas has, naturally, been receiving most of the attention in this country (see Warming-Enhanced Texas Drought Is Once in “500 or 1,000 Years … Basically Off the Charts,” Says State Climatologist).  Later in the week I’ll blog about the ones hitting Mexico and South America.

But Britain is clearly also being hit by one for the record books, as the UK Guardian reports:

Underground water supplies are being used to keep rivers flowing in the seasons when they are supposed to be replenished

… The impending crisis – which could have widespread consequences for farmers, food production, tourism, industry and domestic life – has been building for the past 18 months. Reservoirs were already low this time last year. Then came 2011, the driest year in England and Wales for 90 years.

In addition, we are now experiencing the driest winter on record, though this could change over the next few weeks, meteorologists have said. The crucial point is that boreholes and reservoirs are now at “notably low” or “exceptionally low” levels. At the RSPB reserve at Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk, springs have dried up and many of the birds, including populations of bearded tits, marsh harriers and reed warblers, are now struggling to find food. Fresh water plants and animals such as water voles are also suffering. “This is a very worrying situation to have at this time of year,” said Grahame Madge, an RSPB official. “This is an incredibly important wildlife site that we cannot afford to have damaged. We are going to have to look very carefully at how we manage water supplies there in coming years.”

A second article warns, “Half of UK households ‘could face water restrictions by April’.”

A key point is that warm weather droughts are much worse than cold weather droughts. Thanks to manmade global warming, future droughts will be fundamentally different from all previous droughts humanity has experienced because they will be very hot weather droughts, as I have written (see Must-have PPT: The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather).

The Guardian piece makes a similar point:

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Americans Desperately Want an Oil Change

by Daniel J. Weiss

As part of the FY 2013 budget released on February 13, President Obama proposed to eliminate $40 billion in tax breaks for oil and gas producers over the next ten years. Yesterday, the Yale Project on Climate Change reiterated its recent finding that Americans of all political stripes oppose subsidies for “coal, oil, and natural gas companies.” They oppose these subsidies by 70 percent to 30 percent – better than two to one.  Republicans oppose these subsidies by 67 percent to 34 percent (reflects rounding of percentages).

Intensity matters in public opinion.  A determined, energetic minority can be quite powerful.  The Yale poll shows that there is much more intensity against oil subsidies than in favor of them.  Americans strongly opposed to the subsidies outnumber those who strongly support them by 31 percent to 3 percent – a 10 to 1 ratio.  Independents – the voters who will likely determine the outcome of the 2012 election – strongly oppose these fossil fuel subsidies by 45 percent to 2 percent.

This poll was conducted from October 20 to November 16, 2011, before respondents knew that the profits of the big five oil companies – BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell – would be a record $137 billion in 2011.  In addition, gasoline prices averaged $3.38 to $3.44 per gallon during the survey period.   This week the average gasoline price was $3.52 and climbing.  Imagine how the anticipated higher gasoline prices combined with big oil’s record 2011 profits will intensify opposition to big oil subsidies.

It is said that elections are won in the middle.  Politicians who want to appeal to these independent voters would do well to vocally oppose these big oil subsidies.  Certainly President Obama understands that.  Supporters of big oil tax breaks may learn this lesson the hard way.

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Our guest blogger is Annie-Rose Strasser of the Center for Community Change.

Roseanne Barr, best known for her role on the eponymous 1990s television sitcom, has in recent years taken up a slightly less glamorous job: running a 46-acre macadamia nut farm in Hawaii.

Now, she is officially running for President of the United States. Barr even pulled 6 percent in a national presidential poll that pits her against President Obama (47 percent) and Mitt Romney (42 percent). Barr, a Green Party candidate, has stated that the environment will be one of the main platforms for her campaign:

While Barr admits that she does not believe she will win the presidency, she tweeted recently, “I’m absolutely sure that Obama will win this election by a landslide- exp. If he takes a cue from the Green Party Platform.”

Barr, whose political past is of questionable sanity, may now be the best hope for addressing the environment in the 2012 election.

So far in this primary, discussion of the environment has been minimal at best, and even Fox News has noticed. Meanwhile, an iceberg the size of New York City is about to break off of Antarctica, and most of the country is experiencing one of the mildest winters on record.

On the Republican side, the environment has played virtually no role in the campaign. Rick Santorum has made clear that he believes climate change is a “hoax.” Newt Gingrich has consistently talked about environmental policy only as a barrier to the free market. And Mitt Romney’s most pointed comments on the environment came on the heels of Obama’s recent decision to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Romney spun the conversation from the environment to jobs.

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Are desert dwellers in denial about the fragility of urban society in the Southwest?

by Greg Hanscom, reposted from Grist

What was the most surprising thing that came out of Andrew Ross’s two-year research stint in Phoenix, Ariz.? For my money, it’s this: People who live there (weirdly) don’t expect their desert civilization to collapse around them at any moment.

“One of New Yorkers’ favorite things is to imagine the destruction of their city. There’s a whole library of movies and novels that do this,” Ross said during a recent visit to the Grist offices. “There’s no equivalent in Phoenix.”

Chalk it up to the power of denial.

Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, sets the scene in his new book, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City – the product of his two-year study, which included interviews with hundred of Phoenicians:

The 17,000-square-mile region known as Greater Phoenix depends on a water supply pumped 300 miles uphill from the overallocated Colorado River, now in the second decade of a drought that has shrunk its volume to unprecedented lows. From 1990 to 2007, Arizona added fossil-fuel pollutants faster than any other state — the rate of increase was more than three times the national average … Once a haven for TB sufferers seeking respirator relief, by 2005 the Valley’s infamous Brown Cloud was drawing the lowest national grades from the American Lung Association for air quality in both ozone and particulates …

To cap it all, climate change [has] targeted the state for special attention in the years to come. As Jonathan Overpeck, Arizona’s leading climatologist (and one of the chief authors of the seminal 2007 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), warned the state’s House Environment Committee in 2009: “Whether it is drought frequency, the increase in temperature, or the decrease in soil moisture, we are in the bull’s eye — the worst in the United States.”

And then there’s the fact that Phoenix is built atop the ruins of an actual fallen civilization: The Hohocam, who once built an agricultural empire 40,000 strong in this valley, had all but vacated the place by the mid-1400s.

This city is going to dry up and blow off the map. Right?

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Other stories below: Texas farmer wins restraining order against TransCanada; Obama’s Wish List for Energy

U.S. Solar Projects Rise 67% in Quarter Amid Price Drop, SEIA Says

Installation of solar panels in the U.S. surged as much as 67 percent in the fourth quarter as developers raced to qualify for an expiring federal incentive program and panel prices fell 16 percent, a trade group said.

Developers installed 700 megawatts to 750 megawatts of rooftop and ground-mounted systems in the quarter, compared with 450 megawatts in the third quarter, according to preliminary estimates from the Washington-based Solar Energy Industries Association.

Installations this year may grow by 3,000 megawatts to 4,000 megawatts, up from about 1,800 megawatts in 2011, if a U.S. Treasury Department incentive known as the 1603 program is renewed, said Rhone Resch, the trade group’s chief executive officer.

Last year “was an incredible year and 2012 could be even better if Congress extends the grant program,” Resch said in an interview today.

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