In one of the most significant reversals of Bush-era policy, the Obama administration plans tomorrow to issue greenhouse pollution limits for new power plants, a major step in the fight against global warming. The new rule — which will go into effect in 2013 — confirms the end of the era of dirty coal-fired power plants:

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits between 800 and 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Since the late 1990s, “natural gas has been the fuel of choice for the majority of new generating units,” and in the 2000s, wind power generation also grew significantly. With the high cost of its toxic pollution from mine to plant, coal has been losing out to cleaner sources of fuel in the electric utility sector. Although few new coal plants have been built in the last twenty years, aging plants — some built in the 1930s — still produce about 40 percent of U.S. electricity, and about 80 percent of carbon pollution from the power sector.

In March 2001, newly elected President George W. Bush reversed a campaign pledge to limit greenhouse pollution from power plants, the source of 40 percent of United States global warming pollution. In 2008, Bush White House officials refused to open an email sent by its own Environmental Protection Agency which called for action against man-made climate change.

“This is the third major executive action launched by the Obama administration to reduce carbon pollution,” writes Center for American Progress senior fellow Daniel Weiss. “With growing evidence that the serious impacts of climate change are already here, President Obama deserves credit for this new standard. We must urgently adopt and implement these new pollution reduction standards for power plants.”

by Peter Sinclair, via Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Mike MacCracken was the first high level climate scientist that Al Gore introduced me to in Nashville, some 5 years ago. Although I knew something about the issue, and had some background reading and writing about energy and environment – Mike very quickly made me realize how much I had wrong,  and how much I had to learn. He has been a reliable and generous advisor and mentor ever since. I owe him a lot for his patience in answering questions and pointing me to people and resources I needed to be aware of.

A few months ago, I became aware of a video of Mike’s presentation on Climate Change at Sandia Labs in  August 1982. The contrast between what scientists already knew even 30 years ago, and the pathetically slow response to this gathering storm, prompted me to want to find out what Mike was thinking now, with three decades of perspective.

I interviewed Mike at the Universty of Michigan in February, where we both attended a climate conference a the Erb School for Global Sustainable Enterprise.\ (he was invited. I kind of crashed the party and was allowed to hang out.)

Exxon Mobil, the most profitable of the big five oil companies, made $41.1 billion in profits last year. Although Exxon made 35 percent more profits since 2010, its estimated effective tax rate actually dropped. Citizens for Tax Justice reported Exxon paid only 17.6 percent taxes in 2010, lower than the average American, and a Reuters analysis using the same criteria estimates that Exxon will pay only 13 percent in effective taxes for 2011. Exxon paid zero taxes to the federal government in 2009.

Reuters compares the 45 percent tax rate Exxon claims it pays to the effective rate estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice — a rate that’s even lower than Mitt Romney’s tax rate. Chevron, which made $26.9 billion profit in 2011, paid 19 percent:

Citizens for Tax Justice considers U.S. profits and U.S. taxes paid only. By that measure, Exxon Mobil paid 13 percent of its U.S. income in taxes after deductions and benefits in 2011, according to a Reuters calculation of securities filings.

It is a far cry from the 35 percent top corporate tax rate.

Still, the three-year average for telecom companies is 8 percent; for information technology services companies, it is 2.5 percent, according to CTJ.

Chevron CEO John Watson recently claimed “We’re the highest taxed industry that I’m aware of” while the American Petroleum Institute has claimed the industry pays a tax rate at more than 40 percent. But as Reuters explains, the oil industry uses a different methodology to claim it pays an artificially higher tax rate to the public. The industry “lumps together U.S. and foreign taxes. It includes taxes that are deferred and thus not paid yet. U.S. companies must pay taxes on profits earned abroad, but they can defer these taxes until they bring the cash into the country.” The big five use this tactic of hoarding cash oversees in tax havens, cutting their tax rates drastically. Exxon uses at least 20 tax shelters. These tax loopholes permit Exxon to pay a rate in-line with Mitt Romney, who’s also notorious for tax dodging.

If the Mitt Romney of today debated himself from a few years ago, he would likely call himself a government-loving socialist.

In 2007, as he prepared his national presidential campaign, Romney explicitly supported 50-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency standards, electric cars, government programs for new automotive technologies, and renewable energy to reduce the global warming “burden” of greenhouse gases:

We have to make our automobiles far more fuel efficient. I’d love to see we’re gonna get up to 50 miles per gallon. The time will come, people will look back and say, “You’re kidding me, cars back then only got 25 miles to the gallon? You’re kidding!” We can do much, much better than that and I believe that one of the ways we do that is having a joint public-private partnership to invest in new technology related to fuel efficiency as well as new sources of energy.

Today, after a few good shakes of his Etch A Sketch, Romney now calls fuel standards “disadvantageous for domestic manufacturers.” He must have forgotten that 90% of auto manufacturers operating in the U.S. — including Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volvo — all support aggressive fuel economy standards that will bring the nation’s auto fleet to 54.5 mpg by 2025.

A Romney speech released last week illustrates how dramatically the candidate’s stances on energy issues have changed in one election cycle. The audio, purportedly captured at a 2007 town hall event and released by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, offers a completely different picture of Romney’s energy policies.

(The opening question is a bit garbled, but Romney’s answer is much more clear.)

Here’s a transcript of his comments:

Read more

In a new video by Peter Sinclair, prominent climate scientist Michael MacCracken discusses how the last thirty years have confirmed the predictions he and others made in 1982 and earlier. The scientific understanding of how burning fossil fuels transforms the atmosphere was well established then, and predictions of warming and systemic changes in the world have come to pass. The scientists did underestimating how rapidly some of the most extreme consequences of global warming — such as Arctic sea ice melt and loss of the Greenland ice sheet — would come to pass. We are now on the pathway for rapid global sea level rise of several meters a century, having failed to reverse our carbon addiction when we were warned ahead of time.

The video concludes with Dr. MacCracken discussing the obligation we all hold towards young people:

I have a colleague who went home very discouraged to her 13-year-old daughter. And her daughter just heard this disappointment and all this stuff, and basically said to her mother, “You can’t take away my hope.” I think we have an obligation to try to find a path.

Watch it:

Dr. MacCracken is now the Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs at the Climate Institute. He had a 25-year career as an atmospheric physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. From 1993-2002, Dr. MacCracken was the senior global change scientist for the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in Washington DC.

Other climate scientists who appear in the video include James Hansen, Jason Box, Andrew Dessler, Tom Wagner, Seymour Laxton, David Titley, and Julienne Stroeve.

More than 60% of Americans believe that campaign pledges to get gasoline prices to $2.50 a gallon are “empty political promises,” according to a new nationwide poll.

The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates and commissioned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, also found that a majority of Americans have a deep distrust of oil company messaging. The findings are being touted by top political strategists as an opportunity to win the communications battle over gas prices and move the political conversation beyond the “drill baby drill” mantra.

John Podesta, Chairman of the Center for American Progress, issued a memo with pollster Geoff Garin on the findings, explaining the opportunity for progressives to go on the offense over oil drilling and gas prices:

Americans are tired of the stranglehold oil companies have over our national energy policy. They are looking for an honest conversation and realistic long-term plan to lessen our oil dependence, not quick fixes or more empty political promises like claims of bringing gas prices back down to $2.50 per gallon by opening up more areas for oil production. They are equally divided over who to trust to take the right approach. However, by large margins they support more progressive positions than those of the “drill here, drill now” advocates. This fact makes progressive Democrats well-positioned to win the debate on gasoline prices.

By engaging in a public debate centered on exposing oil companies successful efforts to rig the system to favor their own profits over the interests of American consumers and expose their deep political and financial ties to conservatives in Congress that continue to defend their billions of dollars in tax breaks, progressives can win the gas price message war.

In recent months, the American Petroleum Institute (API) has rolled out an aggressive nationwide campaign to encourage more drilling for oil and gas, claiming that a “drill, baby, drill” policy will lower gas prices. However, multiple analyses, including the latest from the Associated Press, have found no correlation between increased domestic drilling and lower gas prices over the last few decades.

That trend is playing out very clearly today. Even while domestic oil and gas drilling is at 8-year highs under the Obama Administration, gas prices continue to climb.

Give this reality, the Hart Research poll suggests that Americans are skeptical about the oil industry’s messaging strategy. The findings show 65% of Americans “very” convinced by arguments directly attacking oil company profits:

The findings come as the battle over gas prices intensifies in Congress. This evening, the Senate is expected to vote on a bill introduced by Democratic Senator Robert Menendez that will eliminate $20 billion in oil and gas industry tax breaks, while also extending a key tax credit for the wind industry.

In their memo, Podesta and Garin recommend repeating five key themes when messaging on gas prices and oil drilling:

Read more

John Fullerton, the founder and president of the Capital Institute, sees the global economy facing the possibility of a crash that would dwarf the subprime crisis and the Great Depression. He also envisions a future where the economy is based not on consumption and competition for resources but on personal well-being. An essential finding that drives his work is what he calls the “stranded asset problem.” In an interview with ThinkProgress Green about this big choice, Fullerton explains the extraordinary challenge of the $20 trillion carbon bubble.

Randy Wray has described the current state of the commodities market as the biggest speculative bubble of all time, but the carbon bubble is even greater. In order to avoid catastrophic global warming, the Carbon Tracker Initiative found, we need to keep 80 percent of known carbon reserves buried in the ground.

By Fullerton’s estimates, this unburnable carbon is valued at $20 trillion:

There’s way more carbon in the ground than there is carbon budget left. If we choose not to trash the planet, we have the get fossil-fuel companies to leave the oil and coal in the ground. Only 24 percent of proved reserves are held by public companies. If you add the reserves owned by state-owned companies — Saudi, Venezuela, Russia, China — if we’re to keep that Potsdam budget, we need to keep 80 percent of reserves in the ground. If you add up that 80 percent at current market value it’s $20 trillion. If you’re Exxon, your stock prices reflects the value of your reserves. If you’re Saudi Arabia, your entire fiscal solvency is dependent on producing those reserves.

Fullerton is a former JP Morgan executive who began his career as an oil and gas banker before rising to manage global capital markets. In 2001, he left JP Morgan and, in the shadow of the 9/11 disaster, investigated the intersection of global economic growth, global sustainability, and human welfare. The Capital Institute is part of a growing movement in alternative economics that includes think tanks like the New Economics Foundation, Demos, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

In a telephone interview with ThinkProgress Green, Fullerton described how alternative-economics thinking reflects the fact that the real world — governed by the laws of physics and with finite material wealth — must eventually constrain the monetary world, which has been operating under the assumption that the flow of material inputs and outputs is unbounded:

The central premise of our work is that there is a fundamental disconnect between the world of economics and finance which sees the economy largely as a monetary phenomenon and the physical aspect of the economy which is a material phenomenon. Historically, when the economy was relatively small we could convert the physical into money and let the market price inputs and outputs. It worked in a nice theoretical abstraction. Limits to growth force physical reality onto the abstraction. We’ve been thinking about it in the abstract forever. Finance is probably the most extreme example of this problem because it’s inherently an abstraction and thinks only in terms of monetary value. A business is forced to deal with physical reality. In finance it’s all numbers and values.

The cost for civilization of this financial disconnect from reality is extraordinary. When the music stops for the carbon bubble, the financial system will have to reckon with the disappearance of supposed assets ten times the scale of the subprime crisis:

If we’re serious about not trashing the planet, we need to pro-actively decide to take a write-off of $20 trillion. That makes the $2 trillion subprime crisis seem trivial by comparison. The real cost of that crisis was the feedback loop it triggered in the global economy. A $2-trillion asset writeoff triggered a global near-depression. The way the carbon writeoff would be felt is a pensioner that holds BP or Exxon stock watch the stock go down by 80 percent. The state of Russia, China, Venezuela, and frankly the United States, would watch their fiscal situation implode. If we imposed this quota tomorrow morning there’d be a rolling thunder — you’d see Russia’s financial stability implode, then Venezuela, then economic collapse that depresses demand.

“It would be very hard to forecast how it would play out other than it would be very volatile and confused and frightening,” Fullerton said.

It shows you the force of the powers that will fight climate change. There’s $20 trillion of value. Would the senior management of BP be able to have the conversation that they can’t exploit 80 percent of their reserves?

That’s the $20 trillion question.

Fullerton noted that his $20 trillion estimate is conservative. “Many of the biggest companies are integrated — they have oil and gas reserves, and also do refining and marketing. These companies have an expectation that they’ll be going as continuing concerns, so they trade at some multiple of their current value. The $20 trillion ignores all the value of private companies. I didn’t add any value for the infrastructure which becomes worth a lot less if you start reducing volume,” he explained.

Of course, if existing proven reserves of fossil fuels are 80 percent greater than is sustainable, that means that all new exploration should be off limits.

“That would say no one’s allowed to drill for more oil or expand the tar sands.”

Projects like the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, or Shell Oil’s exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean, or the expansion of Western coal mines are reckless — the equivalent of deliberately creating financial instruments designed to explode just for a short-term profit.

Reconfiguring the global financial system to safely devalue the toxic carbon bubble is a tremendous challenge, Fullerton pointed out. In the second part of our interview, coming later this week, he discusses why he has significant hope that we can build a revitalized global economy that values sustainable wealth.

It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming.

That’s the conclusion of a major new analysis of the scientific evidence in Nature Climate Change, “A decade of weather extremes” (subs. req’d). The research is by Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The study includes this table of extreme events — “The selection criterion for this (incomplete) list was that the event was documented to be record-breaking (that is, unprecedented) in a long measurement series”:

The study points out how devastating some of these events have been for people:

The Moscow heatwave and Pakistan flooding that year illustrated how destructive extreme weather can be to societies: the death toll in Moscow has been estimated at 11,000 and drought caused grain-harvest losses of 30%, leading the Russian government to ban wheat exports. At the same time Pakistan was hit by the worst flooding in its history, which affected approximately one-fifth of its total land area and 20 million people.

It explains that the context for these events is unprecedented human-caused global warming:

The unprecedented meteorological events listed in Table 1 occurred in a decade that was likely the warmest globally for at least a millennium

A number of these individual events have been the subject of “attribution” analysis  making clear that they would have been extremely unlikely to have happened without human caused global warming (see Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming” and ”Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming,” also by Rahmstorf and Coumou).

In addition, we’ve had analyses link recent drought and dust-bowlification to warming — see NOAA Bombshell: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts:

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author.

The new study was of course completed before the blow-out, all-time record winter/spring heat wave, which many leading experts have said bears the fingerprints of human-caused warming.

Clearly, the more unprecedented climate extremes that we see, the stronger the case grows for the overall human fingerprint (see also Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change).

The powerful conclusion of this study builds off of Hansen’s famous 1988 testimony:

In 1988, Jim Hansen famously stated in a congressional hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”. We conclude that now, more than 20 years later, the evidence is strong that anthropogenic, unprecedented heat and rainfall extremes are here — and are causing intense human suffering.

What is most worrisome is that manmade warming is causing intense human suffering now, and we have only warmed 1.4°F in the past century. We’re projected to warm more than 5 times that this century if we are foolish enough to stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

Climate Progress has written many times about the 2009 study on the increase in the ratio of heat records to cold records in the United States, “spurred by a warming climate.”

The new study has an good analysis and chart on the increase in the number of monthly heat records worldwide:

Read more

Using the vehicle-level data on miles driven compiled from odometer readings, we show that Prius owners have the same vehicle miles travelled as the non-Prius owners. This finding and the estimate of associated energy rebound disproves the claims of the “Prius Fallacy” propagated by the staff writer of The New Yorker in his recently released book Conundrum.

by Shakeb Afsah and Kendyl Salcito, via CO2 Scorecard

There is a new term circulating to suggest that by choosing fuel-efficient and low-energy consumption technologies we actually end up increasing our energy use and CO2 emissions. The “Prius Fallacy” is now the catchphrase for the uselessness of energy efficiency that David Owen of The New Yorker has pitched in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and amplified as the central theme in his recent book Conundrum. Owen has disseminated his claims on the opinion pages of the New York Times, and the catchphrase has over 4,000 hits on Google within two months after its invention.

We have detailed the empirical flaws in Rebound repeatedly (see the links above) but have not directly tackled the metaphor itself.

The Prius Fallacy rests on two key assumptions: (1) that Prius drivers drive more because they are paying less in gas, and/or (2) that Prius drivers use money saved on fuel to purchase or participate in energy- & carbon-intensive goods and activities.

To address the first assumption we turned to the work of Professor Ken Gillingham of Yale University. Prof. Gillingham meticulously compiled a micro-dataset on personal automobiles for his doctoral research at Stanford. This dataset contains information on personal vehicle registration from automotive data supplier R.L. Polk and actual odometer readings reported by the California Bureau of Automotive Repair, who conduct emissions tests. At our request he matched Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) to compare the distribution of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for a sample of 4,208 Prius owners and around 4.6 million other automobile drivers in California.

The result obliterates the Prius Fallacy’s first assumption. As shown in the comparative histogram in Exhibit-2, there is no difference in VMT by Prius owners and the rest of  California’s drivers. On average Prius owners drove 13,130 VMT/year compared to 13,064 VMT/year for non-Prius owners—a difference of a mere 0.5%. The similarity of the VMT profiles of Prius and non-Prius is confirmed statistically and visually in the overlapping kernel density plot shown in Exhibit-3 (see endnote on data and diagnostic regression). This finding is in line with the simple economic logic produced by Prof. Matthew Kahn of UCLA at the Christian Science Monitor.

When consumers switch from conventional cars to a fuel-efficient hybrid like a Prius which gives 45 miles to a gallon, there is a genuine reduction in the consumption of gasoline – up to 430 gallons per year for an owner who switches from an SUV—an 18-mile-a-gallon vehicle (based on average 13,000 VMT/year).

To understand the significance of 430 gallons (~10 barrels) consider that the US imported roughly 600,000 barrels of gasoline every day in March 2012 (EIA). If around 60,000 people replaced their cars with hybrids, we would eliminate a full day of gasoline import in the course of a single year. If 25 million people replaced their SUVs/trucks and other low mileage passenger cars with hybrids (from America’s ~200 million registered vehicles), we could eliminate gasoline imports entirely (given the import average for 2012 so far). As long as Prius drivers don’t become the world’s largest coal-consumers, it’s hard to see any catastrophic rebound here.

But what if Prius drivers do guzzle coal? This leads us to Owen’s second assumption: that money saved on fuel is spent on carbon-intensive purchases. The fact is, we don’t know how Prius drivers spend the $1500 they save on fuel each year (assuming $3.50/gallon gas prices). Some may hide it in mattresses (zero rebound), some may install solar panels (a case of negative rebound), some may use it for the down payment on a Land Rover (positive rebound). In the worst possible scenario, you can imagine a Prius owner spending all her $1500 to buy anthracite coal to grill burgers in her backyard. We haven’t found a study contrasting the purchasing habits of hybrid drivers and conventional car drivers; as such, we can only rely on the aggregate macroeconomic figures.

Read more

by Eban Goodstein, reposted from Grist

“A cross between paradise and paradise.” This is how Mohammed Nasheed of the Maldives describes his nation in Jon Shenk’s powerful new film, The Island President.

Shenk follows President Nasheed over a one-year period, leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit, in a beautiful, courageous, and strangely hopeful story. The film resonates all the more deeply following last month’s coup in the Maldives. The story’s ending — perhaps tragic, perhaps a powerful continuation — is today unfolding in real time.

The Maldives is a string of 2,000 islands off the coast of India, home to about 300,000 people. The highest point in the country is only a few feet above sea level. Until 2008, the islands had been under dictatorial rule for decades.

After returning home from college in Britain, in the late ’80s, Nasheed became an activist for democratic reform. He was imprisoned 12 times, and tortured, enduring 18 months of solitary confinement. In 2008, he led the nation to free and fair elections, winning the presidency.

Shenk, with unprecedented access to a head of state, films a year-long journey of this charismatic, newly elected president. With climate change a clear and present threat to the very existence of his nation, Nasheed begins speaking out globally, and passionately, for all those on the front line of climate change. Finally, he arrives in Copenhagen to play a pivotal role in crafting a global climate deal in 2009.

This is the best film dealing with global warming in years. It is a story of classical proportion: of true heroism, courage and nobility, of eloquent soliloquy, of intimate moments, and of political intrigue, compromise, and betrayal.

Read more

by Mindy Lubber, reposted from Forbes

When eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace, built its first-ever data center in South Jordan, Utah, it wanted to not only design and build the site to LEED Gold standards, it wanted to use clean energy to power much of the sprawling facility. This wasn’t simply part of eBay’s company-wide commitment to sustainable operations, it was a bottom-line business decision: sourcing renewable energy would stabilize and reduce long-term energy costs and minimize environmental impacts in a state that gets 94 percent of its electricity from coal.

But there was a problem: Utah law didn’t allow non-utility energy consumers to buy and transmit power directly from renewable energy developers.

Together with Data Center Pulse, an association of data center professionals representing individuals from over a 1,000 companies in 66 countries including Google, Oracle, Twitter and Adobe, eBay began efforts to change the law.  A working group that included representatives of eBay, Republican State Senator Mark Madsen, Rocky Mountain Power (the state’s largest electric utility), renewable energy producers, consumer groups and industrial stakeholders got together to craft legislation to make renewable energy available to Utah energy consumers – with the key provision of not raising electricity rates or taxes for local Utah residents.

That legislation, Senate Bill 12, was unanimously approved this month by the Utah Senate and House and was signed into law yesterday by Governor Gary Herbert. The law goes into effect this summer.

Read more

Other stories below: Can protecting old growth forest help slow warming? Michael Mann Discussing ‘Climate Wars’

Climate change brings bats to Austin (The Daily Texan)

With the emergence of warm spring weather comes the return of the Mexican Freetail bats under Congress Bridge and the remote possibility that a feared and foreign species of bat could make its way into Texas.

The increase in global climate temperatures has raised concerns about the vampire bat species travelling from Mexico and South and Central America into the southern and central regions of Texas. Carin Peterson, training and outreach coordinator of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said even if vampire bats are not making their appearance, Austin’s surrounding caves and popular bat attraction, Congress Avenue Bridge, already have their annual bat species.

“Biologists are paying attention to the warming climate and what potential impacts that could bring, including non-native wildlife, but this is not something that will likely happen within the next few years,” Peterson said.

Read more