Green jobs pioneer Van Jones has a must-read new book, Rebuild the Dream. It’s already hit #11 on Amazon’s best-seller list, testament to the power of his message and leadership. I’ve had a chance to read the book and strongly recommend it (click here to buy). Jones is as eloquent writing as he is speaking. He talks about  life inside the White House, explains why he resigned, and looks at what went right — and wrong — with Obama’s presidency. Finally, he offers his blueprint for recapturing the American Dream. This excerpt explains his view of the clean energy economy — JR.

by Van Jones

Many politicians want us to lower our expectations about the economy. I say it is time to raise them. We should go beyond the shriveled thinking imposed upon us by today’s mania for austerity. The time has come to propose solutions at the scale of the problems we face. We can and we must revive the economy — in a way that respects people and the planet.

For too long, we have acted as if we had to choose between strong economic performance and strong environmental performance. We have been torn between our children’s need for a robust economy today and our grandchildren’s need for a healthy planet tomorrow. We have been trapped in the “jobs versus the environment” dilemma.

The time has come to create “jobs FOR the environment.” We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don’t put themselves up. Wind turbines don’t manufacture themselves. Houses don’t retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don’t plant themselves. Community gardens don’t tend themselves. Farmers’ markets don’t run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.

We have our own “Saudi Arabia” of clean, renewable energy in America. In the Plains states, off our coasts, and in the Great Lakes area, we have abundant wind energy. With American-made wind turbines and wind farms, we could tap those wind resources and create jobs doing it. We also have abundant solar resources — not just in the Sunbelt and in our deserts, but on rooftops across America. With American-made solar panels and solar farms, we could tap the energy of the sun to create electricity. Then we could build a national smart grid — an internet for energy — to connect our clean-energy power centers to our population centers. That would create jobs and let us begin to run America increasingly on safe, homegrown energy.

When we do this, we won’t be starting from scratch. According to the Brookings Institution, the United States already has 2.7 million green jobs. A bigger national commitment to building a green economy can create many millions more.

Every kind of American can and should adopt the clean energy agenda: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians; farmers, ranchers, and urban property owners; struggling youth and entrepreneurs.

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

In the last few months, Republican presidential candidates from Mitt Romney to Rick Santorum have shown their ignorance about the value of public lands.  And recently a handful of states have joined the fray, with state legislators introducing bills that demand Congress turn over millions of acres of public lands to the states or face a lawsuit.  Utah has taken this idea the furthest, where two weeks ago Governor Gary Herbert (R) signed a bill into law demanding that Congress give 30 million acres of federal land located in Utah to the state by 2015 or it will sue.

But buried under the headlines is the fact these bills are being quietly drafted and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing corporate front group that provides draft legislation to state lawmakers and is funded by some of America’s biggest corporations including Koch Industries, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.

As the Associated Press reported:

Lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.

And in January, Utah Pulse noted that:

Lawmakers in four western land states will be running similar bills in their legislative sessions this year – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Idaho.  Ivory’s bill will be unique to Utah, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has turned his bill into model legislation that other western land states can use.  While ALEC is a conservative legislative/business group, Ivory says he hopes to get Utah Democrats onboard with this new effort.

ALEC is behind many controversial state legislative efforts, including Wisconsin’s anti-union legislation, “stand your ground” gun laws, and teaching children climate denial.

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by Frank Alsup, via Rocky Mountain Institute

Momentum is building around the nation for deep energy retrofits of buildings—which have a critical role in transforming our energy system and ending the use of fossil fuels.

For example, President Obama has ordered $2 billion worth of federal building retrofits and has partners for another $2 billion of work in the private sector. U.S. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota has kicked off a “Back to Work Minnesota” retrofit initiative. New York City, to spur retrofits, requires owners of buildings larger than 50,000 square feet to audit their property’s energy use every 10 years and report their annual gas, oil, and electricity consumption by May 1.

Now, in California, state Controller John Chiang is pushing for legislation to jump-start retrofits.

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In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times reporter Justin Gillis criticizes the media, including his own paper, for failing to connect the dots on how the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution humanity has spewed into the atmosphere is making weather more extreme and “crazy”:

One thing I’m seeing—and I see it in our own paper as well as many other news outlets—is that people are covering the crazy weather we’re having and, more often than not, dodging the subject of whether there’s any relationship to climate change. TV weathermen are dodging that subject. Print reporters are dodging the subject. And it’s not so easy to cover because science does not have particularly good answers for us. The concept that I wrote about last week—that we’re in the middle of a sort of weather “weirding”—isn’t really a scientific concept for which you can build a weird index and figure out where we are on that index, but there are some things that scientists can say about weather extremes. Some of the extremes are very consistent with what is expected and what has long been predicted, and we’re seeing very clear trends in certain extremes like heat waves and heavy precipitation events. Reporters are not going to be able to be definitive, in real time, about whether this particular event was or wasn’t connected to climate change, but it’s a bit of a scandal that there’s not enough connecting the dots for people.

As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said in 2011, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”

Detroit automakers are beginning to outsell foreign competitors in an important sector of the US auto market: fuel-efficient vehicles.

General Motors, the world’s largest car manufacturer, announced yesterday that over 40 percent of their sales in March came from fuel efficient vehicles that get at least 30 miles per gallon. That figure is dramatically higher than just four years ago, when only 16 percent of GM’s sales were attributable to fuel efficient vehicles.

Yet despite the success of these cars, Republicans continue to demonize the technology. And no model has been the poster child for these unprecedented attacks more than the Chevrolet Volt, a car that makes use of both a rechargeable battery with a 40 mile range and a normal gas-powered engine for when the battery runs out.

Yesterday in Wisconsin, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took another shot at the Volt:

“I’m not sure America was ready for the Chevy Volt. I mean, I hope it does well, I don’t want to disparage any product coming out of Detroit. But I think instead of having politicians tell us what kind of cars we ought to make, we ought to let the people who are trying to understand the market make that decision.”

This is not Romney’s first critique of the Volt. In December, during a radio appearance on a Boston station, he laughingly dismissed the Volt as “an idea whose time has not come.”

The Chevy Volt was first introduced as a concept vehicle in January 2007, fully two years before President Obama took office. And the substantial tax incentives for purchasing high efficiency and plug-in vehicles like the Volt were passed under President George W. Bush. Former President and Romney campaign surrogate George H. W. Bush just this past week bought a Volt for his son Neil.

Romney’s renewed attack on the Volt places him with Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, and Newt Gingrich, who have taken turns disparaging the car.

The lessons of the Hebrew prophets can teach humanity how to respond to the catastrophe of global warming with strength and resilience. As we near Passover and Easter Sunday, it is a good time to reflect on their example.

The threat of global warming is almost unimaginable — sea level rise of meters swamping the world’s great cities, the desertification of lands populated by billions, the extinction of thousands of species, the death of the oceans, the destruction of ice caps, droughts, floods, fires, and storms of Biblical proportions. Unchecked, global warming could actually make regions of the planet literally uninhabitable to humans — so hot a person would drop dead in minutes.

The cause of this growing calamity — with terrible devastation already and much more to come — is humanity itself, with the unchecked burning of the fossil fuels that power civilization, despite the increasingly desperate warnings of scientific observers.

Yet people are told that we can fight global warming easily. Anointed leaders retreat into denial or simply avoid the subject. Many who grasp the terrible stakes righteously batter the “failure” of imperfect, “ineffective” governmental efforts to tackle climate pollution.

In Pillar of Fire, the second of his three-part biography of Martin Luther King, Taylor Branch describes how the civil rights movement in 1963 faced a similar crisis of faith in trying to figure out how to fight entrenched, institutionalized, racism and segregation in what seemed at the time to be impossible odds and repeated failure.

At the January 1963 Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, one thousand delegates of assembled clergy from the various branches of the Judeo-Christian faith grappled with that question, which sent them careening from Pollyannish optimism to biting despair. As Branch relates, King found a fellow voice in Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic scholar who escaped the Nazis and then fought the wave of atheistic nihilism that followed the Holocaust. King and Heschel found guidance in the “ideal of the Hebrew prophets” who faced destruction not merely with virtue but also the “remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression”:

What brought King and Heschel together was a prescription for the dilemma that plagued the Chicago conference. Most of the delegates searched for ways to overcome a stubborn avoidance of race in religious discourse. To break such a barrier, nearly all the theologians felt the need for a calming approach that labeled racial prejudice a feeble anachronism, a holdover of premodern irrationality, but this very impulse to soothe and minimize opened them to charges of false engagement from realists such as Stringfellow and Campbell. Yet, the realists’ tinge of fatalism reminded Heschel of a ghostly legacy from the Jewish past — the defiant urge to abandon hope of any divine presence in the face of inexplicable calamity . . .

As proof that human beings could engage the most deadening crises without falling into either of the classic polar traps — nihilism or blandness — Heschel held up the ideal of the Hebrew prohpets. While facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people, the prophets remained suffused with redemptive purpose. Far from soaring off in to saccharine self-persuasion, however, they made biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments. “Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue,” wrote Heschel. “The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression…”

Man-made global warming is another “inexplicable calamity.” Blandness, sarcasm, and nihilism are tempting responses. But there is another path — that recognizes that suffering is inevitably found on the way to justice, that knowing sacrifice can lead to redemption. “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” King said in at the the funeral for the four girls killed in a Birmingham church bombing in 1963. “And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”

King continued with words that speak directly to the challenge we now face:

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

We have poisoned the very seasons, and people from New Orleans to Karachi have paid for that profligacy. The path to hope and redemption will not be easy or painless, but it can be found.

The final data is in for the unprecedented March heat wave that was “unmatched in recorded history” for the U.S. (and Canada).  New heat records swamped cold records by the stunning ratio of 35.3 to 1.

This ratio is almost off the charts, even with the brutally warm August we had, as this chart from Capital Climate shows.

For the year to date, new heat records are beating cold records by 22 to 1, which trumps the pace of the last decade by more than a factor of 10!

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming. A 2009 analysis shows that the average ratio for the 2000s was 2.04-to-1, a sharp increase from previous decades. Lead author Dr. Gerald Meehl explained, “If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.”

Meteorologist Jason Samenow points out just how extreme the heat wave was: “More than 7,700 daily record high temperatures were set (or tied, compared to just 287 record lows), in some cases by mind blowing margins and over multiple days. In several instances in the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest region, morning lows even bested record highs and high temperatures soared above mid-summer norms.”

Many of the country’s leading climatologists and meteorologists have looked at the data and concluded that like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace.

Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro calls the current heat wave “surreal” and explained that “While natural factors are contributing to this warm spell, given the nature of it and its context with other extreme weather events and patterns in recent years there is a high probability that global warming is having an influence upon its extremity.”

Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has said, “this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.” He published a detailed statistical analysis concluding, “It is highly unlikely the warmth of the current ‘Summer in March’ heat wave could have occurred unless the climate was warming.”

Climate Central pointed out that given the intensity, duration, and geographical breadth of the heat wave, “this may be an unprecedented event since modern U.S. weather records began in the late 19th century.” They interviewed several top scientists who explained global warming’s likely role in helping to make this extreme event so unique.

University of Utah’s Jim Steenburgh blogged that he is convinced global warming has played a role:

Welcome to the new climate in which heat waves are pushing farther outside the envelope of what has been observed previously during the historical record.  To quote Hansen et al. (2011), “Today’s extreme anomalies occur because of simultaneous contributions of specific weather patterns and global warming.”  I’m usually very cautious about linking weather events to global warming as there is considerable natural variability in the system, but these are jaw-dropping records and such events are more likely today than 60 years ago.

NBC News has a very good story about the cause of the extreme weather. Their chief environmental correspondent Ann Thompson interviews NOAA scientist, Dr. David Easterling:

Thompson:  But scientists say ping-ponging between weather extremes may be an indicator of a much bigger problem: the heat trapping gases of climate change

Easterling:  The warming that we’ve seen actually increases the chances, kind of loads the dice that were going to see these kinds of events more often.

Thompson: Dr. David Easterling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a co-author of United Nations report out this week that points to climate change as leading to extreme weather events since 1950.

Easterling:  The unusual warm days and nights, and to some extent heat waves, you can actually begin making that link between climate change and those events.

Watch it:

 

Since the science of attributing extreme events to global warming is still emerging, scientists still disagree to what extent a specific event like this heat wave is driven by global warming. But two of the  leading experts explain at RealClimate why even small shifts in average temperature mean “the probability for ‘outlandish’ heat records increases greatly due to global warming.” Furthermore, “the more outlandish a record is, the more would we suspect that non-linear feedbacks are at play – which could increase their likelihood even more.”

The really worrisome part is that we’ve only warmed about a degree and a half Fahrenheit in the past century.  We are on track to warm five times times that or more this century.

In short, we ain’t seen nothing yet!

by Daniel J. Weiss

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Washington yesterday making some misleading statements about tar sands (which are also called the oil sands) and the Keystone XL pipeline.

In a public dialogue at the Wilson Center, Harper was asked by audience members about the environmental impact of expanding Alberta’s oil sands extraction — including the global and local impacts of building the Keystone XL pipeline through America’s heartland.

Below, I provide a quick summary and response to his statements. (You can find the whole video here).

In response to a question about the politics around Keystone XL, Harper said “everything that I’ve seen in the United States indicates pretty overwhelming public opinion in favor” of the project.

However, a Center for American Progress Action Fund poll conducted by Hart Research last month found that Keystone XL was not in the top four most supported solutions to high gasoline prices.

Harper also brought up jobs figures, saying that Keystone XL “has the capacity of employing up to 30,000 people on both sides of the border.”

However, the jobs numbers on the U.S side of the border are substantially smaller. According to the State Department’s Final Environmental Impact Statement, construction of the proposed Keystone XL project, including the pipeline and pump stations, would result in hiring approximately 2,650 to 3,200 workers over the 18-month construction period. TransCanada has also confirmed those figures.

In addition, there may be as few as 26 permanent full-time jobs associated with pipeline operation. If Harper’s numbers are somewhat accurate, that puts the other 26,000 jobs in Canada, not the U.S.

Harper cautioned that “the environmental impacts should not be exaggerated.” But also explained that “oil sands oils, while they are heavy in emissions are no heavier than typical heavy crudes … no heavier than Venezuelan [crude].”

Hold on. The higher carbon dioxide pollution produced by tar sands production is due to the significant amount of energy necessary to extract the bitumen (oil sands) from the Earth and convert it into useable oil.   The Environmental Protection Agency estimates a very high CO2 content from tar sands:

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We’ve detailed the exhaustive list of dramatic changes Mitt Romney has made to his energy policies in a few short years. As a previous supporter of cap and trade, climate science, vehicle efficiency, electric cars, and public investments in clean energy, Rommey was once the poster child of progressive ideas on energy.

As the press continues to pick up on the story, Romney needs to find a way to change the conversation. How’s he going to do it? No, not with an Etch A Sketch. As the Onion New Service reports, he’s built a time machine to go back and snuff out previous versions of himself.

With Romney once taking a completely different stance on almost every issue he stands for today, is this the only way he can wipe the slate clean?

Romney To Travel Back In Time To Kill Liberal Versions Of Himself

The Obama campaign is acting as if it is already in a general-election fight, against a Big Oil-Mitt Romney ticket. In a new ad, President Barack Obama attacks “big oil” and Mitt Romney, pushing back against oil-industry campaign ads that accuse Obama of raising gas prices. The front group American Energy Alliance, secretly funded by Koch Industries and other oil giants, is running a $3.6 million ad campaign that criticizes Obama policies that don’t favor the oil-industry agenda. Oil companies have been profiting from American suffering at the gas pump, but they believe they would do even better under a Romney presidency, the new Obama ad argues:

Under President Obama, domestic oil production’s at an eight-year high. So why is Big Oil attacking him? Because he’s fighting to end their tax breaks. He’s raising mileage standards, and doubling renewable energy. In all these fights, Mitt Romney stood with Big Oil, for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables. So when you see this ad, remember who paid for it and what they want.

Because of Citizens United, the spending by Koch-funded front groups on this election is practically unlimited, especially as the oil industry pulls in $200 million more every time the price of gas goes up a penny.

J. Henry Fair is a photographer who snaps beautiful and unsettling images of industrial scars. I was recently turned onto this work, and stumbled upon a TED talk he gave last fall in Berlin on the impact of energy extraction on the environment.

At a time when many American politicians are stepping up rhetoric in support of the  “extraction economy,” it’s important to see what that really means on the ground.

From coal ash storage to fertilizer production, Fair has accumulated an array of stunning industrial photos — making the invisible costs of energy and consumerism visible.

“Every product, everything we buy, everything that we spend money on has invisible costs. Those costs are hidden costs that usually result in some kind of environmental degradation.”

“Those systems which are providing us with free services — clean air, clean water — as we push those systems into failure, we will ultimately have to pay (or our children will have to pay) to replace those services. In actual fact, what we’re doing, it’s a massive transfer of wealth between the people who are profiting from these extractive processes and our grandchildren.”

Our deeply-held beliefs about never-ending economic growth are being challenged by limited resources and environmental degradation. Is this the type of economy we want to strive for?

Watch Fair’s TED talk:

by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Over the past 50 years, our average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history.  That is fact, not opinion.  Scientists say that under current trends, average US temperatures could be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century.

This is not abstract, nor are the effects limited to the developing world.  These changes will have – indeed, are already having – major effects on our cities, suburbs, and towns.  Chicago is becoming warmer.  So is Orlando.  So are Spokane and Dallas.  So are smaller towns such as Louisville, Colorado and suburbs such as Gaithersburg, Maryland.  Everyone has weather, and everyone’s weather is getting warmer.  By fits and starts, to be sure; but, if you don’t believe it, ask a landscaper.  The serious impacts beginning and yet to come are not pretty and, as my colleague Kim Knowlton has reported, even the insurance industry is noticing.

There are many things we can and must do to reduce the warming trajectory.  First among these is reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common and potent greenhouse gas, particularly by transitioning to a clean energy economy.  But turning this ship around is going to take time, even under the best scenarios.

Meanwhile, there are also measures we need to take right now inside our communities so that we are as prepared as possible for the warmer climate ahead.  Some of them are related to technology, of course, perhaps including personal technology.  But that isn’t my personal strength as an environmental observer.  This article focuses on a few things that we can and should do for our cities, suburbs and towns that are low-tech.  What’s below is by no means a definitive or complete list, but it’s a start:

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Other stories below: U.S. military forges ahead with plans to combat climate change; Canada will send oil to Asia even if Keystone XL proceeds, says Canadian PM

Thousands of Dolphins Dying in Gulf Waters

The dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico are in the midst of a massive die-off. The reasons why remain a complicated and mysterious mix of oil, bacteria, and the unknown.

Normally an average of 74 dolphins are stranded on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico each year, especially during the spring birthing season. But between February 2010 and April 1, 2012, 714 dolphins and other cetaceans have been reported as washed up on the coast from the Louisiana/Texas border through Franklin County, Florida, reported the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 95 percent of the mammals were dead.

Since many of the dead dolphins sink, decompose or are eaten by scavengers before washing up, NOAA biologists believe that 714 represents only a fraction of the actually death count. NOAA declared the die-off an “Unusual Mortality Event” as per the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

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