Long thought to produce only one generation of tree-killing offspring annually, some populations of mountain pine beetles now produce two generations per year, dramatically increasing the potential for the bugs.

Because of the extra annual generation of beetles, there could be up to 60 times as many beetles attacking trees in any given year, their study found. And in response to warmer temperatures at high elevations, pine beetles also are better able to survive and attack trees that haven’t previously developed defenses.

Pine beetle damage

That’s from the University of Colorado, Boulder news release for a new study in in The American Naturalist.

We’ve known that climate change  favors invasive species, but the mountain pine beetle infestation is far worse than anyone had imagined even a decade ago. This this new study, “Mountain Pine Beetle Develops an Unprecedented Summer Generation in Response to Climate Warming,” spells out the grim facts:

The current MPB epidemic is the largest in history, extending from the Yukon Territory, Canada, to southern California and New Mexico…. To date, more than 13 million ha [hectares] of trees have been killed in British Columbia. The MPB-killed trees in British Columbia alone will release 990 million tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, an amount equal to five times the annual emissions from all forms of transportation in the country. Forests affected by bark beetles also have altered hydrology and biogeochemical cycles. Thus, extensive beetle kill is altering forest ecology and tipping conifer forests from regional carbon sinks to carbon sources, thereby creating positive feedback for climate-change factors.

For more on the amplifying feedback, see “Nature: Beetle tree kill releases more carbon than fires.”

It turns out that there has been an “exponential increase in the beetle population.” Why has infestation been nonlinear? The study’s abstract explains:

The mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonus ponderosae) is native to western North America, attacks most trees of the genus Pinus, and periodically erupts in epidemics. The current epidemic of the MPB is an order of magnitude larger than any previously recorded, reaching trees at higher elevation and latitude than ever before. Here we show that after 2 decades of air-temperature increases in the Colorado Front Range, the MPB flight season begins more than 1 month earlier than and is approximately twice as long as the historically reported season. We also report, for the first time, that the life cycle in some broods has increased from one to two generations per year. Because MPBs do not diapause and their development is controlled by temperature, they are responding to climate change through faster development. The expansion of the MPB into previously inhospitable environments, combined with the measured ability to increase reproductive output in such locations, indicates that the MPB is tracking climate change, exacerbating the current epidemic.

[Read about diapause here. I welcome a simpler explanation from any biologist reading this.]

For more  background on the study, here is an extended excerpt from the news release:

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A new report from the prominent global consulting firm McKinsey shows why solar photovoltaics have hit a tipping point.

As the economics of solar PV continue to improve steadily and dramatically, McKinsey analysts conclude that the total “economic potential” of solar PV deployment could reach 600-1,000 gigawatts (1 million megawatts) by 2020.

In the year 2000, the global demand for solar PV was 170 megawatts.

That doesn’t mean 1 million megawatts will get developed by 2020; it’s just an estimate of the economic competitiveness of solar PV. When factoring in real-word limitations like the regulatory environment, availability of financing, and infrastructure capabilities, the actual yearly market will be closer to 100 gigawatts in 2020.

That could bring in more than $1 trillion in investments between 2012 to 2020.

The McKinsey report, appropriately named “Darkest Before Dawn,” highlights three crucial factors that are giving the solar industry so much momentum — even with such a violent shakeout occurring in the manufacturing sector today.

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by Carol M. Browner, via the Albright Stonebridge Group India Newsletter

In the energy and environment sector, India currently faces a clear inflection point with the potential to become an innovative leader in the use and development of clean energy and renewable products.

While the scale of the energy and environmental challenges is tremendous, it also represents a significant opportunity.  The Government of India has also made investment in these areas a key focus and priority, though the country still suffers from shortages of electricity, inadequate water and sanitation, and overburdened infrastructure.

The Indian economy has grown rapidly over the past decade, with growth rates routinely topping 8%, and this year growth is expected to be robust again.  Such growth rates are essential in India, where more than half a million new people enter the labor force each month.  That being said, the Government of India recognizes that economic growth will falter unless there is more investment in energy, mobility, and water services to provide the critical underpinnings of development.  To help meet this challenge, the government is planning to invest over $1 trillion in infrastructure projects over the next five years, half of that in the form of public-private partnerships.  This represents a tremendous opportunity for U.S. firms with technological solutions to energy and environmental challenges to develop their presence in the Indian market.

Clean energy is one of the brightest opportunities in India.  In 2011, India had the fastest growth rate in clean energy investment of any major economy: $10.3 billion was invested in the sector, a 52% increase over 2010.  Under its “National Solar Mission” the Indian government has established a formal goal of 20,000 MW of electricity from solar by 2020.  According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2011 saw a substantial increase in grid-connected solar capacity in India, up from 18 MW in 2010 to an estimated 277 MW by end of 2011.  The total installed capacity took another giant leap forward last week with the commissioning of the world’s largest PV power plant (600 MW) in the state of Gujarat.  With projects like that, it is no wonder that credible sources are forecasting the country may overshoot its 2020 goal.  The key to unleashing a true flood of solar investment will be when the price of solar power falls to parity with traditional grid power, a milestone India appears on track to reach as soon as 2018 (indeed, in rural areas, the equivalent of grid parity has already arrived, with solar today providing power more cheaply than diesel fuel).

The Indian wind sector is another success story that continues to build; it added a record 2,827 MW of capacity in 2011, bringing total wind capacity to just over 16,000 MW.  This put India just behind China and the U.S. in terms of new capacity additions, and India is on track to add even more this year. A 2011 study by the Global Wind Energy Council forecast that India’s wind energy capacity could increase to more than 65 GW by 2020 if supported by aggressive policies.  Perhaps the most exciting recent news for the Indian wind sector is a study released last month by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the U.S., which pegged India’s wind energy potential at 2 to 3 million MW, which is 20 to 30 times greater than previous official estimates.  Much of the increase is due to the fact that modern turbines are taller, and therefore able to take advantage of faster wind speeds at higher altitudes.  This vast potential, coupled with prices for wind power that are now cost competitive with imported coal and natural gas, bode well for continued rapid growth in the sector.

And solar and wind are just two of the energy and environmental sectors in the midst of exciting growth.

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by Ruy Teixeira

President Barack Obama recently observed that tackling climate change remains vitally important despite difficulties moving legislation forward. Conservatives, of course, are trying their utmost to remove the issue permanently from political discussion, claiming that the public is tired of the debate and no longer has an appetite for combating global warming.

But a just-released poll from the Yale and George Mason climate change communication programs reveals the lie in this claim. 63 percent of respondents said the United States should move forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do, compared to 3 percent who said we should await action by industrialized countries, 8 percent who said we should wait for both industrialized and developing countries to move, and 5 percent who said we shouldn’t bother reducing emissions.

In the same poll, the public supported — by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent — requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if that would cost the average household an extra $100 per year.

The poll also found that 65 percent of Americans support an international treaty to require a 90 percent cut in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Clearly, reports of the death of public support for action on global warming are overblown. Contrary to conservative assertions, that support is alive and kicking.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This is a CAP cross-post.

Related Posts:

• Gallup: 65% of Americans Support ‘Imposing Mandatory Controls On CO2 Emissions’
• Poll: 75 Percent of Americans Support Regulating CO2 As A Pollutant, 60 Percent Support Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax
• Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?
• Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming
• Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent

Want to know where the country’s dirtiest hotel room is? No, it’s not that $20-per-night drive-in motel on the side of the highway. Chances are that it’s a penthouse suite in a J.W. Marriott hotel in Chicago.

And if you’re looking for the cleanest hotel in the country, you might consider going to a Vagabond Inn located somewhere in California.

That’s according to a new report from the research firm Brighter Planet, which just released a comprehensive ranking of the energy and carbon intensity of hotel chains across the country. Here’s a look at the geographic spread of where the “cleanest” and “dirtiest” hotels are located:

There are 51,000 hotels, motels and inns scattered around the U.S. with roughly five million guests rooms. According to Brighter Planet, the lodging industry represents 4 percent of all commercial building energy consumption in the country, generating 34.5 million metric tons of CO2 each year.

As appliances and building materials get more efficient, you’d think that the industry would be getting more efficient. But this analysis shows that modern hotels use far more energy per room than their “vintage counterparts.” This trend is particularly stark in upscale hotel chains, which use 25 percent more energy per night than the average budget hotel.

The dirtiest 25 percent of hotels — a large share of which are upscale chains — represent more than half of the energy use and carbon emissions from the entire lodging industry. The cleanest 25 percent only make up 7 percent of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

However, it’s wrong to conclude that high-class hotels are always going to be “dirtier” than budget lodging:

It’s probably no surprise that efficiency varies by price, with upscale hotels on average using 25% more energy per room-night than budget hotels. This is to be expected based on hotel characteristics: the average upscale hotel has twice as many rooms and was built a decade more recently than the average budget hotel, with midrange hotels falling in between.

But it’s important to note that there’s so much variability within each service class that the different service classes overlap significantly. Nationwide the cleanest upscale hotels are cleaner than most budget hotels, and the dirtiest budget hotels are as dirty as all but the dirtiest quarter of upscale hotels.

This study is particularly relevant for companies attempting to track their carbon footprints. It’s not just air or car travel that matters. Depending on the length of stay and the type of room purchased, lodging can rival the carbon intensity of office space.

by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

If you’re in the business of trying to make communities better, and supporting great, green revitalization that will strengthen central cities, you know only too well how change can frighten current residents.  Not entirely without reason, people fear development, especially when someone new shows up with an idea.  Heck, a friend of mine is having trouble beating back opposition to a nice pizza place in a vacant commercial property in his neighborhood.  It can be hard to stay optimistic when even pizza is controversial.

There may be something very human – maybe even Darwinian – about our tendency to resist ideas that come from, you know, other people.  (I guarantee that if the idea for universal health care based on all citizens buying health insurance had come from within the Republican Party rather than from the Dems, Republicans wouldn’t oppose it so strongly.  Oh wait . . .)  So, how do we empower communities to own ideas for development?

Two young developers in DC have come up with a new way to solicit opinion on what to do with commercial property in an up-and-coming neighborhood.  First they bought the property, on H Street, NE, where the first segment of the new DC streetcar will run.  Then they set up a website called Popularise to solicit community ideas on what people would like to see in that space, and hung a banner over the property, saying “What would YOU build here?” and directing people to the website.  People can submit their own ideas to the site and/or vote and comment on those submitted by others.

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by Rebecca Lefton and Andrew Light

In 2010 the U.S. launched the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) as a collaborative effort among governments, the private sector, and other stakeholders to promote policies, programs, and technical solutions that will accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy.

An outgrowth of the U.S.-led Major Economies Forum — which brings together the major carbon polluters in the world in a smaller forum than the U.N. climate negotiations — the CEM has evolved into a global alliance of 23 countries joined in a variety of partnerships to advance energy efficiency, increase renewable energy, and provide modern energy access solutions to 10 million people by 2015.

Last week the CEM met in London and had its most successful meeting to date, greatly expanding a number of its initiatives on technology cooperation. This alone would have signaled a successful meeting. But the parties went even further, joining forces with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL) initiative.  SE4ALL has emerged as the key goal for the upcoming Rio+20 meeting in June, an event marking the 20^th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that gave birth to the U.N. framework conventions on climate change, biological diversity, and desertification.

Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All goals are to (1) ensure universal access to electricity by 2030, (2), double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030, and (3) double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by 2030.  While some in the environment and development community had doubted the U.N.’s ability to move this new platform over the finish line in Rio, this show of support from the CEM parties greatly increases the chances of success by adding a necessary level of detail for how the goals would move forward.

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A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.

Last year’s hurricanes and flooding not only engulfed homes and carried away roads and bridges in hard-hit areas of the country, it dispersed aggressive invasive species as well. [Associated Press]

Insurance company executives are aware of the future risks posed by climate change. And yet they have been slow to prepare for the coming wave of weather-related accidents and litigation spawned by global warming changes. [AllGov]

If you want to shrink your carbon footprint when you check into a hotel, you may be better off staying at a mid-range or budget chain hotel. [Los Angeles Times]

Tim McCarver isn’t just a baseball announcer, no, he’s also evidently an amateur meteorologist. How else would one explain McCarver dropping this wisdom on an unsuspecting nation during Saturday afternoon’s MLB on Fox coverage. [Huffington Post]

The biggest challenge to farming and food security in Zimbabwe today is not funding, it is not skills shortage but climate change and global warming. [All Africa]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s effort to create jobs in renewable energy is faltering as subsidy cuts and competition from Chinese manufacturers forces the industry to stop hiring for the first time in eight years. [Businessweek]

India is struggling to add more electricity capacity for the country’s rapidly growing economy, but the domestic coal industry is an absolute mess, points out articles in the New York Times and the Economist this month. [Earth2Tech]

In six oceans, the U.S. Navy is considered the master. In the seventh, the Arctic Ocean, it will rely on others. [The Weekly Herald]

The New York Times keeps running opinion pieces and analyses that misstate the positions of the major environmental groups and even leading scientists.

A classic example is the Dot Earth post from Friday headlined, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Message of ‘Green Traditionalists’.” I will show that this critique is pure bunk. Indeed, this critique isn’t merely untrue, it is the exact opposite of the truth.

Amazingly, we will even see that the critique contains an utterly false attack on “a bunch of scientists” who just published a major report. But people just don’t click on links, I guess.

The New York Times post begins by stating that Keith Kloor “has an essay posted on Discover, titled ‘The Limits to Environmentalism,’ that is well worth reading.” The NY Times then reposts this introduction with a link to the rest:

If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.

Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.

For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined for ecological collapse, unless global population and consumption rates are restrained. No, I’m not talking about the UK’s just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I’m talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement. [Read the rest.]

No and no.

This analysis, which would have been relevant 20 years ago, is simply the opposite of the truth today.

Indeed, anyone who follows the history of the environmental movement knows that the most serious complaint offered against it these days is that it has become too corporatist and too focused on the techno-fix. I’m not saying I agree with that critique 100%, but it has far more truth to it than this critique.

If you look at the major environmental groups — the ones with the power and money that this analysis purports to be about — they all work closely with industrial corporations, generally take lots of industry money, and they aggressively supported a climate bill that was absurdly pro-technology and pro-industry, that was business friendly and market oriented.

The climate bill was entirely about pushing any low carbon technology into the marketplace — including nuclear power. The bill had staggeringly generous subsidies for pretty much every industry, including many billions for the coal industry to help it develop technology to save its ass.

And the broken-record New York Times simply seems unable to acknowledge that the tens of millions of dollars spent to promote the climate bill was done by focusing on the pro-technology message and utterly downplaying the threat of climate change. The primary focus of the messaging was on clean energy jobs, along with energy security and the threat of international competition — industrial competition.

While the NY Times is oblivious to this, it did not escape the attention of the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who wrote about it in his 2010 article, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked in this post “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate” (excerpted at the end).

To see what message they are pushing, please visit the front page of the websites of The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council — and of the enviro groups with the really big revenues — the World Wildlife Fund, and National Wildlife Federation, National Audobon Society, the Nature Conservancy. Apocalypse not!

UPDATE: Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, author of two books and some 20 refereed articles on the U.S. environmental movement – whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications” — emailed me after reading my post:

This opinion piece by Mr. Kloor and Mr. Revkin is, generously speaking, highly problematic. It ignores a vast amount of scholarship on the environmental movement. It seems very difficult to me to understand how Mr. Revkin can maintain his argument that his opinion blog is “science based”and run something like this. There is apparently a double standard in operation, where the physical sciences are taken into account, but the social sciences are not. I would expect more fidelity to the empirical research on this topic from the NY Times. Perhaps a good start on becoming conversant with this material might be the books of two previous NY Times environmental reporters –Mark Dowie’s Losing Ground and Philip Shabecoff’s A Fierce Green Fire.

As an aside, the notion that being anti-nuclear is somehow a litmus test for proving environmental groups are “Green Traditionalists” stuck in the 1970s is particularly absurd.  The Economist just published a 14-page report, “Nuclear energy: The dream that failed, A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety.” Is there a more pro-corporation, pro-technology mainstream global publication than The Economist?

And then we come to the utter misrepresentation of the “just-published Royal Society report,” People and the Planet. Reading the NY Times, you’d get the impression that this is somehow a doom and gloom report about how “the earth is destined for ecological collapse” if we don’t reverse course. And you’d also believe that a “bunch of scientists” have written a jeremiad that “recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth.”

Not. And not.

Anyone who knows the Royal Society – the UK’s national academy of science, founded in 1660 — knows that like most big scientific bodies, it tends to be pretty staid and conservative. The Royal Society’s motto is apt:  Nullius in verba — Latin for “On the words of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it.”  It is “an expression of its enduring commitment to empirical evidence as the basis of knowledge about the natural world.”

So when someone attacks the Royal Society scientists, it’s a pretty good idea not to take their word for it. And in fact the report is pretty darn mild given the dire nature of our situation. More important, it most certainly does not recommend developed countries put a brake on economic growth.

If you go to the link the New York Times provided, here’s what the Royal Society has to say about our situation:

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by James Newcomb, via the Rocky Mountain Institute

Electric utilities and policymakers in Japan and Germany have been scrambling for months to find ways to compensate for nuclear power plants shut down in the aftermath of Fukushima.

In both instances, fossil fuels are part of the stopgap solution to offset the declines in nuclear generation in the short term, but longer-term energy policies are shifting definitively toward efficiency and renewables. Now, the unexpected and indefinite shutdown of both units at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California has raised questions about California’s short-term electricity supply options and long-term contingency plans.

Not surprisingly, efficiency, demand response, and renewables could play a key role in helping to diversify and mitigate risks for Southern California’s electricity supply future. The solutions being pioneered in these three markets, while driven by different circumstances, all take advantage new smart grid technologies to manage and integrate distributed resources.

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by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Which are the best US cities for those who need or prefer to use public transportation?  New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia – in that order – according to the terrific organization Walk Score, whose range of services offered to the public just keeps getting better and better.

Today, Walk Score is releasing its first ranking of city transit systems, revealing which, by their calculations, offer residents the best access to public transportation.  The rankings are based on the organization’s Transit Score, a GIS-based set of calculations that is a companion service to the organization’s flagship walkability rankings.  Transit Score, according to the organization in a press release, “measures how well a location is served by public transportation, and is based on data released in a standard open format by public transit agencies.”

Here are the top 25 cities, listed with the Transit Score for each:

(1)     New York (Transit Score: 81)

(2)     San Francisco (Transit Score: 80)

(3)     Boston (Transit Score: 74)

(4)     Washington, DC (Transit Score: 69)

(5)     Philadelphia (Transit Score: 68)

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Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann tell the media “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”

Two leading political scholars — representing the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the centrist Brookings Institution – have published a must-read article, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”

I’ll excerpt the piece by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann at length for two reasons. First, the problem they describe in detail is the central reason the United States failed to act on climate change when it had the chance in 2009 and 2010, and the central reason this country is poised to abandon any hope of maintaining  leadership in what will certainly be the biggest job creating sector of this century — low-carbon technologies and strategies. Until it is fixed

Second, they issue some advice to the media on the dangers of false balance in a world where there isn’t actually balance between the two “sides.”

The article opens:

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s noat that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

Yes, false balance is “simply untenable” these days, when one side is so “far out.” This, of course, is  especially true in the case of the climate debate:

• WashPost stunner: “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.”
• National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones”

The authors offer some specific advice to the media:

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by John Atcheson

The first thing to say about The Crash Course is that it is an impressive work of scholarship.  It is reminiscent of Guns, Germs and Steel in terms of the scope and breadth of knowledge brought to bear by the author in support of his thesis – which is basically that we’re headed for hard times unlike anything humanity has seen.

The second is that it contains a few fundamental flaws.

The third is that you should read it anyway.  His thesis is more than plausible; his research is meticulous; and no matter how much you think you know about sustainability, you will walk away from The Crash Course wiser, if sadder.

Martenson is an intellectual omnivore.  From peak oil to finance to economics, he bores deeply into his chosen topics – without being boring.

His lens on the future centers on the three E’s: Economics, Energy and Environment, viewed through the remorseless calculus of exponential growth.  Let’s look at each in turn, although it is important to understand that for Martenson, it is the confluence of forces between the three that make the future so challenging.

We’ll start with his take on economics. For Martenson, exponentially increasing debt is the defining economic reality. And indeed, his characterization of where we are today, projected into the future, paints a picture of inevitable collapse.

Compounding the debt conundrum is the fact that currency, which economists treat as if it were real, tangible wealth, is — as Martenson puts it — merely “… a claim on wealth.” In short, money is not wealth.  Worse, it can grow indefinitely in a finite world.  But if faith in currency erodes, then it can no longer serve as a surrogate for real wealth and the entire construct can — and will — collapse.  And Martenson believes that exponentially exploding debt makes the crash inevitable.

He also notes that the books have been cooked in ways that could further undermine faith in our currency. Take inflation, for example.  Since the late 1970’s, a series of changes in how we measure it – things like tossing out food and energy from the index, or economic subterfuges such as the “substitution effect,” “hedonics,” and adjusted weighting of goods and services  — have worked to systematically understate inflation.  Here’s Martenson on the effect of this economic legerdemain:

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A cyberbarrel of oil for your thoughts.

And how about crowd-sourcing some real pennies for cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, who has given me permission to reprint her cartoons. Here’s the link to Paypal where you can donate to her if you like her cartoons.  CLICK HERE (then click where it says DONATE).

Related Post:

• Legacy Of BP Oil Spill: Eyeless Shrimp And Fish With Lesions

by Arne Jungjohann

Recently, the editorial board of the Washington Post asked if the world can fight global warming without nuclear power, looking to Germany and Japan for the answer.

Both countries are known for a nuclear shutdown path. In Japan, only one of the 54 nuclear reactors currently remains in operation. Germany has closed eights reactors following the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima in March 2011 and the remaining nine are scheduled to be closed by 2022.

That obviously must lead to rising emissions, the Post claims. Germany’s “electricity sector emits more carbon than it must after eight reactors shut down last year.”

If you look at the most recent emissions data, however, the opposite is happening. Germany reduced its carbon emissions in 2011 by 2.1 percent despite the nuclear phase out. How can that be?

The cut in greenhouse gases was mainly reached due to an accelerated transition to renewable energies and a warm winter. In addition, the EU emissions trading system capped all emissions from the power sector. While eight nuclear power plants were shut down, solar power output increased by 60 percent. In 2011 alone, 7.5 gigawatts of solar were installed. By the end of last year, renewable energies provided more than 20 percent of overall electricity.

The Washington Post refers to critics of this transition who “reasonably predict that the country will instead rely on electricity imports from neighbors running old, reliable coal, gas and, yes, nuclear plants for years to come.”

So this means Germany would import electricity from neighboring countries, such as France, Poland, and the Czech Republic? It’s true, depending on time of day and year, that Germany imports electricity. However, even after shutting its eight oldest nuclear power plants, Germany is still a net exporter of electricity.

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We knew that “deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice.” And we knew that these warm ocean currents melting Antarctica were so intense that, seawater appears to “boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.”

We also knew that the the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is inherently far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level (see below). And JPL has told us that polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up and is on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.

Now a new study using NASA satellite data finds the WAIS in particular is “being eaten away from below by warm water” as the AP put it, which “suggests that future sea levels could rise faster than many scientists have been predicting.”

The Nature study itself, “Antarctic ice-sheet loss driven by basal melting of ice shelves,” concludes:

We find that ocean-driven ice-shelf thinning is in all cases coupled with dynamic thinning of grounded tributary glaciers that together account for about 40% of Antarctic discharge and the majority of Antarctic ice-sheet mass loss. In agreement with recent model predictions, we conclude that it is reduced buttressing from the thinning ice shelves that is driving glacier acceleration and dynamic thinning. This implies that the most profound contemporary changes to the ice sheets and their contribution to sea level rise can be attributed to ocean thermal forcing that is sustained over decades and may already have triggered a period of unstable glacier retreat.

This ought to be doubly worrisome since scientists told us in October that the Greenland Ice Sheet “could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming … difficult to halt.”

The new study is behind a firewall, so I’m excerpting the NASA news release below along with a NASA video.

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Richmond, California protest Chevron on Earth Day.

Chevron posted a modest 4.2 percent increase in first-quarter profits compared to 2011, increasing net gains from $6.2 billion to $6.5 billion. That still translates to more than $71 million per day in the first three months of 2012.

Despite a drop in production, a 12 percent increase in average oil prices boosted Chevron’s profits this quarter.

Meanwhile, Chevron has faced recent protests in California, home to Chevron CEO John Watson, for environmental damage and tax dodging.

Here’s the context for Chevron’s $6.5 billion profits:

Chevron paid a 19 percent effective federal tax rate in 2011, after making $26.9 billion profit.

Spent 19.2 percent of its Q1 profits buying back stocks ($1.25 billion), which enriches the largest shareholders.

Production dropped by nearly 5 percent, from 2.76 million barrels per day in Q1 FY 2011 to 2.63 million barrels in 2012.

Chevron CEO John Watson received $25 million compensation last year, a raise of 52 percent. Chevron’s Vice President received a 75 percent increase to $7.8 million.

Chevron is sitting on even more cash reserves, $18.9 billion, up from $15.9 billion in January.

Has spent more than $500,000 on federal political contributions in the 2012 election cycle. 87 percent of these contributions went to Republicans.

Has spent $3.24 million on lobbying in the first few months of 2012, after spending $9.51 million lobbying in 2011. Some of the Chevron PAC’s major recipients for 2012 include House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) ($5,000), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) ($5,000), Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) ($5,000), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) ($7,500), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) ($5,000).

Chevron is in a legal battle over a $18 billion judgment for environmental damage to Ecuador’s rainforest communities. According to Amazon Defense Coalition, the company has tried to block the decision four different times.

In January, Chevron had a natural gas explosion off the coast of Nigeria, which killed two contractors and “caused a fire to burn for weeks,” according to Reuters.

With just BP left to report its profits on Tuesday, four of the five Big Oil companies have already made over $26 billion in the first 91 days of 2012.

A new resource assessment of U.S. hydro potential finds that the industry could feasibly develop 12,000 megawatts of projects on existing non-powered dams around the country.

However, the inability of Congress to pass a production tax credit or help streamline permitting among regulatory agencies is threatening the hydro industry’s ability to get new projects constructed.

In a report released this month, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found enormous potential for projects greater than 1 MW on existing dams around the country. There are more than 80,000 non-powered dams scattered throughout the U.S., with roughly 54,000 potentially suitable for energy projects.

Of those 54,000 non-powered dams — ranging from four feet to 770 feet in height — the researchers found about 12 GW of potential electrical generation capacity.

This follows a 2006 report from the Idaho National Laboratory that found roughly 30 GW of potential capacity in rivers around the country. That report assessed small and low-power hydro projects between 10 kW and 30 MW.

Topping it all off, the Department of Interior recently issued an analysis showing that 268 MW of hydro capacity could be developed at waste water treatment facilities around the country. Last month, Interior updated the study by examining the resource potential of waste water conduits and found another 103 MW of potential.

In other words, there’s still a lot of low-impact hydro available.

The U.S. currently has about 96 GW of conventional and pumped storage capacity, providing about 6 percent of total electrical output in 2011. As both of these resource studies point out, the industry has plenty of room to expand — and in a way that can have a much lower environmental footprint:

Importantly, many of the monetary costs and environmental impacts of dam construction have already been incurred at NPDs [non-powered dams], so adding power to the existing dam structure can often be achieved at lower cost, with less risk, and in a shorter timeframe than development requiring new dam construction. The abundance, cost, and environmental favorability of NPDs, combined with the reliability and predictability of hydropower, make these dams a highly attractive source for expanding the nation’s renewable energy supply.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Nothing is ever that simple.

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by Francesco Femia & Caitlin Werrell, via The Center for Climate and Security

The world is suddenly paying attention to the oft-ignored North African country of Mali, as it is racked by its most recent in a long string of crises: a coup d’etat. This political and constitutional crisis sits atop an already extremely vulnerable situation – a volatile mix of climate change, drought, food shortages, migration and immobility, armed insurrection and heavy weapons proliferation that threaten to plunge the country into a state of instability not unlike Somalia. As the international community, including the UN Security Council, moves to act on this crisis, it will be important to consider all the identifiable sources of Mali’s insecurity in order to get the solutions right.

From model to mayhem?

Mali has been described by some as a benchmark country in Africa, where democracy had put down healthy roots over the past two decades. Yet on March 21, a military junta seized control of the government in Timbuktu, ousting the democratically-elected President Amadou Toumani Toure from power. The rationale, according to military spokespersons, was that the government had failed to put a lid on the separatist Tuareg rebellion in the north (a situation we covered in a previous blog.) Soon after, on April 4, the UNSC issued a strongly-worded Presidential statement condemning the coup, and urging military leaders to restore power to civilian control. Since then, the coup leaders have committed to a framework agreement “for the restoration of constitutional order in Mali,” but a positive outcome remains uncertain.

Insecurities under the surface

Despite some previous descriptions of Mali as a success story, significant tensions were seething under the surface all along. The coup came amidst a backdrop of a series of old, perennial insecurities in Mali, and recent ones created by rapid political changes in North Africa.

The first is the aforementioned armed rebellion led by nomadic Tuareg tribesmen, which has been calling for separation from the south for over two decades. In October of last year, these militants formed the the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), and proceeded to violently wrest control of a significant swathe of northeastern Mali, with no signs of slowing down. A few weeks following the coup, the Tuareg managed to seize the “major garrison towns city of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu,” prompting a chastened Malian military leadership to promise a handover to civilian control once elections could be held. As of today, the Tuareg control most of the country’s northern territory.

The second is the recent arrival of the Algerian Salafist offshoot, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), onto the Mali political scene. On April 4, the UN Security Council expressed serious concern about this entity, warning that Islamist extremists from AQIM and the Tuareg could take advantage of the instability caused by the coup to sow further chaos and advance sharia law.

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Arizona Tea Partier Judy Burges wants to kill clean energy programs.

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.

An Arizona Tea Party-backed bill that would gut government-run green programs in the state may have the support it needs to go before Gov. Jan Brewer (R). [Huffington Post]

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson says the Obama administration plans to take further action to combat climate change. [Boston Globe]

The Sierra Club said Thursday it will try to block an energy company’s plan to export liquefied natural gas to find new markets for the drilling boom that has flooded the Mid-Atlantic with natural gas. [Associated Press]

A “perfect storm” of economic and regulatory factors is driving major United States utilities to rapidly switch from coal to natural gas as an electric power source, the top executive of one of the nation’s largest utilities said on Thursday. [New York Times]

Energy ministers from around the world met in London this week and got a scolding. The International Energy Agency warned the ministers that they are falling way behind in their efforts to wean the world from dirty sources of energy. Nations are nowhere near being on track to avert significant climate change in the coming decades. [National Public Radio]

Shell will not be joining David Cameron’s crusade to attract private sector investment into creating a North Sea wind revolution despite its commitment to turbines in the US. [Guardian]

Peru became the latest developing country to enact a domestic climate change initiative in the absence of a binding global pact, adopting a resolution on Thursday to lower carbon emissions in its fast-growing economy. [Chicago Tribune]