ClimateWire published a truly amazing story about Heartland-Gate Friday, “For Heartland board, failed climate attack was a surprise.”

On the surface, it is a CYA story where members of the Board assert they did not know in advance about Heartland’s now widely condemned campaign to compare climate science believers and reporters to mass ‘murderers and madmen’.

But what the story actually does is confirm that the Board stands behind Heartland’s ongoing smear campaign — since Heartland hasn’t backed off any of its hate speech or apologized for the original ad.

I should say the remaining Board, because as the story notes:

Another director, Robert Lamendola, resigned last Friday because of the ad, according to sources. He’s a senior adviser for Renaissance Reinsurance, which terminated its relationship with Heartland over the billboard after giving the organization $407,000 during the past two years.

Every other insurance company and trade group supporting Heartland also cut ties with the group….

Indeed, we learned last week that the insurers expressed “disgust and shock” over the campaign. And just this afternoon, news broke that Eli Lilly, BB&T and Pepsi will no longer support the Heartland Institute. That brings the number of companies dropping Heartland to 11. According to Forecast the Facts, more than 150,000 citizens have weighed in against the organization’s messaging strategy.

So while most folks are abandoning Heartland or condemning its actions, here’s what we learn about the Board:

According to three people with knowledge of Heartland’s campaign, the surprise ad comparing Unabomber Ted Kaczynski to advocates of reducing greenhouse gases prompted a sudden conference call last Friday between the board and the group’s president, Joe Bast. The call occurred hours after the electronic billboard became active Thursday afternoon. The ad was canceled before rush hour Friday.

One director on the 14-member board disassociated himself from the failed campaign when asked whether he was comfortable with the message of the highway advertisement….

“Since the billboard thing happened, we’re on the same page moving forward,” said the board member. “Whatever Heartland is saying at this point, I think we’re all in concert with.”

Wow!

The remaining Board is on the same page with “whatever Heartland is saying at this point.” That’s really a bombshell because Heartland’s website makes clear:

1. Heartland refuses to apologize for the billboards.
2. Heartland is saying now exactly what they said before the billboard was taken down — some of the most extreme speech ever seen from a global warming denial group, including this absurd assertion, “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

Since the Board has apparently endorsed it, Heartland’s detailed rationalization for its campaign is worth quoting at length once again since it is so self-discrediting for the whole organization:

Read more

Apparently, bad ideas are contagious.

On the heels of a disastrous billboard campaign from the Heartland Institute that linked people who understand climate change with serial killers, an organization in Colorado has released its own tasteless campaign comparing President Obama and other Colorado politicians with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The billboard campaign was rolled out at 28 locations around Colorado by the conservative organization Compass Colorado.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that the Holocaust was a myth, believes that the U.S. government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and has bragged about how effective Iran is in recruiting suicide bombers who “enlighten our future.”

President Obama has said that “this country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. A strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.”

According to Compass Colorado, that belief in clean energy is egregious enough to compare Obama to a dictator who promotes mass murder.

When the Heartland Institute attempted the same kind of campaign, the fallout was swift — with 11 corporations pulling support from the organization. Ahmadinejad doesn’t have the same kind of lurid cultural relevance that Ted Kaczynski or Charles Manson have in America, but the attempt at shock value is no different than Heartland’s.

And just like Heartland, Compass Colorado is patting itself on the back for such a ridiculous campaign.

Who decided this was a good idea?

by Sarah Murdock

At a time when 80 percent of Americans believe Congress is doing a poor job, there is an opportunity for lawmakers to take action on an issue that would impact many millions of citizens: flood insurance reform.

And, here’s the amazing part — it’s got major bipartisan support. Like football.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) makes flood insurance available to coastal and inland property owners for homes and buildings that are mapped in areas of flood risk. It’s a critical service.

Unfortunately, the Program in its current form is fatally flawed. It actually encourages increased risks to people, property and nature.

This flaw is due in large part to subsidized flood insurance that pays people to rebuild again and again in areas where floods and hurricanes put communities, first responders and properties at risk.

To make matters worse, development in flood risk areas has the perverse effect of destroying natural systems that would otherwise provide flood and storm protection to people and properties.

Then there’s the fact that the current program does not emphasize “preventative-care” solutions that would greatly reduce the cost of flood damage during extreme events. One recent study estimated that for every dollar spent on flood preparedness, five dollars are saved when disaster strikes.

But, here’s perhaps the biggest problem: in a world of increasing severe and erratic storms and floods, as well as sea level rise, these issues are beginning to have more devastating consequences. In 2011 alone, there were 58 Federal flood disaster declarations, covering 33 different states, costing over $8 billion and causing 113 deaths. Both the costs and the number of deaths exceeded the 30–year averages.

What’s more, in a report commissioned by FEMA, findings indicate that there will be a 40 to 45 percent increase over the next century in U.S. areas susceptible to flooding.

Enter The Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act of 2011.

The bill passed the House last summer by a vote of 406-22 and the Senate banking committee unanimously last fall. It needs to pass the full Senate by May 31^st, before the flood insurance program is scheduled to sunset altogether.

Last week, I testified before the Senate banking committee on why The Nature Conservancy – and the diverse Smarter Safer coalition, of which we are a member – supports the legislation, with a focus on fixing the fatal flaw of the current Program.

The bill will eliminate subsidized rates, allow rates to be adjusted to reflect true risk, and take into account future impacts from increased storms and floods. Currently there are 1.2 million properties (20% of the Program) that are charged premiums well below the value of the insured liability.

This pricing fix works in tandem with the bill’s increased focus on flood mitigation – the “preventative care” strategies I mentioned earlier.

The traditional approach to flood protection has been to rely on dams and levees to contain floodwaters, and to build sea walls and bulkheads in coastal areas. While this “grey” infrastructure plays an important role in helping to secure our communities, it’s expensive to build and maintain. What’s more, an over-reliance on it in the U.S. in the past hundred years has encouraged extensive land development in areas particularly susceptible to floods and storms – and catastrophic damage when infrastructure fails. And, fail it has. Look no further than Hurricane Katrina.

Instead of relying solely on grey infrastructure, the bill will make it easier for flood insurance grant programs to fund oftentimes cheaper and more flexible “green infrastructure” solutions – such as restoring coastal wetlands, oyster reefs, and barrier beaches, as well as restoring river connectivity and restoring forests to ensure sufficient floodplain areas.

The reality is, we’ll need both green and grey solutions. But, right now, most planners don’t think beyond the grey stuff.

And, natural systems give us benefits we can’t get from a wall or levee, such as cleaner water, protection against erosion, more recreation opportunities, and food (bringing back fish and shellfish populations, and maintaining agricultural production).

It’s good policy, and it’s a hit on both sides of the aisle. Time for the Senate to take it to the finish line.

For folks interested in showing support for the legislation, check out our Use Your Outside Voice site.

Sarah Murdock is a senior policy advisor at The Nature Conservancy.

by Richard W. Caperton

Who will take radical steps to stop the transition to clean energy?  That’s the question that underlies “Blowout,” the new book by retired Senator Byron Dorgan and David Hagberg.  Because the answer is so straightforward (hint: it’s the oil companies), Dorgan and Hagberg have taken the unprecedented step of addressing the issue in a blood-soaked action thriller, instead of the typical non-fiction format we’re all so used to.

“Blowout” is based around a fictional clean energy research and development facility in North Dakota, which is very close to making a revolutionary technological breakthrough.  Just as the final critical test approaches, the facility is attacked by a relatively incompetent gang of militia members, who have been hired by unknown outside interests.  This attack, the resulting manhunt, and various other criminal hijinks make up the bulk of the plot.

Along the way, we’re treated to scenes of extreme violence in various North Dakota locations, as well as Venezuela and Washington, DC.  There are also numerous detailed mentions of all kinds of exotic military firearms.  For example, one character was previously shot with “a Barrett A2 .50 caliber U.S. sniper rifle,” and in another scene someone uses a “Knight PDW 6x35mm compact automatic carbine,” which presumably possesses an outstanding amount of killing power.

I’m glad they went the action route, because it’s actually pretty fun.  We’ve all read the formulaic clean energy book, which goes something like this: we’re in an energy crisis, the solution is X, but X has some small problems holding it back, so we need a broad national commitment, which will be a win-win situation for everyone involved.  “Blowout” is something entirely different: we’re in an energy crisis, the solution is an insanely complicated new technology that I can’t even begin to understand, developing this technology costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and special interests will go to unimaginable lengths to stop the research, including killing dozens of innocent civilians with weapons originally designed for big game hunting.

Unfortunately, this may be a case where fiction is stranger than truth.  As Joe Romm has written countless times on this very blog, the solutions to the climate crisis are almost certainly the technologies we have with us today.  Here’s how a character describes the new technology under development in “Blowout”:

We’re going to inject three classes of microbes directly into the coal seam [the facility] is sitting atop.  One breaks down the long hydrocarbons in the deposit.  The second converts those into organic acids and alcohols.  And the third – methanogens – feed on the first two and convert them to methane that we pump to the surface and burn as fuel to power our turbines.

Right.  Wouldn’t it be easier just to build a lot of existing renewable energy?  And cheaper?  In fact, it would be cheaper.  The new technology in “Blowout” cost the government $650 billion, but extending the production tax credit for wind would cost less than one percent of that.

Now, it would obviously be a mistake to read too much into a work of fiction, especially one that has two authors.  That said, it’s tempting to use this book to try to understand why Senator Dorgan wasn’t a bigger supporter of taking action on climate change when he was in the Senate.  The obvious connection is that one of the bad guys in “Blowout” is a derivatives trader, which aligns perfectly with this quote from Dorgan from a December 2009 press release: ““I don’t support offering Wall Street a trillion-dollar cap and trade carbon securities market so the investment banks and speculators can trade securities and establish speculative prices that tell the American people how much their energy is going to cost.”

Dorgan’s tepid support for addressing climate change is especially frustrating when you consider it in the context of the first sentences of “Blowout”:

We may have already reached the carbon dioxide tipping point, which in effect means that even in the planet reduced its carbon dioxide emission to zero, it may take a thousand years for Earth to heal itself. As dramatic as this might sound, the situation is closer to reality than even Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was.  Of course, doing nothing is not an option.

We have to act now, to at least mitigate the effects of the poisons we are pumping into the air.

That just about perfectly sums up the situation.  One hopes that Senator Dorgan will remember this when thinking about what to work on in the real world, and not just his nascent career as a novelist.

Richard W. Caperton is the Director of Clean Energy Investments at the Center for American Progress.

by Mindy Lubber, via Ceres

When your company’s job is to keep the lights on, you have to be cautious about risk. Power has to be there when people need it.

Risk comes in different forms, and there are times when business as usual becomes a risk in itself. America’s electric utilities are approaching just such a moment.

Across the country, a generation of power plants and transmission systems is aging and needs to be replaced. At the same time, rules on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are tightening. Clean energy technologies are getting cheaper and gaining market share. These shifts coincide with record spending: Utilities are expected to make $2 trillion in capital investments over the next 20 years – about double their recent spending rate.

How to move forward in this complex, risky environment? That’s the subject of a new report from Ceres, Practicing Risk-Aware Electricity Regulation: What Every State Regulator Needs to Know.

The industry experts who wrote the report analyzed a range of investment decisions utilities could make over the next two decades – decisions that will determine which utilities prosper and how their shareholders, ratepayers, and the wider society will be affected. The economic as well as environmental stakes are high.

Read more

The Obama campaign and the super PAC Priorities USA recently fired back at Americans for Prosperity, highlighting Mitt Romney’s ties to a funding source of $18.5 million in energy attack ads: Koch Industries.

Koch Industries has produced its own video claiming it doesn’t deserve the label of a secretive Big Oil corporation.

Shockingly, Factcheck.org and the Washington Post have taken up Koch’s argument. Factcheck.org wrote that despite Koch’s $100 billion revenue, the corporation’s diverse holdings mean “it is hardly in the league of the truly ‘big oil’companies.” The Washington Post Factchecker took the same angle.

While it’s true the most profitable U.S. corporations — ExxonMobil and Chevron — are larger than Koch, using this standard to claim the company isn’t Big Oil is incorrect. Let’s take a look at some key facts:

• The Koch brothers’ net worth tops $50 billion and they have pledged to spend $60 million to defeat President Barack Obama, according to the Huffington Post.
• The Koch PAC is the largest oil and gas contributor — donating more than even ExxonMobil — spending over $1 million in each of the last two cycles. This cycle, it has spent almost $750,000. Koch Industries sends 90 percent of these contributions to Republicans.
• It’s the fourth-largest lobbyist in the oil and gas industry, spending $2,300,000 so far in 2012 and over $8 million in 2011.
• Koch Industries emits over 300 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, based on the assumption that Koch emits the same amount of greenhouse pollution per billion dollars in revenue as Exxon and Chevron.
• Flint Hills Resources, a Koch subsidiary, processes 300 million barrels of oil a year. This company is responsible for up to five percent of the U.S. 7-gigaton carbon footprint.
• Koch says itself that the company is on par with big banks and is among the world’s top five oil speculators.

• Koch is a major player in driving up gas prices through speculation, hurting American consumers. ThinkProgress reported that in 2008, Koch leased four supertankers to hold oil in the Gulf, leading to a gas price increase anywhere from 20 to 40 cents a gallon at the time.
• According to Inside Climate News, Koch industries “has touched virtually every aspect of the tar sands industry since the company established a toehold in Canada more than 50 years ago.” It is active in mining Canada’s tar sands and exporting to the U.S., and is active in Canadian politics, with half a million dollars in donations between 2007-2010.
• As reporters consider these factors, Koch has been widely reported as a Big Oil corporation by media outlets like Politico, Forbes, NPR, and Politifact.

It is absurd to say Koch Industries is not Big Oil when it plays such a hugely influential role in a wide variety of fossil fuel markets — all while flexing its power to protect the oil industry’s special interests.

Power generation from coal is falling quickly. According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 — down from 44.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011.

That stunning drop, which represented almost a 20 percent decline in coal generation over the last year, was primarily due to low natural gas prices. As EIA explains, natural gas generation will climb steadily this year, while coal will see a double-digit drop by the end of 2012:

Natural‐gas‐fired generation continues to expand its share of total generation at the expense of coal‐fired generation. During the first quarter of 2012, natural gas accounted for 28.7 percent of total generation compared with 20.7 percent during the same quarter last year. In contrast, coal’s share of total generation declined from 44.6 percent to 36.0 percent over the same period.

Prices for natural gas delivered to the electric power industry fell by 7.5 percent in 2011, which contributed to a significant increase in the share of natural‐gas‐fired generation. EIA expects this trend to continue in 2012, with electric power sector coal consumption falling by 14 percent. Natural gas in the electric power sector grows by almost 21 percent in 2012, primarily driven by the increasing relative cost advantages of natural gas over coal for power generation in some regions.

EIA also projects that coal production at mines will fall by more than 10 percent this year. However, with prices falling due to an increase in secondary inventories, the agency predicts that domestic consumption may rise by just over 1 percent next year.

The U.S. coal industry if facing major headwinds. The current drop in generation is mostly due to competition from natural gas. But there are other factors that will assist in pushing coal out of the electricity mix: An aging fleet of plants, cost-competitive renewables, new clean air regulations, and a strong anti-coal movement are working together to reduce the attractiveness of coal. Since 2010, plant operators have announced 106 retirements of coal facilities — representing 13 percent of the U.S. fleet, according to the Sierra Club.

The continued decline in domestic coal generation is good news for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuel sector are expected to decline by almost 3 percent this year — continuing the 1.9 percent decrease seen in 2011. Emissions from natural gas will rise by 5.5 percent, while emissions from coal will fall by almost 12 percent.

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

The flagship project of a hoped-for but not-yet-realized “nuclear renaissance,” the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors under construction near Augusta, Ga., may cost about $900 million more than had been estimated, the Southern Company said in a filing this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. [New York Times]

In the foothills of the Andes, in the Sierra Piura region of Peru, the problems faced by coffee farmers are clear. [Guardian]

Although farmers know better than ever how to grow food, global warming may indirectly affect our diet by diminishing the amount of available nutrients. [Jerusalem Post]

Are you and your neighbors breathing healthy air? The American Lung Association has released their State Of The Air 2012 report, detailing cities with the least and most air pollution in America. Each city is ranked by ozone pollution, short-term particle pollution, and year-long particle pollution. [Huffington Post]

Coastal erosion, a natural effect of Matunuck’s direct exposure to the elements in an area prone to sand-sucking northeasters, has shrunk parts of the beach to less than a dozen feet during high tide, not only imperiling seafront structures like the Ocean Mist but also threatening the only road that residents can use to get in and out of here, as well as the water line beneath it that serves over 1,600 customers. [New York Times]

A decade at war has made Marines mean on the battlefield. Now to get lean, the Corps is becoming Green. Marines have become exceedingly lethal, but all that deadly precision comes with a heavy burden — a lot of fuel and extra batteries to carry, said Col. Bob Charette, director of Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office. [Jacksonville Daily News]

B.C. Premier Christy Clark is prepared to alter her government’s strict climate-change targets to pave the way for her plan to create a liquefied natural gas industry in the province. [Globe and Mail]

A recent study on the distribution of 11,000 marine species in relation to water temperature supports that the current human-induced climate change has huge consequences for our marine ecosystems. And a 15°C change is not even necessary. [Business Mirror]