Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose

Heartland Institute hosts its annual denial-a-palooza conference in Chicago this week, during an uncertain time for the libertarian think tank. Exposed for its secret agenda to teach climate denialism in classrooms and its outlandish billboard campaign, Heartland has shed sponsors and more than $800,000 exactly because of its extremist position on the climate.

Meanwhile, the UK Guardian breaks the news today that an external investigation conducted for the Pacific Institute cleared climate scientist Peter Gleick of the charge of faking material in his elaborate effort to obtain internal Heartland strategy and finance documents.

In a matter of months, Heartland has alienated its own senior staff and lost 11 corporate sponsors including AT&T to General Motors. Now, its claims to legitimacy “lie in shreds and its financial future remains uncertain,” the Guardian wrote in a separate story Sunday:

Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organisation.

The organisation has been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week’s conference, undermining Heartland’s claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.
Its entire Washington DC office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland’s biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.

Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.

It’s become increasingly clear that the more Heartland’s agenda has been exposed, fewer corporations want to remain publicly connected to the efforts undermining climate science. But what’s the most revealing is who remains among Heartland’s funders: a coal lobby group has stepped in as one of its “gold” sponsors. The Illinois coal chief praises Heartland for its work and “so we thought we would finally make a contribution to the organisation.” He added, “In general, the message of the Heartland Institute is something the Illinois Coal Association supports.”

In addition to the Illinois Coal Association, , Heritage Foundation has also joined to sponsor the conference.

Here’s more from today’s story on Gleick:

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By Tom Kenworthy

Scientists from two Texas universities are looking into a pair of recent earthquakes near the Texas-Louisiana border for clues to whether they were related to underground injection of oil and gas drilling waste produced in the course of hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

One of the scientists studying the two recent Texas quakes was on a team that concluded a swarm of earthquakes near Dallas in 2008 and 2009 were related to the disposal of drilling wastes, according to E&E’s Energy Wire.

Cliff Frohlich, a research scientist at the University of Texas who studied those Dallas area quakes, did not rule out a similar conclusion in the recent east Texas quakes.

“It’s possible they were natural,” he said. “It’s possible they were man-made.”

The two quakes, a 3.9 magnitude event on May 10 and a 4.3 magnitude one on May 17, took place northeast of Nacogdoches, Texas. That area is part of the Haynesville shale formation and is home to injection wells.

The two recent events come about a month after the US. Geological Survey reported that a big increase in earthquakes across a large part of the nation’s midsection since 2001 is “almost certainly manmade.”  Though the agency did not tie the increase directly to a big increase in drilling for gas and oil from shale formations, it did say the surge in seismic activity “corresponds” to that development and the huge jump in fracking and the underground disposal of liquid wastes that flow back to the surface after fracking jobs are  completed. Fracking involves the injection at high pressure of large quantities of water, sand and chemicals into underground rock formations to release oil and gas. Afterwards, much of that mixture, commonly called brine, is brought back to the surface and often disposed of by re-injecting it deep underground.

In March, Ohio oil and gas regulators linked a dozen earthquakes in the northeast part of the state to the disposal of drilling brine after hydraulic fracturing. At the same time, the state announced new regulations governing the transport and disposal of drilling wastes, including banning underground injections into a formation that contains a fault in the region.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Photo: Bridget Besaw, The Nature Conservancy

by Bronson Griscom, via the Nature Conservancy’s Planet Change Blog

Can tropical forests be logged sustainably and still maintain their incredibly rich biodiversity — and benefits to people? A new study published in the journal Conservation Letters provides evidence that, with smart forest management, the answer can be “yes.”

As a forest scientist and a co-author on this article, I believe our findings confirm a critical middle way forward in protecting tropical forests: maintaining the diversity of tropical forest plants and animals, reducing carbon pollution, securing economic opportunities for local communities, and recognizing that the world’s growing population will continue to have significant needs for timber.

Why a “middle way”? Why not just focus on halting logging of these forests wherever possible?

After all, our article does find that fully protected forests are often better at conserving more plants and animals than forests managed for timber. Also, cutting trees in the tropics generates as much carbon pollution as all the cars, planes, boats, and trains in the world. That’s why a lot of organizations like The Nature Conservancy, where I work, see protecting tropical forests as a powerful part of the solution to climate change.

But what happens when tropical forest logging is halted?

For one thing, what happens to the people in tropical forest regions who depend upon logging to put bread or rice on the table for their families? Getting rid of logging jobs may backfire as a conservation goal if the alternative livelihoods involve forest conversion. (We’ve seen this in Borneo, where villages face the option of engaging timber companies or oil palm companies … or attempting to refuse both and relying on subsistence agriculture.) Another problem: some builders might replace wood with another material like steel or cement, and the process of making those other materials generates more carbon pollution than wood. Furthermore, in some places loggers are a stronger force for forest protection than national parks. This dynamic has been demonstrated in community-managed forests of Mexico and Guatemala.

These are reasons why we considered the implications of a “middle way” in tropical forest conservation: a path that integrates logging and conservation. Our study reviews over 100 scientific papers and concludes that, in places with improved forest management practices, selectively logged tropical forests[1] retain the lion’s share of their plants and animals (85-100%) and carbon (roughly 75%). Not only that: timber yields can be sustained, albeit at a lower timber volume than the first cut.

In other words, tropical forests are surprisingly resilient to damage, as long as they are not completely cleared for another land use.

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Since I lost many relatives in the Holocaust, I understand all too well the unique nature of that catastrophe. The Holocaust is not an analogue to global warming, which is an utterly different kind of catastrophe, and, obviously, one whose worst impacts are yet to come.

I have explained this many times, including a 2008 post (“PLEASE stop calling them skeptics“) and in my 2009 post, “Anti-science conservatives are stuck in denial but for climate science activists, the reverse is true,” which I’ll excerpt in this post.

Over the years, I have explained why “denier” is not my preferred term. I tried to coin the terms “delayer” and “disinformer” for those who make a living spreading disinformation about climate science — and I still use the term ‘disinformer.’  But coining terms is nearly impossible, and the fact is that almost everybody has embraced the term “deniers” – including many, many disinformers.

As the National Center for Science Education explains in their 2012 post, “Why Is It Called Denial?”

“Denial” is the term preferred even by many deniers. “I actually like ‘denier.’ That’s closer than skeptic,” says MIT’s Richard Lindzen, one of the most prominent deniers. Minnesotans for Global Warming and other major denier groups go so far as to sing, “I’m a Denier!”.

Heck, even disinformers associated with the hard-core extremists at the Heartland Institute like the term:

So clearly, using the term ‘denier’ doesn’t inherently mean you are equating a disinformer with a Holocaust denier. So if for no reason than for clarity’s sake — as well as for people doing web searches — we seem to be stuck with ‘denier’ for general usage.

But undefined labels are always subject to criticism and out-of-context attacks, especially by people who spread disinformation for a living, so I’m a big fan of defining one’s terms, as NCSE does in its post. As I have written many times in the past:

I understand that some of the deniers take offense at the apparent implication that they are like Holocaust deniers.  I am not trying to make that connection — since climate science deniers are nothing like Holocaust deniers.  Holocaust deniers are denying an established fact from the past.  If the media or politicians or the public took them at all seriously, I suppose it might increase the chances of a future Holocaust. But, in fact, they are very marginalized, and are inevitably attacked and criticized widely whenever they try to spread their disinformation, so they have no significant impact on society.

The climate science deniers, however, are very different and far more worrisome. They are not marginalized, but rather very well-funded and treated quite seriously by the status quo media.  They are trying to persuade people not to take action on a problem that has not yet become catastrophic, but which will certainly do so if we listen to them and delay acting much longer.

This doesn’t stop the disinformers from misrepresenting what one was trying to say, of course, since that is what they do for a living.

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by David Roberts, via Grist

The most important thing you can read this week is Joe Smyth’s post on federal coal leasing. I realize “federal coal leasing” is not a phrase to quicken the pulse, but it’s a Very Big Deal.

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the situation the U.S. coal industry is in: Domestic electricity use has leveled off, utilities are switching to cheap natural gas and wind, and the EPA is finally cracking down on dirty old coal plants. All that leaves U.S. coal in a pinch. Their main hope for the future is to increase coal exports. That’s why the fight over coal export terminals matters.

Arguably, though, the coal-export fight is secondary. From a climate-hawk point of view, it would be better just to leave the damn coal in the ground.

Is that even within our power as concerned U.S. citizens? As it happens, yes, it is, because we own much of the coal! The coal that companies like Peabody are itching to export comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. And most of the land in the Powder River Basin is owned by the federal government — that is to say, it’s owned by you and me.

The federal Bureau of Land Management leases the land to coal companies at bargain-basement prices, so they can strip-mine it and export the coal at a profit. Does that sound like good public policy to you?

You really should read Smyth’s whole post for the details, but here’s the important bit:

The BLM’s role is critical because unlike other regions such as Appalachia, Powder River Basin coal is mostly owned by the federal government, and BLM is supposed to ensure that coal development there “is in the best interests of the Nation.” But without proper oversight, the BLM has been offering this federal coal to companies like Peabody, Arch Coal, and Cloud Peak Energy for bargain rates. Over the last 30 years, this has amounted to a $28.9 billion subsidy to the coal mining industry and helped coal maintain its large share of US electricity generation by keeping coal prices artificially low, as explained in a report [PDF] and legal brief [PDF] by Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

These low prices have also helped the Powder River Basin soar from just 5% of US coal production in 1970 to almost half today — even though the Federal Government no longer classifies the region as a coal-producing region. If this sounds absurd, that’s because the BLM’s process for leasing US coal is skewed to benefit coal mining companies, lacks proper oversight and public participation, and is basically corrupt — check out the WildEarth Guardians for more info. [my emphasis]

Speaking of that corrupt BLM process, there’s a lease auction happening today — BLM is selling off the “South Porcupine Tract,” which contains “an estimated 401,830,508 tons of mineable coal.” But the size of this lease is modest relative to the huge expansion of leasing the administration announced last year. When all that newly leased coal is burned, it will contribute 3.9 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, more than half what the U.S. emits in a year. (See also Joe Romm on this.)

As Smyth writes, this travesty is finally starting to get some attention from politicians like Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D). They are asking why U.S. taxpayers should subsidize coal companies to degrade Western port towns to export coal to Asia where it will accelerate climate change. That makes sense for no one other than the coal companies.

The BLM’s own justification for the lease doesn’t even make sense, as Smyth explains:

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A Minnesota engineering professor takes aim at what he considers vacuous arguments and what constitutes proper handling of a series of online comments and jags going beyond the point of fair and serious commentary and analysis.

by John Abraham, via the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media

A recent posting on The Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media website linked to a very long piece regarding climate change by Christopher Monckton.

As a practicing scientist, I recognize and value the role that The Yale Forum plays in furthering civil discussion on this topic. As a society, we have too few venues of this type where ideas can be discussed, solutions proposed, and our preconceptions challenged.

It is not difficult to appreciate the dilemma faced by editors of sites like The Yale Forum when submissions such as that cited are offered, particularly when, as here, the respondent is addressing an earlier posting in which he or she was specifically named.

On the one hand, sites such as this want to encourage vigorous and candid debate. On the other, they must be mindful of the very extreme views taken by some participants in this discussion. Inclusion of the most extreme views may not advance the purpose of the site.

So, how does Monckton’s post fit into the category of extreme views? That, really, is the easy part.

For those readers who follow climate-contrarian cast members, Monckton is well known. He admits he has no scientific background, and he has never published a peer-reviewed scientific paper on any subject. That alone, of course, does not disqualify him from participating in public discussions.

But his post makes many outlandish claims about climate change that would cause great pause, even if they came from the mouth of an expert. Furthermore, when considering claims by those with a clear history of mistakes and factual errors, one should be very careful before granting the benefit of the doubt. In this case, many people have already addressed Monckton’s past mistakes here and here and in a series of videos here, here, here, and here. These are just a small sampling among many such examples.

Perhaps these past errors and misinterpretations stem from a nearly complete misunderstanding of climate science. It is this explanation I endorse.

But what of the latest Monckton submission to The Yale Forum? In the limited space here, let’s consider just a few clear errors. First, Monckton states that there are only 3,000 bathythermographs used for measuring ocean heating. Demonstrably false: There are many ocean temperature monitoring devices, and bathythermographs (commonly referred to as expendable bathythermographs) are just one type. In my own work in oceanography and with one research group, more than 3,500 devices have been deployed in just the first three months of this year. When all of the bathythermograph launches are added in a given year, the number greatly exceeds 3,000. Perhaps Mr. Monckton was confusing Argo Floats with bathythermographs? We may never know. (See two recent peer-reviewed papers here and here on this topic).

Make no mistake about it: the oceans are heating, despite claims to the contrary.

The next extraordinary claim Monckton makes is related to climate sensitivity, a much misunderstood issue.

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by KC Golden, via Getting a Grip on Climate Solutions

Talk about a good way to ruin that first Sunday morning cup of coffee….

Seattle woke up yesterday to a litany of coal export insults, front page in the Seattle Times:  “…an explosion of diesel exhaust”; “… long, traffic-snarling trains”; “…more accidents and marine vessel groundings”; “…poison aquatic food webs.”

….and that’s before the story turns to “the most far-reaching issue:  the potential effect new markets for coal could have on greenhouse gas emissions.”

Oregon, Washington, and many local governments insist that the federal government take a comprehensive look at the issue, including the climate impacts.  One way or the other, decisions about coal export amount to fateful climate policy decisions.  Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber said, in his strongly worded letter to the feds:

“In the absence of a clear federal policy on this point, we will simply be deciding by not deciding.”

“Deciding by not deciding” is, of course, exactly what the coal industry proposes.  The last thing they can afford is a conscious decision, on the merits, in full view of all the facts.  When asked about a review of climate impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act, coal industry analyst Andy Robert said,

“…[NEPA is] a national – not an international – act.  I think people against this kind of development will reach for any lever they can pull.”

Yes, these “people” are ruthless.  That crafty and devious Governor Kitzhaber will stoop so low as to invoke the National Environmental Policy Act as a way of analyzing the gravest environmental threat ever to face the nation.  And that’s just the camel’s nose.  What will they do next?  Pass a law against free and unlimited dumping of carbon emissions into the atmosphere?  They must be stopped!

The coal industry’s strategy is clear:  convince us that we are powerless, so we might as well just roll over and turn the Pacific Northwest into a conveyor belt for their “bulk commodity.”  They try to avoid saying “coal” because that just leads to discussions of mercury poisoning and asthma and acid rain,…and then, inevitably, you know, climate disruption. And everybody knows we can’t fix that. It’s a global thing. Let the global people worry about it.

So, c’mon Northwest, lighten up.  Just take the path of least resistance and don’t look at the climate reality, because you can’t do anything about it any way.  The best policy for dealing with intractable evil is simple:  See no evil!

And remember, Big Coal warns ominously, WE CAN DO THIS THE EASY WAY, OR WE CAN DO IT THE HARD WAY.

“The industry is geared up for a long fight, and in the end I think there will be ports developed,” says coal industry analyst Michael Dudas.  “How long that will take and how extensive it will be … that is yet to be determined.”

Let’s see….When does Hell freeze over?

– KC Golden is the Policy Director at Climate Solutions. This piece was originally published at KC’s Getting a Grip blog and was reposted with permission.

“… and these disasters are just the beginning.”

The Charleston, West Virginia Gazette has an amazing editorial, “Extremes: Climate Change.” The coal-state newspaper has strong words on climate:

Last year, America suffered historic weather calamities: disastrous tornadoes, severe floods, extended drought, record-breaking snowfall, raging wildfires, etc. Federal agencies say $52 billion in property loss was inflicted, and more than 1,000 Americans died in weather ravages….

Scientists say the violent weather is solid evidence that fossil fuel fumes are girdling Planet Earth with greenhouse gases that produce global warming and climate change. Warmer air holds more moisture, producing more extreme storms.

A new study by Yale and George Mason university pollsters found that 70 percent of Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” Yale professor Anthony Laiserowitz commented: “People are starting to connect the dots.”

This topic has special resonance in West Virginia, a fossil fuel treasure trove. And what happens here has a special impact on the future of the planet. Pollution controls seeking to reduce global warming are sure to impose tighter restrictions on coal and natural gas. West Virginia’s energy should not be squandered on a shortsighted attempt to protect the status quo, or to discredit science in the public’s eyes, or to vilify the Obama administration’s very reasonable proposal that new coal-fired power plants be required to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. West Virginia should put its energy into getting people ready to work in a world after coal.

Conservatives doubt that climate change is real, or that fossil fumes cause it. Republicans in some state legislatures are passing laws to let public school science teachers dispute both evolution and global warming.

They are leading people down a wrong and dangerous road….

Insured losses due to thunderstorms and tornadoes in the U.S. in 2011 dollars. Data and image from Property Claims Service, Munich Re.

Low-tech cleantech solutions won’t revolutionize the energy industry. They won’t make venture capitalists rich. And they won’t, by themselves, lead to the 80 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 that many climate scientists suggest we need. But they can offset a lot of carbon in the short run. [Bloomberg]

The strange thing is, experts say, that despite the politics, Romney and Obama have essentially the same position on offshore drilling. [Los Angeles Times]

Solar energy is seen as one way to save in Connecticut, where residential electricity costs were the third highest in the United States in 2010, exceeded only by Hawaii and New York, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. [Businessweek]

Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere. [BBC]

It seems to have gone virtually unnoticed, but the world leaders at the weekend’s G8 summit look as if they have taken the biggest step in years in tackling climate change. And it’s quite apart from anything to do with carbon dioxide. [The Telegraph]

The administration of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is taking a hard line on power plant pollution near his state’s border, backing an Environmental Protection Agency order for strict reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions from a GenOn-owned plant in eastern Pennsylvania. [Politico]