Yesterday, 221 members of Congress released a letter to the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, asking him to allow the coal industry to emit greenhouse pollution without any limits. Claiming the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule on greenhouse gas pollution from new and modified coal-fired power plants needs to be killed because of the “devastating impact it will have on jobs and the nation’s economy” were 207 Republicans and 14 Democrats:

We respectfully ask that you stop EPA’s GHG rulemaking because of the devastating impact it will have on jobs and the economy.

The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), chairman of the subcommittee on energy and power, and Rep. John Barrow (D-GA). The OMB is now weeks past the February 3 deadline to approve the EPA rules. This letter is similar to one sent on February 2 to OMB director Jeffrey Zients from Whitfield, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), and Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI).

The chart below lists the fourteen Democrats who oppose climate protections:

Fourteen Coal-Above-Climate Democrats
Jason Altmire (D-PA)	John Barrow (D-GA)
Sanford Bishop (D-GA)	Dan Boren (D-OK)
Ben Chandler(D-KY)	Jerry Costello (D-IL)
Mark Critz (D-PA)	Tim Holden (D-PA)
Larry Kissell (D-NC)	Jim Matheson (D-UT)
Mike McIntyre (D-NC)	Collin Peterson (D-MN)
Nick Rahall (D-WV)	Mike Ross (D-AR)

Of these 14:

–Ten are members of the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition. The energy sector has been a huge financial backer of the Blue Dog political action committee — the coalition’s shared fundraising apparatus.

–Seven of those ten are part of the Blue Dog Energy Task Force. That nine-member group claims works to “promote responsible, diverse domestic energy production, increased energy efficiency, greater use of natural gas, renewable energy, electric transmission, and research and development on advanced energy technologies.”

–Except for Kissell, all of them voted last year to block climate action last year. Thirteen voted last year for HR 910, which would have permanently eliminated the EPA’s power to limit greenhouse pollution by legislatively denying the scientific threat of global warming.

Of the 34 Republicans who did not sign the letter, all but three — Rep. John Boehner, Bob Turner, and Rodney Frelinghuysen — voted for HR 910. Boehner publicly dismisses climate science. As Speaker of the House, he does not typically vote on legislation. Turner, who took Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) seat, was not in Congress when the HR 910 vote took place, but is a global warming denier. Frelinghuysen voted against the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2009, and did not cast a vote on HR 910.

This letter, once again, shows the House is dominated by climate zombies more concerned about polluter welfare than about the immediate threat of global climate change.

At the end of this year, the United States will confront a trifecta of difficult fiscal challenges: The Bush tax cuts will be set to expire; the defense budget and spending on civilian programs will face a $110 billion sequester; and a new extension of the federal debt limit will be looming.

At the same time, the evidence will be clearer than ever that urgent action is needed to protect our nation and the world from irreversible climate change. The overwhelming scientific consensus will have grown even stronger. And if 2011 is a harbinger of our future, record-breaking droughts and storms will have again afflicted our nation — at immense cost in lives and property damage.

These fiscal and environmental problems may appear unrelated. But as a bipartisan group of current and former members of Congress, we want to propose a new idea: These seemingly intractable challenges are easier to address together than separately….

If budgeting is ultimately about choices, enacting a policy that reduces dangerous air pollution while providing hundreds of billions of dollars in debt relief should be a no-brainer. No other policy would do as much for our economy, our security and our future as putting a price on carbon.

That’s the opening of a bipartisan Washington Post op-ed on how a price on carbon could immediately help America address two of its biggest long-term problems, global warming and the national debt.  The authors:

Democrats Henry A. Waxman and Edward J. Markey represent California’s 30th District and Massachusetts’s 7th District, respectively, in the House of Representatives. Republicans Sherwood Boehlert and Wayne Gilchrest formerly represented New York and Maryland districts, respectively, in the House.

As I first reported last May, a “high and rising price for carbon pollution has emerged as a credible deficit reduction strategy.”

Then in July, I pointed out, ”The only plausible scenario now for seriously addressing US greenhouse gas emissions in a way that would enable a global deal and give us some chance of averting catastrophic multiple, simultaneous climate impacts is for a serious carbon price to be part of the post-2012-election budget deal.”

Now 4 members of Congress, 2 Ds and 2 Rs, have stated the obvious: Since higher revenues must be part of any grand bargain to address the debt, a price on pollution makes the most sense. And yes, Yes, I’m aware the two Republicans ain’t in Congress any more. Ya gotta start somewhere!

Here is more of their argument:

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Climate Reality Project rolls out new campaign to keep climate denial out of school curriculum

by Maggie L. Fox, Climate Reality Project

Do you think schools should teach our children that climate change isn’t real?

Of course not. But the Heartland Institute, an organization well-known for giving a microphone to climate science deniers, now wants to bring this false message into America’s classrooms.

As their President and CEO just admitted, they are writing a “global warming curriculum” that would say climate science isn’t settled. They’d like our teachers to claim we just don’t know if humans are changing our climate.

This plan is outrageous on its face. As you well know, the science behind climate change is not controversial — it is a reality. Scientists know that climate change is happening, and we are beginning to see the impacts with our own eyes. It would be the height of irresponsibility to urge our schools to teach something known to be untrue.

As its own budget documents reveal (PDF), the Heartland Institute is funded by oil and coal companies with a financial interest in denying climate science. But I think you’ll agree this industry-funded propaganda has no place in our schools.

Fortunately, one brave high school student is asking the Heartland Institute to stop. Corey Husic is writing to the group to say there is no place for a climate denial curriculum. He is asking that Heartland immediately “cease and desist” its plan to bring climate denial into our schools. And today, I invite you to sign this petition as well.

It’s time we move on from this false debate over climate science and engage in a much more fruitful and educational discussion over what we can do to solve the climate crisis.

We’ve created a short video to help you learn more about this urgent issue. I encourage you watch this video now, and sign the petition to keep climate reality in America’s science classrooms.

– Maggie L. Fox is the President and CEO of the Climate Reality Project. This piece was originally published at the Climate Reality Project.

NOTE: Think Progress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the 2012 Climate Strategy document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

See also “CAPAF General Counsel Responds To Heartland Institute.”

TUCSON, Arizona — Politicians are nothing without their rhetorical flourishes, but a congressional candidate in Arizona left some in the audience scratching their head when he called oil a “renewable resource” during a Tea Party rally this week.

Jesse Kelly, who was the 2010 GOP nominee in Arizona’s eighth congressional district and is running again to fill former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ (D-AZ) vacant seat this year, made the comment on Wednesday at a Tucson Tea Party rally in front of a crowd of approximately 500.

Kelly brushed off concerns about fossil fuels because “we have so much here in this country.” After noting that technology has increased the available supply of oil worldwide, Kelly told the audience that “apparently it is the renewable resource we’ve all been talking about!”

KELLY: I do find it laughable when they talk about the energy crisis, the energy shortage, when we have so much here in this country. We have so much coal, so much oil, so much natural gas, we have everything we need right here. Three decades ago, they told us there were 800 million barrels of oil existing in the world. Today, because of technology, there’s over a trillion. So apparently it is the renewable resource we’ve all been talking about!

Watch it:

Whether joking or not, it’s little surprise that Kelly would go to bat for the oil industry. He does not believe man-made global warming exists, dismissing it in 2009 as “junk science” that seeks to “destroy [our] way of life”. In his campaign last cycle, Kelly took tens of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry, including maxed-out contributions from Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.

Still, Kelly did propose one possible solution for our nation’s energy needs: eliminating tofu. From a town hall meeting in 2010:

It’s no secret we could be 100 percent energy independent. We have all the supplies we need in this country if we just get the tofu eaters out of government at this point in time and put in some actual real Americans who believe in oil and coal and natural gas and nuclear and all these other things.

The oil lobby American Petroleum Institute weighed in on President Obama’s corporate tax reform that closes an array of tax loopholes, including $4 billion in subsidies for the oil industry. Not surprisingly, API is unhappy. API President Jack Gerard played victim, calling the plan “discriminatory” against an industry that “receives not one subsidy”:

One day after the Obama administration unveiled a sweeping corporate tax reform plan, the oil and gas industry’s top lobbyist went on the attack against the president’s proposal.

Calling it “discriminatory,” Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said the administration’s outline was more of a “Swiss cheese approach that we’re trying to get rid of in this country.”

“The industry receives not one subsidy,” Gerard claimed. “It takes tax deductions the same or similar to what all other American companies get to recover their costs of doing business.”

Here’s a fact for Gerard: tax deductions are subsidies, as API has previously admitted. In one API document, the organization discussed “subsidies for alternative fuels” including “preferential tax treatment.”

Here’s another fact: the industry receives a whopping $7 billion in tax breaks each year.

Gerard also claimed big oil pays one of the highest effective tax rates, and yet Exxon Mobil – the most profitable oil company – paid a 17.6 percent federal effective tax, lower than the average American. The company paid zero taxes to the federal government in 2009. The oil industry is fighting to keep its handouts, despite posting record-breaking profits of $137 billion in 2011.

So far, it seems like it’s American families who are being discriminated against, in favor of Big Oil.

Skeptical Science summarizes our latest understand of Earth’s emissions-driven energy imbalance and the warming “in the pipeline”

Revised estimate of global ocean heat content (10-1500 mtrs deep) for 2005-2010 derived from Argo measurements.

by Rob Painting, cross-posted from Skeptical Science

• Global warming is the result of a greenhouse gas-caused imbalance between incoming solar energy and heat that the Earth radiates away to space. Heat loss is reduced causing the planet to warm.

• Previous attempts to estimate this planetary imbalance relied on climate models rather than observations because sufficiently detailed observations were not available then.

• Loeb (2012) combined ocean heat content data, top-of-the-atmosphere satellite observations, heat absorbed by the land and atmosphere, and the energy required to melt ice. They found the global energy imbalance was 0.5 (±0.43) W/m2, smaller than previous estimates.

• The uncertainties are large due to the short length of robust observations, and because ARGO only samples down to 2000 metres — less than half the average depth of the global oceans.

• Although the deep ocean will have absorbed far less heat the the surface ocean it cannot be neglected in order to adequately balance the Earth’s energy budget. See: SkS post: Ocean Heat Content And The Importance Of The Deep Ocean.

• The huge margin of uncertainty and the disparate heating rates between the three ocean heat data sets vindicate Kevin Trenberth’s appeal that “we (the scientific community) must do better”, but they will improve as the length of the observational record grows, and if proposed deep ocean observations, such as Deep Ninja, are put into place.

• And perhaps most crucially of all, the persistent energy imbalance at the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) is representative of future global warming, or warming “in the pipeline.” The Earth will continue to warm until the balance at TOA is restored.

Figure 1 – typical dive cycle of the ARGO submersible float system — the most detailed set of ocean heat observations yet obtained. Image from UK Met Office.

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“Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country’s coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru’s population.  And if warming trends continue … many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.”

Huantsan, at left, in 2010 (credit: Sophie Denis) and in 1979, at right

by Peter Lehner, cross-posted from the NRDC Switchboard

Soon after my return from Chile, I came across an article in the American Alpine Journal, where climbers report new routes up the mountains of the world. I was struck by a report from Sophie Denis, who recorded her group’s ascent of Huantsan, a mountain in the Peruvian Andes. Her photo of the west face of the mountain shows a sheer, steep face of bare brown rock, with a small cap of frosty glacier at the top.

I know this mountain. But the picture didn’t look like the Huantsan I remember. Back in the summer of 1979, I led a group that made a first ascent of the west face of Huantsan. We were experienced New England climbers, but had little experience with the high altitudes of the Andes. It was a tough, 35-day effort, icy and precarious. Two members of our group spent three nights on an ice ledge just 20 inches wide.

“The mountain … rose out of the green Rajuqolta Valley like a white fountain,” we wrote in our submission to the American Alpine Journal.

As you can see in these photos, both taken at the same time of year–2010 on the left, my group in 1979 on the right–Huantsan can no longer be described that way. The change in snow cover is astounding, and sobering.

Throughout the Andes, glaciers are in retreat, a phenomenon that has become more pronounced and rapid in recent decades. Scientists suggest that global warming is primarily responsible. Peruvian glaciers have lost more than 20 percent of their mass since we made our climb of Huantsan. Bolivia’s 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya Glacier disappeared completely in 2009–scientists monitoring the ice mass thought it would hold out until 2015.

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Yesterday, President Barack Obama laid out the steps the White House is taking on rising gas costs, telling the Florida crowd that “drill everywhere” rhetoric is a “bumper sticker,” not a solution, but that he’s working to reduce oil demand and rein in Wall Street speculators.

When CNN moderator John King directly asked the Republican candidates for their own plans on gas prices at Wednesday’s debate, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum completely sidestepped the question by attacking Obama’s foreign policy in Iran. Newt Gingrich, who released a half-hour ad targeting energy prices earlier that day, offered nothing beyond his one-sentence talking point on gas prices:

Well, the first thing I’d do, across the board for the entire region, is create a very dramatic American energy policy of opening up federal lands and opening up offshore drilling, replacing the EPA.

Gingrich, who earlier in the debate said that he could lower gas prices to $2.50, did not explain how any of these policies would lower prices to his promised benchmark, a price economists agree is impossible to achieve. Gingrich omitted that the U.S. became a net fuel exporter for the first time in 60 years as domestic production hit an 8-year high in 2011. Evidence shows that speculators drive up gas prices. Although Gingrich released a half-hour ad focused on gas prices and energy policy ahead of Wednesday night’s debate, given a chance to defend it, he couldn’t even elaborate beyond the expected conservative talking point.

But given the chance to offer proposals, Gingrich couldn’t even come to his own defense to elaborate beyond the expected talking point of drill, baby, drill.

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Other stories below: Increases in avalanches may foreshadow the future; China Sets up First Renewable Energy Think Tank

Latinos Emerging as New Actors in Fight Against Climate Change

Most people view immigration, education and jobs as the Latino electorate’s key issues.

Environmentalists want to add climate change to the list.

“It’s a no-brainer for the Latino community,” said Adrianna Quintero of the National Resources Defense Council Thursday at a teleconference including Latino advocates, climate change activists and an environmental scientist.

Recent scientific research backs her up.

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