A new document has surfaced showing Mitt Romney’s strong support for regulating carbon dioxide in 2003, when he called cap and trade “an effective approach” to combating climate change.

The comments were made in a letter from Romney to New York Gov. George Pataki about a regional cooperative system for regulating greenhouse gases. In the letter, Romney agreed with Pataki on the need to “reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate.”

But today, in trying to align himself with conservative political backlash against climate science, Romney says “we don’t know” whether humans are warming the planet, and that doing something about the problem “is not the right course for us.”

Here’s the full letter from Romney to Pataki:

Thank you for your invitation to embark on a cooperative northeast process to reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate. I concur that climate change is beginning to effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action toward climate protection. Furthermore, I share your interest in ensuring that the economic and security contributions made by our electricity generating system are not negated by the impact of emissions from that system on the health of our citizens.

As you may know, the commonwealth is making major strides to reduce the environmental impact of our power plants. Specifically, I am making good on my pledge to clean up the six oldest and dirtiest power plants in the state and bring them up to new plant standards for NOx, SOx, mercury and CO2. We are the first state to enact a cap on CO2, implementing regulations that, by 2008, will reduce these emissions by 10%, removing 6,750 tons of Co2 per day. Furthermore, Massachusetts, along with the other New England states and Canadian provinces, has a target of reducing greenhouse gases and improving the efficiency of the grid substantially over the next 20 years.

I believe that our joint work to create a flexible market-based regional cap and trade system could serve as an effective approach to meeting these goals. I am ready to have my staff work with yours to explore how we might design such a system — one that would keep the cost of compliance as low as possible, diversify our fuels, encourage energy efficiency and renewables, and keep our energy dollars in the region. Thank you for your initiative in proposing this project.

Mitt Romney is getting a lot of media attention for his contradictory stances on energy policy. Every week, there’s a new document or quote surfacing from the past that counters all of his current campaign mantras.

This adds to the very long list of dramatic changes to Romney’s energy policy. During his last bid for the presidency in 2007, Romney advocated aggressive fuel efficiency standards, electric vehicles, and public-private partnerships to develop clean energy.

In 2006, Romney said that high gas prices were good for discouraging consumption, explaining that he was “very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.”

In 2004, Romney introduced a climate protection plan for Massachusetts, laying out a “no-regrets policy” to tackling climate change.

And in 2003, the year the letter to Pataki was written, Romney set up a $15 million fund for renewable energy and criticized coal plants for creating jobs that “kill people.”

With this barrage of information surfacing about the candidate, it’s not likely he can simply Etch-A-Sketch his problems away.

Our guest blogger is Chris Mooney, who has just published a new book, The Republican Brain.

I first got to know Judith Curry—the Georgia Tech researcher who blogs at “Climate, Etc.,” and has been drawn into controversy for, in her words, “challenging many aspects of the IPCC consensus”—when I was working on my second book, Storm World. I spent a fair amount of time with Curry, and with the other scientists profiled in the book—interviewing them in person, getting to understand their research. This is what science writers do.

At the time, Curry and her colleagues were just coming off a media feeding frenzy after having published papers linking hurricanes to global warming right in the middle of the devastating 2005 hurricane season.

When Storm World came out, it is no exaggeration to say that Curry gave it a rave review. I want to quote in full from her Five Star endorsement at Amazon.com, which is entitled “Science writing at its very best.” Bear with me, this will all become very relevant; and I’ve bolded a few important parts:

To provide a frame of reference for this review, I and my colleagues Peter Webster and Greg Holland are among the scientists that are featured prominently in Storm World. Our involvement in the issue of hurricanes and global warming began when we published an article in Science shortly before the landfall of Hurricane Rita, where we reported a doubling of the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally since 1970. When Chris Mooney first approached me with his idea for writing a book on this topic, I was somewhat skeptical. I couldn’t see how this could be accomplished given the rapid changes in the science (I was worried the book would be outdated before it was published), the complexities of the technical aspects of the subject, a concern about how the individual scientists would be treated and portrayed, and a concern that the political aspects of the issue would be handled in a partisan way. Over the course of the past year and a half, it became apparent that Mooney was researching this issue extremely thoroughly and was developing a good grasp of both the history and technical aspects of the subject. Upon finally reading the book, I can only say Storm World has far exceeded any hope or expectation that I could have had for a book on this subject.

The book is surprisingly rich in technical detail, and Mooney has grasped the nuances of the breadth of scientific arguments and uncertainties. He provides a fascinating history with rich insights into the current controversy. The individual scientists are portrayed accurately as well as sympathetically and colorfully. The political aspects are treated in an insightful and nonpartisan manner. I am most impressed by the fresh insights provided by this book, which besides being a ‘good read,’ Storm World is an important and timely contribution that deserves careful consideration in the dialogue and debate on hurricane policy in the U.S. Storm World is science journalism at its absolute best.

After Storm World came out, Curry also invited me to speak at Georgia Tech, where she works.

Given that I got to know Curry and greatly appreciated her support for my endeavors, I avoided criticizing her in subsequent years—even though we were increasingly on different “sides” of the highly polarized web battle over global warming. And for the most part, she didn’t really seem to criticize me either (or at least, not that I noticed).

So imagine my surprise when I came across this post at Curry’s blog, about my new book The Republican Brain. Unlike Storm World, Curry admits she has not read the book. Nevertheless, she cites a variety of critics—none of whom seem to have read the book, either—and uses labels like “neurotrash” and “neurobabbling” to describe what, she seems to think, I am up to.
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by Jeff Masters, via the WunderBlog

A hailstone with the diameter of roughly that of a grapefruit that hit Oahu on March 9, 2012, has been confirmed as the largest hailstone on record for the state of Hawaii, according to NOAA.

The record-setting hailstone was dropped by a “supercell” thunderstorm on the windward side of Oahu. There were numerous reports of hail with diameters of 2 to 3 inches and greater. Hail the size of a penny (diameter of 3/4 inch) or quarter (diameter of one inch) has been reported in Hawaii only eight times since records began, and there is no record of hail larger than 1 inch in diameter. Hail the size of golf balls and baseballs can only form within intense thunderstorms called supercells. These supercells need warm, moist air to rise into progressively colder, drier air, as well as winds changing direction and increasing speed with increasing height off the ground.

For both sets of conditions to exist at the same time in Hawaii is extremely rare, but that did occur on March 9. Conditions that day were ideal for a supercell to form, and the storm looked very much like supercell thunderstorms common in the Central U.S. during spring. Supercells can also produce tornadoes, another rarity in Hawaii. The same hail-producing supercell produced a confirmed EF-0 tornado with winds of 60-70 mph in Lanikai and Enchanted Lakes on Oahu.

Jeff Masters is the co-founder of the Weather Underground, where this piece was originally published.

Read the first half of his interview with ThinkProgress Green, where Capital Institute founder John Fullerton discusses the $20 trillion carbon bubble.

John Fullerton, a former Wall Street banker who founded the Capital Institute, believes that the financial industry can and must change its priorities to preserve the promise of a healthy civilization. His think tank is part of a growing movement of alternative economics, seeking a theory of capital and finance that addresses the crisis of climate change, instead of accelerating the destruction of our atmosphere.

Fullerton isn’t a traditional environmentalist. Rather, he learned about the scope of the climate crisis after retiring from JP Morgan in 2001, and reflecting on the state of the global economy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks:

I don’t have a particularly green background. I discovered it as a systemic crisis. I’m completely prepared to bet my life that the solution lies in looking at nature.

As related in the first post from his interview with ThinkProgress Green, Fullerton discovered that the global carbon-based economy is sitting on a $20 trillion bubble of unburnable fossil-fuel reserves, a potential economic crisis that dwarfs the collapse of the housing market.

Below, Fullerton talks about a hopeful path forward, where the financial industry is key to an economy based on “growing well-being instead of material throughput”:

We are in the process of an evolutionary if not revolutionary change in how we structure the economy. We’re going to need to redefine well-being. There have been people working on alternatives to GDP for twenty years now. “uneconomic growth.” We need to shift into growing well-being instead of material throughput. When people are adolescents, they’re physically growing. When they mature, they read books, go to yoga, increasing their growth in ways that don’t mean physical consumption. We’re on the proverbial rat race, and it’s not buying anyone well-being and happiness. There’s a hopeful scenario in front of us.

This maturation of capitalism, from consumption-based growth to the growth of happiness, will require a global shift of capital investment. This means, Fullerton argues, that finance is the “critical lever” to building resiliency:
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by Michael Conathan

Bluefin tuna is one of the poster children for overfishing. So one might expect that “Wicked Tuna,” the National Geographic Channel’s new series about bluefin tuna fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, would take a fairly conservation-minded perspective on fishermen’s efforts to capture these majestic giants, some of which can grow to more than 1,000 pounds and more than eight feet in length.

In fact, National Geographic deals its viewers a fairly even-handed look at the bluefin tuna. And ultimately, the takeaway message may be that ironically the best way Americans can help save this fish is by supporting New England’s artisanal bluefin fishery.

As I discussed in a column last year, bluefin is an internationally managed species. The fish migrate across entire oceans over the course of their lifetimes, through international waters and in and out of multiple countries’ jurisdictions. So their management falls to an intergovernmental body: the International Commission on Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT. This organization’s effectiveness is questionable at best, and the word most often used to describe it is “dysfunctional.”

Despite rampant international mismanagement, however, the U.S. bluefin fishery is indisputably the most sustainably managed in the world. The vast majority of the bluefin caught in the United States is landed in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, and only hand gear—rod and reel or hand-thrown harpoon—is permitted in the domestic bluefin fishery, while the remainder of landings come as bycatch in longline fisheries targeting swordfish and other tuna species primarily in the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of Mexico. We even include requirements to make those fisheries more bluefin friendly by using specialized gear known as “circle hooks” and “weak hooks” proven to reduce bycatch of bluefin and other nontarget species like sea turtles.

Meanwhile, European fisheries frequently use purse seines—massive nets that encircle entire schools of juvenile tuna. The small fish are subsequently transferred to holding pens or “ranches” where they remain until they reach marketable size. This means the fish are removed from the ecosystem before they have a chance to spawn—an inherently unsustainable practice.

In recent years, the tremendous value of the fish themselves has made ICCAT’s job more difficult.

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by John Farrell, via Energy Self Reliant States

In their excellent interactive graphic, Bloomberg Energy Finance calls solar grid parity (when electricity from solar costs less than grid power) the “golden goal.” It’s an excellent illustration of how the right energy policy can help a nation go gold on solar or wallow in metallurgical obscurity.  In the case of the U.S., it may mean delaying grid parity by eight years.

In the screenshot below, countries in purple have reached the golden goal in 2012, based on the quality of their solar resource and the cost of grid electricity, as well as a 6% expected return on investment for solar developers. (Note to Bloomberg graphic designers – countries meeting the golden goal could be colored gold).

By 2020, the universe of countries has expanded significantly, and includes the United States.*

*But this picture isn’t accurate, because the type of solar policy influences investors’ expected rate of return and solar policies vary significantly across countries.  In Germany, their feed-in tariff policy offers long-term, fixed-price contracts for solar.  This certainty and policy transparency means lower risk and investors accept a modest 6% return on investment.

In the U.S., however, there is high uncertainty.

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by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

In this space, I have written before about dead shopping malls, past their prime and doomed by a business model stuck in the late 20th century.  Although I am no fan of the architectural form or the way malls became de facto, mass-manufactured, neo-public spaces (while being vastly inferior to true public spaces) in American suburbs, there can be something profoundly sad when they fail.

The giant mall you see in the photos here, though, didn’t die.  It has never lived, having been nothing but empty since it opened seven years ago.  According to its Wikipedia entry, it has an astounding 2,350 available retail spaces, only 47 of which are occupied.

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It’s April 2nd. So you know that what we print here today isn’t a joke.

But after reading the latest energy action plan from House Republicans over the weekend, I wish I could tell you that I’m making up their latest strategy.

Last May, Think Progress reported on the creation of a House Energy Action Team (HEAT), a group of more than two dozen House Republicans pushing an “all of the above” approach to energy. But it should really be called an “all of the below” strategy — as it focuses exclusively on carbon-based fuels buried in the ground.

HEAT has just released its latest messaging plan for House Republicans to use while working in their districts on recess this summer. It’s no surprise that the plan calls for greater domestic use of fossil fuels. But the document reveals just how disconnected Washington politicians are from what scientists are telling us about global warming.

Or, as David Roberts of Grist so eloquently put it last week:

In a sane world, a 2011 filled with spectacularly bizarre weather followed by a winter and spring that are record-shatteringly hot – out of control hot; Biblical hot – would have everyone in the U.S. freaking the f*ck out about climate change.

But the HEAT work plan has absolutely nothing on efficiency, nothing on conservation, and only one token mention of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. All common-sense talking points on clean energy have disappeared from Republican messaging on energy issues.

The only resources touted in the plan are coal, natural gas, oil, oil shale and methane hydrates. It’s basically a “how to” guide for warming the planet.

(Insert your own joke here about the group’s ironic acronym, HEAT).

The plan, which includes talking points and media strategies on how to talk about energy issues, is couched in consumer-friendly terms to make it seem less preposterous:

We owe it to future generations of Americans to continue to stand as a leader in the global economy, no longer subject to the whims of other oil producing nations, and that’s why we’ll continue fighting for an energy policy that will achieve these goals.

But there’s one major problem. To anyone who’s not thinking about global warming, this may seem reasonable on the surface. Why wouldn’t we want to exploit new innovations in unconventional fossil fuels to become more independent?

Well, at a time when scientists say we are reaching irreversible global warming tipping points, it’s beyond absurd that anyone would propose it: This energy strategy is reckless. Unfortunately, with most politicians silent on global warming, energy plans like this can all too easily become a real part of the debate.

Democratic strategists believe they can win the rhetorical battle over gas prices by focusing on oil company profits and the financial link between Congress and the fossil fuel industry. That may work for short-term political messaging. But it still does not bring global warming into the energy conversation — thus making plans like HEAT seem less threatening than they are.

This is one more reason why leading politicians must stand up for climate science. Ultimately, that’s the only common-sense way to neutralize the “drill-everywhere-exploit-everything” energy mantra.

Related Post:

• On Algae Fuels, Energy Innovation and Obama’s Failed Climate Messaging

by Mindy Lubber

Given the economic, energy and climate change challenges we face, you’d think it wouldn’t be necessary to write a column illustrating how it makes no sense to “flare” — literally burn up — $110 million worth of perfectly good natural gas each year without even using it to power a single light bulb.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening in North Dakota’s shale oil fields these days, as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” liberates vast, once-uneconomic oil reserves — and billions of cubic feet of underground gas along with them. More than two million tons of carbon pollution is being flared into the air each year in this state alone.

The story behind this is not just one of short-sighted waste and environmental harm, but a pressing reminder of the business risks for oil companies that don’t get this hot new way of drilling for oil right.

Major investors are noticing those risks. In a letter sent this week to 21 of the industry’s largest shale oil producers, three-dozen investors representing $500 billion in assets wrote:

We are concerned that excessive flaring, because of its impact on air quality and climate change, poses significant risks for the companies involved, and for the industry at large, ultimately threatening the industry’s license to operate.

The financial and reputational risks for oil companies should be obvious. First, we’re supposed to be valuing precious domestic energy resources and our environment. But the New York Times reports that in North Dakota’s shale oil fields alone, “Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.”

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Other stories below: California officials ask energy firms to disclose fracking sites; Biden slams Republicans for blocking renewable energy

Warm weather, dearth of snow leave ski resorts scrambling to keep terrain, chairlifts open

Flowers are blooming along the sidewalks. Snow on the mountains is melting fast.

Residents here aren’t sure whether to ski or golf.

But most of them are certain of one thing: Climate change is not a hoax.

The Aspen Skiing Co., the mayor, a pair of county commissioners and many residents in town are pressuring the Aspen Chamber Resort Association to quit paying dues and divorce itself from the U.S. Chamber, which has aggressively lobbied against climate legislation over the years. The 680-member local chamber wrote a letter to the national group in 2010 delineating its political differences, but the debate this ski season — the driest one here since 1976-1977 — has become far more heated.

“The U.S. Chamber is the largest right-wing, climate-denying corporate front group on the planet. And Aspen supports it. Why?” asked Auden Schendler, the ski company’s vice president of sustainability. “Now is the time to actually do something that matters on climate. Aspen can be the Keystone XL of the Chamber fight.”

… Changing temperatures don’t just affect ski resorts in the winter. The forests that engulf them in the summers have been ravaged by bark beetles that thrive in warmer environs. The insects are sucking the life out of forests, leaving them more vulnerable to wildfires and changing them from green to brown. Foresters are having to devote more resources to combat climate change.

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