Two weeks ago I wrote about how the Washington Post embraced false balance in its flawed piece on the Heartland affair.  Not only did the Post quote the head of an organization known for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals,” it also quoted the long-debunked Richard Lindzen. And it quoted a confusionist to frame the “debate” as a he-said/she-said, when it is really about climate science vs. misinformation.

Now the Post has doubled down with another dreadful piece of false balance, but attempts to rationalize it with this rewriting of history:

There is no question that climate scientists have mobilized in recent years to talk more publicly about greenhouse-gas emissions from activities such as driving and coal-fired power plants. For years there were only a handful of researchers on both sides of the debate: the late Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider and James E. Hansen, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, spoke about the risks associated with climate change while Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, questioned the extent to which humans contributed to the problem.

Now dozens of climate scientists have taken on a more public-advocacy role, contending that mounting evidence suggests the world needs to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from the industrial and transport sectors or risk disastrous consequences.

No. For years there have been hundreds of climate scientists willing to explain climate science to the media and public and policymakers. Indeed, a 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, “Expert credibility in climate change” — coauthored by Schneider — reaffirmed the broad scientific understanding of climate change, while questioning the media’s reliance on a tiny group of less-credibile scientists for “balance.” That analysis concluded:

Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

There have never been more than a handful of climate researchers willing to spread misinformation and confusion. The status quo media simply doesn’t care if the person they’re quoting has been wrong again and again and again, has published few if any significant articles in the field in recent years, or actually continues to spread disinformation that has been long debunked in the scientific literature. But they should.

Lindzen has been debunked by leading climate scientists for years (see here and here). Yet the media still quote him as if he were a credible climate researcher. Same for Spencer (see Climate Scientists Debunk Latest Bunk by Roy Spencer and Should you believe anything Roy Spencer says).

But the Post wants to rationalize yet another piece that “balances” climate scientists with disinformers and confusionists.

It is worth pointing out that false balance isn’t just about who you quote but what you quote them saying. The new NPR ethics handbook, which I will have a post on tomorrow, spells this out:

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.

This is precisely what the Washington Post article does not do. The article is full of false balance, a scale with the reporter’s thumb pressed down on the side of misinformation to give it equal weight. And so while it quotes some credible scientists, we have this nonsense:

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Friedman: “I’ve never been more concerned about climate change than I am now….”

Tom Friedman had another good NY Times column Sunday on climate and clean energy, “Take the Subway.” The gist of it was that because of the urgency of climate change, we need to start aggressively deploying clean energy ASAP. I interviewed him about his thinking this morning.

What I’ve always liked about Friedman is that he is just about the only major columnist anywhere in the political spectrum (other than Krugman) who regularly writes about climate and clean energy in his op-ed column.

Even though Friedman is a “centrist” or “moderate” — or perhaps because he is a centrist — he gets the two key points:

1. Climate science makes increasingly clear that inaction is ever-more dangerous, which is why we have to keep talking about the problem
2. The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is a price on carbon coupled with aggressive deployment of clean energy.

That could not have been clearer from his previous columns, his books, and his recent column, which I’ll excerpt below.

So you can imagine how surprised he was to learn that some folks were trying to twist his latest column to argue that somehow he was no longer for explaining the dire climate situation to people, for enacting a carbon price, and for aggressively deploying clean energy.

He told me, “It is sort of pathetic that people grasp at any perceived shift in emphasis in my column to drive a wholly different agenda.”

Consider this puzzling tweet on the article from NY Times blogger Andy Revkin:

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The NY Times has a killer cartoon by McFadden [click to enlarge]

One party has moved far to the extreme while the other has moved to the center, “forcing” the media to become center-right just to maintain its he-said/she-said “objectivity.” It was a brilliant plan by the Koch-fueled Tea Party.

The result: Even super-centrist ideas like “explaining climate science” and “pricing externalities” are now routinely attacked by some in the media as leftist, out-of-the-mainstream ideas. We are through the Looking Glass.

Rush Limbaugh continued his bizarre attacks on clean energy innovation today, claiming that the solar and wind energy sectors don’t exist. Limbaugh was responding to a ThinkProgress Green post that noted his role in scaring American customers against the Chevy Volt. He has even claimed that GM is “trying to kill its customers.” Attempting to justify his denigration of the extended-range electric vehicle, Limbaugh said that “all of Obama’s green energy” is a mirage:

The problem with the Volt is just like all of Obama’s green energy, there’s no business there yet. There’s no solar energy business yet. There’s no wind energy yet. It’s not there yet. But we can’t have more oil. We can’t have cheaper gasoline prices.

Listen here:

Limbaugh is wrong. Clean energy isn’t just the future of the 21st century economy, it’s driving the present.

In 2010, global investment in wind, solar, and biomass energy hit $187 billion, exceeding the $157 billion spent on fossil fuel energy. U.S. solar installations more than doubled in 2011. U.S. wind power capacity represents more than 20 percent of the world’s installed wind power. Over 400 manufacturing facilities across the U.S. make components for wind turbines. In July, 2011, the Brookings Institute found that the green energy sector has had “explosive job gains” since 2003.

Limbaugh’s attitudes about energy, like his opinions about women, are stuck in the 19th century.

Subscribe to ThinkProgress Green.

by Darci Palmquist, reposted from Cool Green Science

You’re probably doing your part to conserve water, especially if you live in a drought-stricken area. But water is in short supply across the globe because of people’s increasing demands for it—a huge problem for cities, agriculture and industry that will only get worse with climate change.

Getting an accurate handle on what’s causing the problem has been missing—until now. A new study in the journal PLoS ONE and coauthored by Nature Conservancy scientist Brian Richter provides fresh insight into the factors behind water shortages in the world’s most important river basins.

The study provides the most comprehensive picture of the global water problem to date, looking at monthly changes rather than annual and digging into the actual causes of water depletion—agricultural, industrial and domestic—in our ecosystems. While the findings aren’t rosy—more than 2 billion people are affected by water shortages each year—coauthor Richter says there are still reasons to be hopeful [in this interview]….

Q: Why is this study so important? Your numbers seem to corroborate previous findings—water is scarce and getting more so, affecting billions of people worldwide.

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At a conference hosted by the White House this past Friday, President Obama spoke to a crowd of elected officials, sportsmen, environmentalists, ranchers, small business owners, and others about the many values and benefits of conserving our lands, waters, and clean air. In particular, he noted that protecting special places on both public and private lands can create jobs and boost the economy:

We have to keep investing in the technology and manufacturing that helps us lead the world, but we’ve also got to protect the places that define who we are, that help shape our character and soul as a nation. Places that help attract visitors and create jobs, but that also give something to our kids that is irreplaceable. And all of us have a role to play.

Watch it:

The president outlined recent successes and highlights of the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative, such as the establishment of Fort Monroe as a national monument under the Antiquities Act, local collaboration to restore and protect Montana’s Crown of the Continent, and a new commitment to work with farmers to protect 1 million acres of grasslands and wetlands under the Conservation Reserve Program. He also touted recent steps he has taken to promote tourism to the U.S., like easing visa requirements so that more people can enjoy our American parks, lands, and heritage.

In his speech, Obama waxed poetic about the beauty of Hawai’i and his first visit to Yellowstone National Park as an 11-year old child, saying he “still remembers” traveling there and the awe he felt coming over a crest and seeing the park below. He invoked America’s great conservationists such as Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold when making the case for the protection of our lands and waters. However, he failed to mention climate change, which fundamentally threatens all the “places that define who we are.”

The president’s statement that conservation can support jobs and the economy is supported by both academic experts and the American public. In November, a group of 104 economists sent a letter to the president stating that “protected public lands are significant contributors to economic growth” and asked him to create jobs by establishing more parks and monuments. Also, a new poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies project found that 91 percent of voters in six western states said that protected places are “an essential part” of their state’s economies.

As Obama put it last week:

The bottom line is this: there will always be people in this country who say we’ve gotta choose between clean air and clean water and a growing economy. Between doing right by our environment and putting people back to work. And I’m here to tell you that is a false choice.

Land conservation and environmental protection are under a broad assault in Congress.  Republicans have launched campaigns to mine uranium around the Grand Canyon, throw open some of our last best places to drilling, and roll back presidential authorities to protect areas that local communities want to see protected.

Kosovo, once host to a brutal ethnic war, is now the epicenter of a different kind of conflict — over the energy future of the impoverished country.

The resolution of this conflict  has enormous implications not just for Kosovo, but for other developing countries as well.

At issue is a proposed 600-MW coal plant that would be financed through the World Bank. The plant, which was first proposed more than a decade ago, has become ground zero for environmental groups working to stop the international build-out of coal plants in less-developed countries.

The World Bank plan is to take one of Kosovo’s old, extremely dirty coal plants offline and replace it with a new one. While the new plant would be more modern and less toxic than what is in place today, it would still burn lignite — the lowest-quality and most carbon-intensive form of coal.

In recent years, the World Bank has taken a firm stance on addressing climate change, calling mitigation efforts necessary to “avoid the unmanageable.” And USAID, an international development agency within the U.S. State Department also pushing the Kosovo coal project, recently rolled out a new aggressive climate development strategy, calling climate change “one of the greatest global challenges of our generation.”

So why do these organizations continue to push coal projects like the one in Kosovo?

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by Auden Schendler, excerpted from his LA Times op-ed

As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway point out in their book “The Merchants of Doubt,” the fossil fuel industry and the hard right have used the same tactics as the tobacco industry to seed doubt about the danger of climate change. In fact, they’ve often used the same people and institutions to deliver that message. Although that’s depressing (fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me), it’s also hopeful, because we beat tobacco — or at least we’re winning, with smoking rates having dropped from 45% of the population in 1954 to less than 20% today.

First, we implemented policy solutions. The “sin taxes” levied on tobacco in most states made it increasingly difficult to afford the habit and created incentives to quit. Yes, those were regressive taxes, but some of the tax revenue has been used to support health and smoking-cessation programs.

Second, we used the courts to take on tobacco for willfully and knowingly hurting people. And we started to win those lawsuits.

Third, we changed cultural norms through advertising, in many cases funded through tobacco taxes.

And fourth, we embraced real, third-party, arbitrated science, blessed with the imprimatur of the U.S. surgeon general, as a tool for moving public policy forward.

And we won, even though nobody on an airplane in 1975 would have thought it possible. So let’s consider how we might apply those same techniques to solving climate change.

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According to Energy Information Administration data, from 2000 – 2010, the presence of a renewable electricity standard has no statistically significant impact on how much rates changed over that decade.

There’s a thriving cottage industry devoted to debunking Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute.

Last October, Bryce said be believed a still-unproven experiment with neutrinos called our entire scientific understanding of global warming into question.

Earlier in the summer, he had the audacity to quote economist EF Schumacher’s book “Small is Beautiful” to unleash a factually inaccurate attack on renewables and promote nuclear power. (Ironically, Schumacher called nuclear an “incredible, incomparable, and unique hazard”).

And now, Bryce is claiming that renewable electricity standards (i.e. state targets for renewable generation) have caused state electric rates to increase by 32% from 2001 to 2010, concluding that states should “suspend or eliminate renewable energy mandates to ensure that electricity is affordable.”

This is a continuation of the scary-but-hollow argument that Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist tried to make last December in Politico.

The argument is as presumptuous and inaccurate as it was back then. And still no official agency backs up the claim that renewable energy targets have caused substantial increases in rates.

As Bryce well knows, most of the states with renewable electricity standards had higher rates even before putting targets in place. And because of the extraordinarily complex range of factors that go into pricing electricity — number of customers, average usage, infrastructure investments, etc — blaming these increases on renewable energy targets is misleading at best and an outright lie at worst.

Upon examining electricity rate data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration spanning the decade from 2000-2010, a Center for American Progress analysis found zero statistically-significant difference in how renewable electricity standards affect changes in rates. In states where we do see rate increases, it is difficult to quantify what impact these standards had compared with the myriad other factors that drive changes.

For example, MIT researchers determined that there were 14 reasons why California’s rates varied from the national average. In Hawaii, which had the highest rate increase, it was imports in oil for electricity generation that caused such a dramatic hike. And in Maryland, a state with the next-largest increase, the impact of deregulation has been the primary factor.

In 2008, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory examined the range of states with renewable energy targets and found a roughly 1% impact on rates. And in a progress report on Michigan’s renewable electricity standard issued last month, state regulators found that renewable energy contracts were coming in 30% lower than contracts for coal: “the cost of energy generated by renewable sources continues to decline and is cheaper than a new coal-fired generation,” concluded regulators.

There is no doubt that we will see rate increases in some areas of the country, particularly those that are highly dependent on coal and have done little to implement renewables. These impacts should not be overlooked. But experience in various states shows — most recently in Michigan — renewables are increasingly cost-competitive with coal, a resource that is only getting more expensive.

To claim that renewables have already driven up rates by double digits is simply not true, and is not backed up by any official analysis.

Former Snowe staffer offers thoughts on Maine Senator’s retirement

by Michael Conathan, CAP’s Director of Ocean Policy

For the past four decades, the understanding in Maine has been that the tide comes in, the tide goes out, and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) serves as a representative of the people. So her announcement last Tuesday that she would not seek reelection to the U.S. Senate rocked her home state. It also sent shock waves through Washington, changing the conventional wisdom that firmly believed her Republican party would take control of the upper chamber of Congress in 2013. In addition to these broader and more widely discussed ramifications, her decision will have a lasting effect on what became one of her signature issues—the health and vitality of America’s oceans, coasts, and fisheries.

The nooks and crannies of Maine’s rocky shore mean Sen. Snowe’s home state includes nearly 3,500 miles of coastline, enough to barely edge out California for fourth place on the national list (behind Alaska, Florida, and Louisiana). This, combined with a fishing industry that annually nets about $300 million, provided ample motivation to make ocean issues one of her top priorities. For more than a dozen years, Sen. Snowe has served as the chair or ranking member (depending on whether Republicans were in the majority or the minority) of the Senate’s ocean, fisheries, and Coast Guard subcommittee.

Now with her impending departure, there is no clear-cut ocean leader waiting in the wings to fill her shoes. Sen. Snowe was poised to gain her party’s top spot on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees the oceans subcommittee—a seat that’s among the most powerful in Washington when it comes to ocean issues. Now the gavel will likely pass to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), one of eight men deadlocked atop the National Journal’s list of “Most Conservative Senators,” and perhaps the Senate’s staunchest opponent of efforts to increase funding for ocean priorities—or any other priorities for that matter. Thus the rather collegial, non-confrontational manner in which the Senate has handed ocean issues for at least the last two decades is likely to become a thing of the past.

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Other stories below: Controversial anti-renewable energy report branded as “shoddy nonsense”; Japan solar demand may be on the rise

Deepwater Oil Drilling Picks Up Again as BP Disaster Fades

Nearly two years after an explosion on an oil platform killed 11 workers and sent millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, deepwater drilling has regained momentum in the gulf and is spreading around the world.

The announcement of an agreement late Friday by BP and lawyers representing individuals and businesses hurt by the disaster represented something of a turning of the page, though BP and its drilling partners continue to face legal challenges.

After a yearlong drilling moratorium, BP and other oil companies are intensifying their exploration and production in the gulf, which will soon surpass the levels attained before the accident. Drilling in the area is about to be expanded in Mexican and Cuban waters, beyond most American controls, even though any accident would almost inevitably affect the United States shoreline. Oil companies are also moving into new areas off the coast of East Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

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