There’s an age-old debate playing out among climate hawks today: Do you win environmental battles by fighting against something or fighting for something?

Grist’s David Roberts had a thought-provoking piece on the issue yesterday, lamenting the oppositional tactics of enviros:

And as a substantive matter, oppositionalism is a woefully insufficient approach to climate change mitigation and/or adaptation. Most of what’s needed to respond to climate change involves building sh*t — new power systems, new transportation systems, new sustainable communities, new models of finance and ownership. If it ever happens, it will be a “third industrial revolution.” You don’t get one of those by stopping things.

Roberts raises some good points. And as someone who’s tried to fall on the side of positive messaging when writing about these issues, I agree with the basic premise.

But there’s a major issue that he leaves out: Enviros and other supporters of action already tried the strategy of “let’s build shit” to solve climate change – and it hasn’t worked out terribly well politically in the U.S. (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“)

Admittedly, that is likely a result of failed tactics, not the strategy itself.

In the few years leading up to the climate bill in Congress, the environmental community switched gears, linking up with business to tell a positive story about the economic potential for clean energy and combating climate change.

However, as Congress developed a climate bill in 2008 and 2009, there was remarkably little mention about climate – with advocates instead choosing to talk exclusively about green jobs and economic competitiveness. That worked. Until it didn’t.

Three years after the climate bill imploded, we are further away from taking action on climate change than ever. One of the reasons is that fossil fuel proponents have shifted the narrative on jobs and competitiveness due to the boom in unconventional oil and gas.

You want to build shit? Why not build a bunch of shale oil rigs, fracking wells, and tar sands pipelines?

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by Adam James

Republican Congressman Darrell Issa is continuing his witch hunt against American jobs. Why? Because they are classified as green.

It may seem like an odd tactic for a politician to go after these kinds of jobs and isolate so much of his own constituency, since 338,000 of the green jobs he is belittling — representing 2.3 percent of total employment in 2010 — came from his home state.

But we’ll have to leave that to California voters.

At yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing on Department of Labor reporting of green jobs, Rep. Issa pinpointed a few positions and asked if they were considered green. In particular, Issa was very troubled that retail workers in secondhand stores were counted as green because of their role in recycling/conservation.

His rhetorical point is to illustrate that green jobs numbers are inflated. So let’s finish the math for Rep. Issa.

Based on analysis from the Brookings Institution, of the 2.7 million clean energy jobs in the U.S., 25.7 percent are in manufacturing (687,000 jobs), 21.5 percent are in public administration (575,000 jobs), and 12.7 are in transportation and warehousing (341,000 jobs). 10.4 percent are professional, scientific, and technical services (279,000 jobs) and 11.2 percent are waste management (299,000 jobs).

How many are retail? 0.6 percent. Here’s a graph to illustrate that breakdown:

Interestingly, at least 42 percent of oil and gas jobs are in gas stations, offering a median hourly wage of $8.68. Green jobs have a median salary of $46,343 – roughly $7,700 more than median wages across the broader economy. They are widely distributed, creating more jobs for every million invested in every employment category of low, mid, and high credentialed jobs.

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Come July, after $4 billion lobbying, Royal Dutch Shell will be the first oil company to begin drilling in the Arctic. A new video parodies what an inauspicious start would look like for the company.

In the spoof, Shell holds a private party celebrating its new drilling venture, with a centerpiece a mini-drilling rig that would theoretically pump liquor for the guests. Instead of safely delivering the liquor as promised, Shell’s mini-rig spewed it everywhere. Not able to contain it or stem the flow, some staff tried to at least cap it from causing more damage.

The parody parallels a disturbing reality of how Big Oil — including Shell — has handled its spills:

More seriously, the poor performance at the party reminds us of the very real concerns with Shell’s plans. The Government Accountability Office has cited concerns with Shell’s spill response plan, raising questions about whether the equipment could withstand the extreme conditions.

The insurance giant Lloyd’s of London expressed major concerns with Shell’s plans, warning of a “unique and hard-to-manage risk,” and WestLB bank refused to fund a project with such excessive risks. Even if a spill doesn’t occur, taxpayers are footing the bill for the Coast Guard to monitor Shell, just to ensure the company is following the law for its billions in profit.

Related Posts:

• You Think America Has A Lot of Oil Spills? Welcome to Nigeria, “the World Capital of Oil Pollution” (8/11): “Wednesday, Shell claimed responsibility for two oil spills dating back to 2008.  And these are not your run of the mill destructive oil spills — they are estimated to exceed the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. Until yesterday, Shell had claimed less than 40,000 gallons had been spilled in Nigeria … off by a factor of 275.”

By Jessica Goad and Daniel J. Weiss

Yesterday, House Republicans led by Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) unveiled the “Domestic Energy and Jobs Act.”

It combines seven bills passed by House committees that include measures to block public health safeguards from smog and toxic air pollution, mandate drilling public lands, and punish citizens for raising concerns about harm from oil and gas production on places owned by all Americans.  It is specifically designed to increase oil and gas development.

The GOP claims that it supports an “all of the above” energy strategy.  But the McCarthy bill was announced the same day that the House passed the energy spending bill for fiscal year 2013 that slashes investments in clean energy research and deployment by more than $500 million.

Instead, the McCarthy bill focuses almost exclusively on weakening public health protections from air pollution and the expansion of oil and natural gas drilling regardless of its harms to hunting, water, or wildlife.  Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) noted that:

House Republicans are sending a love letter to the oil industry in the form of another oil-above-all scheme.

The McCarthy bill is based on a false premise – that the United States is producing too little oil and gas and that is why gasoline prices spiked earlier this year.  But this is not the case, which the facts show:

-  Oil and gas production in the United States is the highest since 1998

-  Oil imports are at their lowest since 1997

-  There are more drilling rigs in the United States than the rest of the world combined

-  Associated Press research concluded that there is “no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump.”

-  Oil and gas companies are sitting 7,000 unexplored or undeveloped leases on public lands

The ingredients of this “oil above all” agenda include the following bills.

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NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued an “El Niño Watch“ today. This chart from NOAA makes clear why that is a big deal:

Global average surface temperatures during El Niño and La Niña years.

An El Niño in the second half of 2012 would make it quite likely that 2013 would be the hottest year on record. NASA had a long discussion of this very point in a January analysis, “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects.”

NASA explains that the apparent recent slowdown in global surface temperature rise is likely to prove “illusory”:

The cool La Niña phase of the cyclically variable Southern Oscillation of tropical temperatures has been dominant in the past three years, and the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data occurred over the past half dozen years. We conclude that the slowdown of warming is likely to prove illusory, with more rapid warming appearing over the next few years.

Of course, the warming never slowed down in the place where climate science predicted 90% of the heat would go in the first place — the oceans (as discussed here).

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) doesn’t change the overall warming trend, but it is a short-term modulation, what NASA labels the largest contributor to the “natural dynamical variability” of the climate system. El Niño and La Niña are typically defined as sustained sea surface temperature anomalies (positive and negative respectively) greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean. You can read the basics about ENSO here.

NASA has some great charts to explain the impact of the solar minimum and ENSO on the recent warming trend:

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As the saying goes: When one door closes, another opens. That is certainly true of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed carbon pollution rule, which will finally shut the door on new coal plants polluting for free and open the door to more clean energy.

Power plants that burn coal for electricity are not held accountable for the “hidden” health and environmental impacts they impose on society. Recent research published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences estimates that these hidden impacts from coal-fired electricity, or “externalities”—such as land-use disturbance from mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, the release of methane and mercury contaminants into our air and water, and the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere—cost the United States between $175 billion and $523 billion per year. Likewise, a National Research Council study placed the health costs from coal-electricity generation, including a rise in respiratory illnesses, at $62 billion annually.

These costs represent a textbook economic failure that will no longer be true for new power plants once the rule goes into effect. The rule will place the first-ever limit on carbon pollution for new coal-fired power plants, reducing their carbon output by 40 percent to 60 percent.

Further, with the appropriate set of policies in place, this rule can help drive investment in clean energy by leveling the playing field with artificially cheap coal, spurring economic growth and job creation in a new clean energy economy that grew at twice the rate of the overall economy during the peak of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution.

In this column, we will argue that the carbon rule corrects longstanding failures in the energy market, protects public health, and will spur economic development in a new clean energy economy.

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Above: local ownership of a wind project in Germany accounts for half of the total economic value to a community.

I’ve always been a big believer that local ownership is one of the most important drivers of renewable energy development. There’s a reason why these technologies took off so quickly in Germany and Denmark: Much of the development was owned by farmers or communities.

Here in the U.S., opposition to wind farms and other large-scale renewable energy projects often comes from distrust of outside companies. When people perceive — rightly or wrongly — that developers are in their communities only to make a quick buck by putting industrial projects on their land, backlash ensues. And when people don’t trust the process, they’re more likely to believe claims from opponents about wind turbine syndrome, predictions of collapse in property values, and charges about corporate land grabs.

How do you combat this? Keeping development local is one of the most effective methods. And the chart above, taken from a German study on the value of localized projects, shows why. (Hat tip to John Farrell for digging it up). Notice the fourth bar in the graph. Keeping the ownership of a wind farm local accounts for half of the total economic impact over the lifetime of the project.

We often think of manufacturing as the biggest economic booster. But, according to the German study, manufacturing the materials doesn’t even provide half the value of local project ownership.

That is a very powerful indicator.

by Kiley Kroh

It’s no secret the world’s oceans are in peril.  Oceans are warming and becoming increasingly acidic. Overfishing threatens global fish populations. Sea-level rise is poised to swamp major population centers. And pollution – from oil spills and nutrient runoff to plastic water bottles to tsunami debris – continues to plague even the most remote locations.

So, how does the U.S. measure up in combatting these dangers and sustaining the economic and environmental health of our oceans and coasts?

Yesterday, the nonpartisan Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, or JOCI, released its U.S. Ocean Policy Report Card 2012 assessing the nation’s progress in implementing the National Ocean Policy. Similar to JOCI’s past report cards and recent report cards from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, the worst grades were saved for Congress.

In fact, removing the lone bright grade of an A- for state and regional efforts, the federal government accumulates a miserable GPA of 0.86.

This year’s report card focuses on development and implementation of President Obama’s National Ocean Policy, a concept that is neither new nor partisan. The concept first emerged at the National Ocean Conference in 1998 and passage of the Oceans Act in 2000 during the Clinton Administration. The policy was a cornerstone recommendation of both the independent Pew Oceans Commission, chaired by current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, whose members were appointed by President George W. Bush.

Still, the path toward implementation of the National Ocean Policy has been impeded by inadequate funding and repeated attacks from Congressional Republicans.  The policy, which is designed to streamline management of our oceans and coasts and enhance government efficiency, is now being characterized as an overreach that would spawn “job-killing regulations.”

Far from the paranoid delusions of its detractors, the National Ocean Policy is a critical step toward protecting our oceans and enhancing America’s national security and economic prosperity. As John Podesta, Chair of the Center for American Progress and Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council member explained, “When fully implemented, this bipartisan policy will pave the way for investment in sensible development and economic growth and protect some of our treasured natural resources.”

Commerce Secretary John Bryson echoed that sentiment yesterday in a speech to kick off Capitol Hill Oceans Week, saying the nation’s “blue economy” – driven by healthy oceans, coasts, and the Great Lakes – plays a “key role” in broader U.S. economic recovery and needs greater support. Read more

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, expressed cautious optimism that the upcoming Rio+20 conference will result in a “once in a generation” blueprint for global sustainable development. [Guardian]

The Rio+ 20 Earth summit could collapse after countries failed to agree on acceptable language just two weeks before 120 world leaders arrive at the biggest UN summit ever organised, WWF warned on Wednesday. [Guardian]

The energy and fishing industries along the Gulf of Mexico must begin now to adapt to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, loss of coastal wetlands, and the biological effects of warmer water temperatures, according to a report released at a news conference Wednesday by three Louisiana State University scientists. [Times-Picayune]

Gasoline prices are falling, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from attacking President Barack Obama’s energy policy. [Wall Street Journal]

A freshman Democratic senator thinks he may have found a way to encourage investment in wind, solar and biofuel projects without sapping too many taxpayer dollars or injecting new venom into a bitter partisan battle over energy incentives. [Reuters]

At the same time that high crop prices are prompting farmers to expand into millions of acres of land once considered unsuitable for farming, Congress is considering expanding a federal insurance program that reimburses farmers for most losses or drops in prices. [New York Times]

Garbage is heaping high around the world. According to the World Bank, many cities now devote more resources to coping with their trash than to any other single task. [Wonk Blog]