by Rebecca Lefton

The most anti-environmental House of Representatives in history is at it again.

Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee passed the 2013 foreign operations budget, which for a second year in a row cut entire programs crucial for helping developing countries address climate change impacts and advance on a low-emission economic trajectory.

The conservative belief that cutting international climate investments will solve national budget and debt problems simply makes the problem more expensive for us down the road. These cuts are bad for our national security, risk our international credibility, and endanger our planet and future generations.

So what does the House bill do?

• The World Bank multilateral Climate Investment Funds that the George W. Bush administration established — consisting of the Strategic Climate Fund, the Clean Technology Fund, and the Forest Investment Program — are completely absent. That’s bad financial investment policy. The Clean Technology Fund, which helps to scale up clean energy technology in large-emitting developing countries, leverages around $8 in co-financing from multilateral development banks, governments, and the private sector for every $1 invested.
• Funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a body of scientists that studies the risk of human-induced climate change — is eliminated.
• USAID’s operating expenses are cut 5 percent below FY 2012 enacted levels.
• The Global Environment Facility, the main funder of international global warming projects, was cut to $64.7 million. In 2012 President Obama requested $143.7 million for the fund.

As the Center for American Progress has recommended, directing a mix of public and private resources to international climate finance will be a cost-effective way to fulfill our global emissions reductions pledges.  The only way to achieve our goals for climate stabilization is to help developing countries grow in a more sustainable way by using lower-carbon or zero-carbon energy sources.

International climate funding also creates opportunities for investments by U.S. companies that deliver the programs that capture these pollution reductions.

These cuts put the U.S. in a dangerous position, and they reflect a paralyzing ideological divide among parties. Indiana Senator Dick Lugar — a conservative who worked across party lines to address climate change — recently lamented the way his party is attacking the issue. In a statement after his defeat to a climate-denying Tea Partier, Lugar warned:

“I don’t remember a time when so many topics have become politically unmentionable in one party or the other. Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change….Our political system is losing its ability to even explore alternatives. If fealty to these pledges continues to expand, legislators may pledge their way into irrelevance. Voters will be electing a slate of inflexible positions rather than a leader.”

Senator Lugar was an original sponsor of the Tropical Forest Conservation Act supporting debt-for-nature swaps that allow developing countries to relieve debt owed to the United States by conserving and protecting forests.

Meanwhile, other countries are stepping up their international climate aid. Rather than having conversations about whether to pay for international climate aid at all, other world leaders are discussing about how to ramp up their commitments.

It’s now up to the Senate to help get the budget on the right path by restoring our international financial commitment to combating climate change.

Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst with the International Climate Team at the Center for American Progress

Image: Pamela Davis Photography

by Dominique Browning, via Moms Clean Air Force

As more polls show that a majority of Americans want action on carbon pollution and global warming, leadership on fighting climate change is coming from surprising places—starting with the military.

At a recent reception held by Environmental Defense Fund in Washington D.C….  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave a speech in which he connected the dots between climate change, energy and security issues. He became the highest-ranking official in the Obama administration to do so.

Panetta explained that his Department of Defense is facing a budget shortfall of more than $3 billion because of unexpected fuel costs. “I have a deep interest in more sustainable and efficient energy options,” he said. Secretary Panetta went on to describe how the U. S. military will be called on for humanitarian assistance in the face of rising seas, longer droughts, and more frequent and the severe natural disasters that are a result of global warming.

Secretary Panetta was followed on the podium by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who has served since May 2009. In 1987, the Harvard-trained lawyer became the youngest governor in the nation when he won office in Mississippi. Mabus declared, in an inimitably rich Southern drawl: “We buy too much fossil fuel from the most volatile places on earth.”

He emphasized that “drilling alone will never solve our national security concerns over foreign oil.” Mabus went on to announce that the Navy has made a commitment to get 50% of its energy from renewable sources, like biofuels, solar and wind, by 2025. That’s the most ambitious goal for renewable energy in the country—higher even than California’s!

Mabus pointed out that the Navy has always led in pioneering new sources of fuel, whether it was from moving from sail to coal in the 1850s, to oil in the 20^th century, and nuclear energy in the 1950s. “Every time, there were doubters and naysayers,” he said forcefully. “Every time. And every single time, they were wrong and they will be wrong again this time.”

Mabus vigorously countered the argument that renewable energy is more expensive. “Well of course it is! Every new technology is more expensive. What if we hadn’t started using computers because they were more expensive than typewriters? What if we hadn’t started using cell phones because they were more expensive than land lines? Where would we be?”

Both Panetta and Mabus are on the front lines again—in a battle that will help us curb carbon emissions and lead us to energy independence. Anyone want to join the notoriously craven science deniers at the Heartland Institute in their claim that any leader who fights global warming is no better than tyrants and killers like Charles Manson, Osama bin Laden and Unabomber Kacyznski?

Go ahead. Make Secretary Mabus’ day.

Dominique Browning is the co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force and its lead blogger. She is a writer and editor — and the mother of two sons. She blogs at Slow Love Life and writes a column called Personal Nature for the Environmental Defense Fund.

This piece was originally published at Moms Clean Air Force and was re-printed with permission.

Clean energy has become a huge part of the political campaign this year. And certainly not in a good way. The last election cycle, all the candidates went out of their way to express their support for renewables. This year, 81% of attack ads have been about energy — many of them directly attacking technologies like solar.

With the renewable energy industry suddenly finding itself in a brutal political battle, it’s easy for many of us to get wrapped up in push back in this post-Solyndra world.

That’s why I like the ad campaign below so much. Produced by the solar services company SunRun, the ads completely avoid the exhausting political debate and put solar in a humorous frame that people can relate to — similar to a beer or car commercial. By treating solar like any other consumer product, these ads help normalize the industry.

Ultimately, this is the type of marketing campaign that — if scaled properly  — has the potential to drown out the vicious, false attacks from political organizations like Americans for Prosperity and American Crossroads.

Too bad companies like SunRun don’t have tens of millions of dollars to throw around for national advertising.

The nation’s most famous climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has written a scathing NY Times op-ed, “Game Over for the Climate.” He also lays out an “apocalyptic” but science-based description of what happens if we keep doing nothing.

Hansen begins:

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.

That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.

Hansen lays out why the scientific case for why exploiting the tar sands and unconventional fuels in general would be “game over” for modern civilization:

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

This is an op-ed, so Hansen can’t provide his underlying scientific analysis and charts. Here is the key chart:

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts. [Estimated reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from EIA (2011) and GAC (2011).]

Hansen himself has been increasingly vocal on just what it would mean to stay anywhere near our current emissions path. This piece lays out the picture bluntly:

That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.

Again, this is all from the recent scientific literature.

Hansen is tough on Obama — and all of us:

Read more

More domestic drilling does not make America less susceptible to global supply disruptions or protect consumers from gasoline price volatility, according to a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO report reviewed different policies intended to make the country more energy secure, concluding that the only effective tool for shielding businesses and consumers from price spikes is to use less oil.

Because oil is sold on the global market, CBO concludes that increasing domestic oil production would do little to influence rising gas prices in the U.S.

These findings back up historical experience. According to an analysis of 36 years of gasoline prices and domestic oil production conducted by the Associated Press, there is zero statistical correlation between increased drilling and lower prices at the gas pump.

The CBO report creates a dilemma for drilling proponents. Even if increased drilling did substantially lower gas prices — which it has not –  the agency says those lower prices would actually make the country less secure from price shocks:

Policies that promoted greater production of oil in the United States would probably not protect U.S. consumers from sudden worldwide increases in oil prices stemming from supply disruptions elsewhere in the world, even if increased production lowered the world price of oil on an ongoing basis. In fact, such lower prices would encourage greater use of oil, thus making consumers more vulnerable to increases in oil prices. Even if the United States increased production and became a net exporter of oil, U.S. consumers would still be exposed to gasoline prices that rose and fell in response to disruptions around the world.

In contrast, policies that reduced the use of oil and its products would create an incentive for consumers to use less oil or make decisions that reduced their exposure to higher oil prices in the future, such as purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles or living closer to work. Such policies would impose costs on vehicle users (in the case of fuel taxes or fuel-efficiency requirements) or taxpayers (in the case of subsidies for alternative fuels or for new vehicle technologies). But the resulting decisions would make consumers less vulnerable to increases in oil prices.

The solution is clear: the only way to make America more energy secure is to use less energy.

Even Mitt Romney understood this in 2007 when he admitted that “these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay” and advocated 50-mpg fuel efficiency standards, public transportation, electric vehicles, and renewable alternatives.

However, today, Romney champions opening up virtually every possible area of the U.S. to oil drilling — disingenuously claiming it will make consumers more secure.

“The best thing we can do to get the price of gas to be more moderate and not have to be dependent upon the cartel is: drill in the gulf, drill in the outer continent shelf, drill in ANWR, drill in North Dakota, South Dakota, drill in Oklahoma and Texas,” Romney said at a recent campaign stop.

Even as the analysis piles up showing that increased domestic drilling is not an effective solution to high gas prices or energy security, political leaders continue to repeat these false claims.

We need creative, proven ideas to help us make America more efficient and less dependent on oil — not a hollow Drill-Baby-Drill mantra that does nothing to address the problem.

Related Posts:

• Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and Koch-Fueled Cato Agree: “It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Crude Oil Prices Have Increased”
• GOP: ‘You Think We’re Going To Have A Press Conference Now To Congratulate The Administration For Decreasing Gas Prices?’

The Idaho Statesman ran a good piece on climate change Tuesday, “Climate change accelerating, complicating Idaho’s spring runoff.” The report:

The effects of global warming are making it more difficult for reservoir managers to control floods and manage flows for irrigation, recreation and fisheries.

Two days of record high temperatures and two days of record rainfall the same week in late April sent 26,000 cubic feet per second surging into the Boise River dam system, forcing federal river managers to increase flows to more than 8,100 cfs — the highest flow out of Lucky Peak Dam since 1998 and just the second time it has hit 8,100 in 30 years.

The water station at Twin Springs on the Middle Fork of the Boise River has been recording flow data for 100 years. Such long-term monitoring is increasingly important — and rare — as scientists try to understand long-range effects of climate change. PROVIDED BY USGS

We reported last year on a US Geological Survey study that found “Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply.”

As many recent studies find, it is increasingly going to be feast or famine, flood or drought, because of manmade climate change (see “Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse“).

As the Idaho Statesman piece explains:

The more variability in the climate, the harder it is for the two federal dam-managing agencies to balance their competing tasks of preventing floods while filling the reservoirs to provide water for various uses.

The evidence that the runoff timing has changed is based on streamflow gauges maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey. One of the oldest is the gauge on the Middle Fork of the Boise River, installed near Twin Springs above Arrowrock Dam in 1912.

It shows that runoff that used to begin in early April now starts in late March. That flow used to peak in late May or June, but now peaks in early May.

Droughts and wet years have come and gone over the past century on the Boise River, said USGS hydrologist Greg Clark. But the past 30 years have generally been drier. With the snowpack melting earlier, that leaves flows even lower in the late summer and fall in the tributaries above reservoirs and in rivers without dams.

And this increase in extremes has real impact for real communities:

That affects things besides farmers’ irrigation water. It affects fish, for instance, especially since the water is getting warmer, said Clark, associate director for the Idaho Water Science Center in Boise.

It also affects recreation. On the Boise River, the longer period of high flows through town through the spring to prevent flooding delays floating season. On rivers such as the Middle Fork of the Salmon, low flows late in the season limit the number of days for whitewater rafting.

Yet, just as we need to be spending more money on measurement and planning, money for the key federal agencies is being cut and “money for the 100-year-old Boise Middle Fork streamflow gauge is in doubt.”

The story ends with a warning from Ron Abramovich, “a water-supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Boise”:

“A lot of people think global warming is going to be a gradual increase in temperatures,” said Abramovich. “It may be a roller coaster … kind of like the stock market.”

It is noteworthy that a local paper did such a good job of reporting on a subject that has proved challenging to say the least for many in the national media (see “Silence of the Lambs 2: Media Herd’s Coverage of Climate Change Drops Sharply — Again“). Special kudos to The Idaho Statesman for not undermining the science with any false balance.

by Michael D. Lemonick, via Climate Central

It’s just two weeks since a paper in Nature flagged an ominous thinning of ice shelves along parts of the Antarctic coast lying due south of the Pacific Ocean. The ice appears to be melting from below, as changing ocean currents are bringing relatively warm water to bathe the shelves’ undersides — and as the ice shelves lose mass, they also lose their ability to slow land-based ice in its slide toward the sea.

Now there’s something new to worry about. A pair of brand-new studies published today, one in Nature and one in its sister publication Nature Geoscience, are pointing to yet another danger zone, this one on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea coast, nestled in the armpit of the Antarctic Peninsula. The first study asserts that warm ocean currents are likely to eat significantly into the huge Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf by 2100; the second argues that the lay of the land underneath the shelf makes the ice even more unstable than it would otherwise be. “We don’t necessarily have any evidence for a dramatic change right now,” said Martin Seagirt of the University of Edinburgh, a co-author on the second paper, in a press conference, “but it’s on the threshold.”

The reason, say Seagirt and his colleagues, is that airborne radar shows that the ice shelf sits atop a depressed basin of bedrock about 60 miles wide by 160 miles long by up to a mile and half below sea level at its deepest. Right now, the so-called grounding line — the place where a shelf makes the transition from grinding along the rock to floating freely in the sea — lies at the outer rim of that basin. As warmer water melts the ice back, it can flow into the basin and cause the ice within to detach from the bedrock relatively quickly. “Its very nearly afloat already,” Seagirt said. “It needs some push and we don’t believe the push needs to be very hard.”

It’s exactly that sort of push that emerges from the work of Hartmut Hellmer, of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and his colleagues. The scientists used a state-of-the-art climate model known as HadCM3, which simulates the responses of both atmosphere and oceans in a warming world, to test what might happen to the frigid waters off Antarctica as temperatures rise.  They found that a 7°F warming of the atmosphere — on the high end of what scientists expect by 2100, but still well within the plausible range — could warm the Weddell Sea by 3.5°F. Since the floating sea ice in the Weddell has already begun to disintegrate, that water would have easy access to the ice sheet.

If the Filchner-Ronne lifts off the bedrock, land-based glaciers that feed it will be able to move more quickly to the sea, especially, Seagirt said, because the inland part of the basin, where it slopes back upward toward the center of Antarctica, has a very smooth floor, which is easy for ice to slide along. This suggests it used to sit at the bottom of an ocean where sediment would have plastered over outcroppings of rock— a glimpse, perhaps, of things to come.

Since the Filchner-Ronne is mostly fed by ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, it’s natural to think that the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds enough ice to raise sea level by 160 feet or more, is safe (although with 20 feet of sea level rise potential itself the West Antarctic sheet isn’t anything to sneeze at). But the safety is by no means guaranteed: the two sheets, which are separated by the Transantarctic Mountains, aren’t completely isolated from each other. If you lose the Filchner-Ronne, Seagirt said, “there will be knock-on effects. There will be consequences for East Antarctica.”

None of this means the world is necessarily headed for apocalyptic sea level rise by the end of this century. Current projections still put the most likely increase by 2100 at about 3 feet, which is bad enough. But scientists still barely understand the dynamics of the world’s great ice sheets. They could turn out to be more stable than glaciologists expect.

Or, as these new results seem to imply, they could be much less.

– Michael Lemonick covered science and the environment for TIME magazine for nearly 21 years, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories. This piece was originally published at Climate Central and was reprinted with permission.

Related Climate Progress Posts:

• JPL: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050
• Nature: Antarctica Is Melting From Below, Which ‘May Already Have Triggered A Period of Unstable Glacier Retreat’
• Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
• Greenland Ice Sheet “Could Undergo a Self-Amplifying Cycle of Melting and Warming … Difficult to Halt,” Scientists Find

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

Hurricane Irene, which first made landfall in North Carolina on August 27, and went on to cause devastating flooding in several Northeastern states, is now ranked as the costliest Category One storm to strike the U.S. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Irene caused $15.8 billion in damage, much of it due to inland flooding. [Climate Central]

With a simple statement on Tuesday, State Farm Insurance became the latest company to withdraw its support from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank which claims a “realist” position questioning that humans are responsible for climate change. [LA Times]

Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month. While finishing high school and playing Ultimate Frisbee on weekends, he’s also suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. over climate change. [Atlantic]

The optimism that fuelled hopes of CCS driving deep carbon cuts has stalled. The infant industry was knocked off course by the world economic crisis that dragged urgency about global warming down with it, and made money hard to come by. [Guardian]

A coalition of upstate New York landowners seeking to lease land for natural gas drilling pressed state officials Wednesday to consider the rights of property owners as they make decisions on shale gas development. [Associated Press]

Former General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz thinks pushing back against right-wing criticism of the Chevrolet Volt had an effect. Conservatives are starting to see the benefits of electric cars, he says. And he notes that he, too, is a conservative. [USA Today]

A one degree celsius rise in temperature associated with increase in carbon dioxide in atmosphere could hit wheat production in India unless “adaptation” strategies are adopted, according to a government report on climate change. [The Economic Times]

Old divisions between developed and developing countries in who should lead the fight against climate change should be laid aside, according to ministers from some of the world’s poorest countries and European representatives meeting on Tuesday. [Guardian]