Looks like there has been a conservative war on science after all, just as Chris Mooney asserted in his 2005 bestseller.

A major new study sought to “test Mooney’s (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science.” The analysis of 1974 to 2010 data (PDF here) finds that support for science has remained relatively flat among liberals and moderates, while it has steadily declined among self-identified conservatives:

This politicization long precedes Al Gore’s 2006 movie. Extensive polling data simply doesn’t support that widely-held myth Gore polarized the debate (see “Exciting” Public Opinion Study Debunks Claim Al Gore Polarized the Climate Debate and here).  I’ve asked many leading experts on social science and public opinion — including Stanford’s Jon Krosnick, as well as McCright and Dunlap, authors of “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010.″ They all agree the data don’t support this myth.

Let’s get back to this new study. Since it vindicates Mooney’s analysis, it seems only fair to reprint Mooney’s discussion of it from DeSmogBlog.

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A new series of oil and gas industry “issue ads” running in seven states claim “Americans oppose” Democratic efforts to eliminate subsidies for the petroleum companies. But a ThinkProgress Green analysis finds the industry claims do not add up.

The radio ads, run in seven key states by the American Petroleum Institute this week, say:

It’s another bad idea from Washington. In speech after speech, President Obama is calling for higher taxes on the energy producers who power America, to raise money to pay for more government spending. But Americans oppose President Obama’s new taxes. We know what those taxes will do. Independent analysts say Obama’s tax plan could actually raise gas prices, making families pay more and hurting our economy.

In a press release on the trade association’s website, API explains the group’s rationale for the claim that the public opposes the “new taxes” — really elimination of tax incentives for the industry — claiming:

“Opposition to higher energy taxes is rising among the public. A recent “What is America Thinking on Energy Issues” poll showed that 76 percent of voters think that higher energy taxes could equal higher gas prices.”

The release quotes the group’s president and CEO Jack Gerard arguing:

Raising taxes will not lower energy prices for American families and businesses—in fact, the Congressional Research Service says this plan could cause gasoline prices to go higher. Our new campaign in key states will explain that more domestic production is critical to putting downward pressure on gasoline prices—supply matters.

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive for API, does not include the question of whether Americans support or oppose ending the industry’s tax credits. As Climate Progress previously reported, polling shows strong national support for the idea.

Rather, the API poll asked the 1009 participants whether they agreed with the statement “Increasing energy taxes could increase consumer costs on a wide variety of products and services, including higher gasoline prices.” The polling memo did indeed show 76 percent agreed with that statement. Given that the industry sets its own prices, of course they could raise gas prices to preserve profits if the tax breaks were eliminated.

But fascinatingly, the polling company then read a statement to back up the argument, referencing the Congressional Research study to which the API’s Gerard referred in his quote:

The Congressional Research Service, an agency within the Library of Congress that provides bipartisan analysis to Congress, conducted an in-depth study that concluded that the Administration’s efforts to increase taxes on the U.S. oil and natural gas industry may have the effect of decreasing exploration, development and production here in America, while increasing consumer prices and increasing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

After being read that, the voters were again asked whether they agreed with the statement “Increasing energy taxes could increase consumer costs on a wide variety of products and services, including higher gasoline prices.” This time, only 70 percent said yes. The argument actually disuaded voters.

Perhaps the more voters hear from API, the less they support the industry’s positions.

A spokeswoman for API did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

In a decision yesterday on offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Department of Interior undermined its own authority on regulating potentially devastating oil spills in the region.

Just like the cleanup of an oil spill in the Arctic, the permitting process is extraordinarily complicated — for a good environmental reason. It just got more complicated. But not in a good way.

As the government considers the logistics of Shell’s offshore Arctic drilling plans, it has created two different standards that could impact the ability to respond to a blowout or spill.

Last December, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) conditionally approved Shell Oil’s Exploration Plan to accompany its plans to drill exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s North Slope. In so doing, BOEM took the reasonable step of shortening the approved drilling season by 38 days to ensure that if a spill occurred toward the end of the season, the company would still have time to clean it up before darkness, cold, and encroaching ice made the task impossible.

In approving Shell’s Beaufort Sea Oil Spill Response Plan, the agency’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) touted this reduction as a key element of ensuring adequate spill response capabilities.

But yesterday, BSEE approved Shell’s Oil Spill Response Plan for its proposed operations in the Beaufort Sea – for a drilling season extending through October 31^st.  The announcement, heralded by Shell as a “major milestone” in its effort to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean this summer, came with assurances from BSEE Director James A. Watson that the organization’s “focus moving forward will be to hold Shell accountable.”

Yet, the inherent contradiction of allowing drilling to continue until November in the Beaufort when it would be shut down in late September in the Chukchi leads us to question the strength of the standard by which accountability will be measured. There’s no reason to think that if drilling is unsafe in one part of the Arctic in October, it would be safe in another.

Perhaps more importantly, yesterday’s approval will make it more difficult for the administration to defend its position from Shell’s challenge that a shorter Chukchi season is unnecessary. Shell spokesman Curtis Smith has already stated that this is a fundamental point of contention in the company’s challenge to the shorter Chukchi Season:

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The American Petroleum Institute (API), the trade association for the oil and gas industry, has launched a new radio and print ad campaign in seven states opposing Democratic efforts to eliminate subsidies for the petroleum companies and then urge voters to call key home-state senators.

The Washington Post reported that API spokesman Reid Porter said the ad campaign was “based on public policy currently being debated before the U.S. Senate” and “not related to campaign activities.”

The ads are running in Missouri, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Maine and Nevada from March 24-27. Six of those states will see fiercely-contested Senate races this November. The seventh, North Carolina, will likely see a close Senate race in 2014. The 2012 races are:

– MA: Sen. Scott Brown (R) won a 2010 special election and is seeking a full term
– ME: Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) is retiring, leaving an open seat
– MO: Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) is seeking re-election
– NE: Sen. Dean Heller (R) is seeking a full term
– VA: Sen. Jim Webb (D) is retiring, leaving an open seat
– WV: Sen. Joe Manchin (D) won a 2010 special election and is seeking a full term

Some of the ads mention both of the state’s senators, but others mention only one senator.

In the four states that have an incumbent running for re-election — Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, and West Virginia — the API ads mention that senator alone. And the North Carolina ads mention only Sen. Kay Hagan (D), the incumbent up for re-election in two years. In the two states with an open-seat election — Maine and Virginia — the ads mention both senators.

Sen. Brown’s campaign conceded the ads have an effect on the Massachusetts senate campaign, in his favor. The Massachusetts Republican will make a donation to a charity of his opponent’s choosing, in accordance with an agreement between their two campaigns.

In a 51-47 vote, 43 Senate Republicans and four Democrats filibustered to protect $24 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil. Although a majority voted for Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) bill, it fell short of the 60 needed. The only two Republicans to break rank were Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

A Think Progress Green analysis shows how oil and gas companies have funneled cash to the same senators who protected its handouts:

– The 47 senators voting against the bill have received $23,582,500 in career contributions from oil and gas. The 51 senators voting to repeal oil tax breaks have received $5,873,600.

– The senators who voted for Big Oil’s handouts received on average over four times as much career oil cash as those who voted to end them.

– Overall, Senate Republicans have taken $23.2 million in oil and gas contributions. Democrats received $6.66 million.

– Since 2011, Senate Republicans have voted seven times for pro-Big Oil interests and against clean energy three times.

Democrats who joined the Republicans in defeating the bill include Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Jim Webb (D-VA). Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) broke ranks and voted to cut the tax breaks. Two senators, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) didn’t vote.

Republicans have taken an overwhelming 88 percent of oil and gas contributions this election cycle. While showering politicans with cash, the oil industry also spent over $146,000,000 on lobbying last year.

Although 55 percent of Americans want to see Big Oil welfare end, the GOP once again largely acted in-line with their Big Oil donors.

The full list of oil contributions for the Senate is listed below, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics:
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Ever wonder what the wind really looks like? Turns out Vincent Van Gogh wasn’t far off when he painted Starry Night.

The folks at Many Eyes, an experimental visualization company funded by IBM, have released an amazing map showing how the wind moves across the country in real time. Upon a quick glance, it’s easy to see why all the wind farms are being built in the Midwest, Northwest and Northeast.

Click on the map to see the interactive version. It’s hard to take your eyes away.

Acknowledging Climate Change Doesn’t Make You A Liberal

by Paul Douglas, via neorenaissance

I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real.

I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern. To complicate matters, I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority:  a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term. It’s ironic.

The root of the word conservative is “conserve.”  A staunch Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, set aside vast swaths of America for our National Parks System, the envy of the world. Another Republican, Richard Nixon, launched the EPA. Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly “global warming alarmists” are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity. Well, we have good reason to be alarmed.

Weather 2.0. “It’s A New Atmosphere Floating Overhead.”

These are the Dog Days of March. Ham Weather reports 6,895 records in the last week – some towns 30 to 45 degrees warmer than average; off-the-scale, freakishly warm. 13,393 daily records for heat since March 1 – 16 times more warm records than cold records. The scope, intensity and duration of this early heat wave are historic and unprecedented.

And yes, climate change is probably spiking our weather.

“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” 129,404 weather records in one year? You can’t point to any one weather extreme and say “that’s climate change”. But a warmer atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can’t prove that any one of Barry Bond’s 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his “base state,” raising the overall odds of hitting a home run. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, more fuel for floods, while increased evaporation pushes other regions into drought.

Here’s what I suspect: the patient is running a slight fever. Symptoms include violent tornado sneezes, severe sniffles of flooding and raging rashes of jaw-dropping warmth. It’s 85 in March. What will July bring? It’s as if Mother Nature seized the weather remote, put America’s seasons on fast-forward, and turned the volume on extreme weather up to a deafening 10. This isn’t even close to being “normal”. Weather Underground’s Dr. Jeff Masters put it best. “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with.”

Some TV meteorologists, professionals who are skilled at predicting short-term weather, are still in denial. Why? Some don’t like being upstaged by climate scientists; we’ve all been burned by weather models, and some (mistakenly) apply the same suspicion to climate models. Others haven’t taken the time to dig into the climate science. “It’s all political” one local TV weather-friend told me recently. No, it’s science. But we’ve turned it into a political football, a bizarre litmus test for conservatism. Weather and climate are flip-sides of the same coin; you can’t talk about one without understanding the other.

Acknowledging Climate Science Doesn’t Make You A Liberal

My climate epiphany wasn’t overnight, and it had nothing to do with Al Gore. In the mid-90s I noticed gradual changes in the weather patterns floating over Minnesota. Curious, I began investigating climate science, and, over time, began to see the thumbprint of climate change, along with 97% of published, peer-reviewed PhD’s, who link a 40% spike in greenhouse gases with a warmer, stormier atmosphere.

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Challenging Congress to reduce big oil subsidies, President Barack Obama accused oil companies of gouging American taxpayers at the pump and at tax time:

The oil industry is doing just fine. With record profits and rising production, I’m not worried about the big oil companies. With high oil prices, they’ve got more than enough incentive to produce more. I think it’s time they got by without more help from taxpayers who are having a tough enough time paying their bills and filling up their tanks.

Watch it:

“Instead of taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s never been more profitable, we should be using that money to double down on investments in clean energy technologies that have never been more promising,” Obama argued, saying that the “future” lies in “wind power and solar power and biofuels; in fuel-efficient cars and trucks and homes and buildings.” He criticized Big OIl’s allies in Congress who choose to defend fossil-fuel subsidies “that keep us trapped in the past” while attacking investment in a clean-energy future.

by Ben Holland, via Rocky Mountain Institute

When it comes to energy and the environment, most people want to do the right thing. But how many people actually contribute to improving energy use and environmental impact is another story.

That goes for just about any industry, and few know it better than those at South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. The conference, held annually in Austin, Texas, is a breeding ground for innovation and entrepreneurship in design, Internet and mobile technology—Twitter, for instance, started its rise as a global phenomenon there in 2007. Naturally, I had concerns about giving a seemingly unrelated presentation on observed barriers to electric vehicle adoption. But it turns out that the SXSW crowd is ahead of the curve on the subjects of environment and energy use.

Two buzzwords, “Gamification” and “Big Data,” were in frequent use at SXSW earlier this month. The two are closely related, and when combined, could have interesting implications for energy use. By applying principals of gaming to non-game applications, it is believed you can encourage people to change their behavior. Mobile app developers have had great success doing this by incorporating location-based awareness data into their products. Think about foursquare, which awards users with digital badges for frequently checking into various locations. Being a regular at Starbucks, for instance, isn’t a prestigious honor, but it might earn you a free coffee. What if you could do something similar for energy?

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by Tom Kenworthy

In a stunning report last year, the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that substituting natural gas for coal as an energy source would actually increase global warming for many decades – unless methane leakage rates can be kept below 2%.

Even though we don’t know much about the actual leakage rate for methane – the major component of natural gas and a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 – that NCAR study is bad news. It’s especially bad for shale gas, in part because hydraulic fracturing is believed to have a higher life-cycle leakage rate during the production and transport phases of development.

In a separate NOAA study in February, researchers found that natural gas companies in a Colorado field were losing about 4% of methane during production, and that doesn’t include the losses from leaks in the pipeline and distribution system.

The task of controlling fugitive methane leaks is critical if switching to natural gas is going to do anything to aide the fight against climate change.

According to one environmental organization, controlling those leaks isn’t just necessary for the environment — it’s also potentially profitable.

A report just released by the Natural Resources Defense Council argues that industry – with strong government oversight – can reduce methane losses by 80%, and make $2 billion a year in the process by employing what the group calls “technically proven, commercially available, and profitable” control technologies.

Those ten technologies can be used at different stages of the production process: when drilling at hydraulic fracturing wells; when removing moisture from the gas; and when the gas is being compressed for transport through pipelines.

The report acknowledges that voluntary gas saving programs like the EPA’s Natural Gas STAR effort aren’t enough to stimulate this process, and that mandatory programs would need to be put in place. The EPA estimates that proposed regulations on new oil and gas sources coul reduce methane emissions by as much as 25%. NRDC recommends that leakage controls should also apply to existing oil and gas industry sources and that the federal government should be particularly tough on drilling operations on public lands.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Public Lands team at American Progress

Related Posts:

• Natural gas is mostly methane
• Study: You Can’t Slow Projected Warming With Gas, You Need ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power
• Ken Caldeira: Natural Gas Is ‘A Bridge To A World With High CO2 Levels’, Deployment Is To R&D As Elephant To Mouse

“Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human wellbeing and economic growth throughout the world, and these problems are poised to accelerate,” John Beddington, who chaired the commission, said….

Other stories below: Fears grow over pollution risk from North Sea gas rig; Top 10 states for renewable power; Scientists warn of climate-change onslaught; Tim DeChristopher In Isolated Confinement

How to Fight Food Insecurity, Even in a Changing Climate

About 800 million people worldwide do not get enough food to eat, while about 1.5 billion are overweight. As the global population expands by an additional 2 billion people by 2050 and climate change alters traditional agricultural areas, scientists and policy makers are racing to figure out how to address both problems….

This uneven food landscape is not caused solely by government regulations or farming practices, but stems from many powerful forces—forces that are expected to keep increasing. “Several converging threats—from climate change, population growth and unsustainable use of resources—are steadily intensifying pressure on humanity and world governments to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed,” wrote the authors of a new report, published online March 28, from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change….

One of the major concerns worldwide is increasing production on ever-dwindling acres of farmable land. The world’s farms continue to put out some 2.2 percent more food each year, but that is hardly on pace to keep up with growing global demand. And, many experts argue, these expansions need to be done in a sustainable way if people are to be fed without dragging down the economy—or the environment.

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