For Litany Of U.S. Cities, 2012 Temperatures Are Unprecedented

JR: Here are two Climate Central pieces on the amazing heat waves that hit the country.

Year-to-Date divisional temperature rankings from NOAA. Click on image for a larger version.

by Andrew Freedman, via Climate Central

Four major heat records fell in a stunning new climate report from NOAA on Thursday. The lower 48 states set temperature records for the warmest spring, largest seasonal departure from average, warmest year-to-date, and warmest 12-month period, all new marks since records began in 1895. While the globe has been tracking slightly cooler than recent years — thanks in part to the influence of now dissipated La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific — the U.S. has been sizzling.

The average springtime temperature in the lower 48 was so far above the 1901-2000 average — 5.2°F, to be exact — that the country set a record for the largest temperature departure for any season on record since 1895.

Spring 2012 beat 1910, which had held the title for record warm spring, by a healthy margin of 2°F. No doubt much of this was driven by the massive heat wave that gripped the country during March, but unusual warmth continued during April and May, albeit not as intense. Such warming trends are consistent with both the influence of manmade global warming, particularly the prevalence of record warm nighttime temperatures, and natural variability has also favored warmer-than-average conditions so far this year. Studies show that as greenhouse gases continue to increase in the atmosphere, the odds of heat extremes are growing as well.

Climate Extremes Index showing 2012 has had the most extreme weather to date for any year on record. Credit: NCDC.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, the spring of 2012 “was the culmination of the warmest March, third warmest April, and second warmest May. This marks the first time that all three months during the spring season ranked among the 10 warmest, since records began in 1895.”

Des Moines, Iowa offers a case study of just how warm it’s been. The year-to-date there has averaged a whopping 8 degrees F above average, with many other cities across the country tracking close to that figure as well. Read more

JR: No, Master Limited Partnerships are not when Jerry, George, Elaine and Cosmo engage in The Contest. CAP‘s Acting Vice President for Energy Policy explains they are less fun, but much more useful!

by Richard W. Caperton

For years, the oil and gas industry has claimed that it only receives tax benefits that are available to every other company.  This is, of course, patently false.  From special treatments of royalties to so-called “percentage depletion,” fossil fuel businesses benefit from all sort of unique provisions that aren’t available to anyone else, including renewable energy companies.

Yesterday, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) introduced legislation that would be an important step forward in fixing this imbalance.  The MLP Parity Act allows renewable energy companies to receive a special tax treatment that has been the exclusive purview of fossil fuel companies for decades.  Not only will the MLP Parity Act bring some balance to the energy marketplace, but it would also allow more Americans to invest in renewable energy.

At issue is something called “master limited partnerships.”  (Yes, I’m aware that this name is potentially a bigger turn-off than “feed-in tariff.”  Energy finance policy clearly wasn’t designed with mass marketing in mind.  Please bear with me.)  A master limited partnership is a form of corporate structure, just like the better-known limited liability company or C-Corporation, that has unique tax attributes.  MLP’s are a type of partnership and, like other partnerships, they don’t pay a corporate income tax.  Instead, all of the earnings pass directly through to the partners, who then pay taxes on the income.

What makes MLP’s a unique type of partnership is that they’re publicly traded on the stock market.  The general public and other investors can buy a share in an MLP, whereas buying a share in traditional partnerships (like law firms, for example) is virtually impossible.

There are two clear benefits to being organized as an MLP rather than a traditional corporation: It lowers both the cost of taxation and the cost of capital.

Read more

Swanksalot, via Flickr

by Thom Cmar, via NRDC’s Switchboard

This week we released a report, Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal Fired Power Plants in the Great Lakes Region, which highlights the impacts of mercury emissions from Great Lakes power plants on the people, fish, birds, and wildlife of our region.  EPA recently issued new nationwide Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that require power plants to cut their mercury emissions by 90% on average, as well as to make similar cuts to their emissions of arsenic, lead, acid gases, and other toxic air pollution.

Our report focuses on the 144 coal-fired power plants in the Great Lakes region, and names the 25 worst emitters, which were responsible for putting over 7,000 pounds of mercury into the air in 2010.  Mercury emissions from power plants in the Great Lakes region account for close to 25% of the nation’s mercury emissions total.  Mercury is so highly toxic that exposure to even very small amounts in fish has serious implications for public health, and especially our children’s health.  And mercury fish consumption advisories depress the Great Lakes’ multi-billion dollar fishing economy.

Mercury is a dangerous brain poison that doesn’t belong in our Great Lakes. It puts the health of kids and pregnant women at risk and adds an unwelcome danger to eating what our fishermen catch. That’s why it is so important that we support the EPA’s standards to reduce mercury pollution by holding polluters accountable.  Even more critical is that every single US Senator from the region stand up for the Lakes by rejecting reckless attempts to derail the long overdue Clean Air Act updates that can help tame this problem.

EPA’s authority to adopt these critical safeguards goes back to 1990, when the first President Bush signed amendments to the Clean Air Act that were passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress and directed EPA to set standards on major sources such as power plants.   But now, twenty-two years later, Congress is seeking to roll back these and other basic provisions of the Clean Air and Clean Water Act that have protected our health and environment for decades.

Next week we expect that there will be a vote in the U.S. Senate on a resolution that would void EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and permanently block EPA from re-issuing similar safeguards.  At stake in this vote are the thousands of lives that would be saved every year by the EPA standards and the hundreds of thousands of avoided respiratory illnesses and lost work days.

Many power companies support EPA’s standards, along with doctors, nurses, scientists, and public health professionals.  We have all known for years that these standards were imminent, and many companies have already invested millions to reduce their mercury and toxic air emissions.  Meanwhile, other industries have worked hard to clean up their own pollution.  Rolling back EPA’s power plant standards now would unfairly penalize companies that have invested money to modernize their plants, while granting amnesty to the laggards that disregarded the law and kept polluting and harming our children’s health.  Many of the plants have been operating for decades without modern pollution controls.  It’s long overdue for these polluters to clean up their act and stop demanding that we subsidize their plants with our lungs.

Thom Cmar is an attorney at the National Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at Switchboard and is reprinted with permission.

by Max Frankel

Sadly, those who have contributed the least to climate change will suffer the most because of it.

Any global deal on reducing emissions will require developed countries to step up and help developing nations adapt and mitigate climate change. Hence, the importance of the green fund negotiated at last December’s UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

Recognizing the importance of “climate justice,” individual countries are stepping up and creating their own funds to assist developing countries.  In Scotland this week, First Minister Alex Salmond and former Irish President Mary Robinson announced a multi-million Euro fund for water access projects in Africa.

Scotland is committing £3 million, one million every year for the next three years, to projects in Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia in an effort to help residents of those nations gain more access to precious water resources. Leaders are also encouraging other nations to follow suit.

At the announcement, First Minister Salmond proclaimed: “In launching this fund we are all too aware that one country cannot win the battle against climate change alone. Collective action is not an option but an imperative, and we need to ensure our actions and our message inspires others to act.”

Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said during the announcement that “(c)reating a new narrative based on climate justice, which amplifies the voices of the vulnerable, can inject the necessary urgency and ambition into the international negotiations…”

One such negotiation took place in Durban in 2011. The main outcome from those talks was “the creation of a new Durban Platform for Enhanced Mitigation starting a new negotiating track that must produce a legal agreement by 2015, which is later open for ratification.”

Already, international collaboration on climate financing exists in the form of the Fast Start Financing initiative. The nations involved in the initiative pledged $30 billion annually from 2009-2012 and plan to contribute $100 billion annually starting in 2020. In order to make such lofty spending goals a reality, the Center for American Progress recommends a ”‘ramp-up’ period to increase public and private investment from 2013 to 2020 designed to bridge the gap between the ‘fast start finance’ period… and the target for $100 billion in climate finance by 2020.”

This way, by setting practical targets, the 2020 goal is far more attainable. Scotland is not involved in the Fast Start period, a fact which makes their commitment to international climate financing all the more admirable.

Developing nations pledged in 2009 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050, and the capital raised through international climate financing can go a long way to achieving that goal.

Max Frankel is an intern with the energy team at the Center for American Progress. CAP’s International Policy Analyst Rebecca Lefton contributed to this report.

Courtesy of AP

by Molly Peterson, excerpted from Science Progress.

An op-ed written by two Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, or WHOI, scientists in The Boston Globe this week is heating up a debate about how chilly legal scrutiny can be when it comes to ocean science.

Back in 2010 marine geochemist Chris Reddy and environmental engineer Richard Camilli pinged the plume of spilt oil in Gulf Coast waters with sonar. Remote-operated vehicles thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface helped tell them where the oil was. They analyzed the makeup of that subsurface plume to figure out what kind of light, aromatic hydrocarbons were in it. They calculated an average flow rate of 57,000 barrels of oil a day, for a total release of 4.9 million barrels of oil.

That last part is the sticky wicket. Spilling oil in federal waters tends to yield fines, and in this case, quite large ones. The outcome of federal and scientific calculations is worth billions of dollars, and as a result, BP has been very interested in making Reddy, Camilli, and other researchers show their work.

Now Reddy and Camilli write that they’ve handed over 3,000 emails they call confidential at the demand of BP and under court order. They sure don’t like having to do it. What’s in there anyway? As the authors explained in the op-ed:

In reviewing our private documents, BP will probably find email correspondence showing that during the course of our analysis, we hit dead-ends; that we remained skeptical and pushed one another to analyze data from various perspectives; that we discovered weaknesses in our methods (if only to find ways to make them stronger); or that we modified our course, especially when we received new information that provided additional insight and caused us to re-examine hypotheses and methods.

Read more

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

Carmakers will have to slash the carbon emissions of new cars sold in Europe by a  third by 2020, according to leaked European Commission documents seen by the Guardian. [Guardian]

Bloggers and TV comics have ridiculed it, and now state legislators will get their first chance Thursday to debate unusual legislation that would put tight restrictions on how state and local agencies cope with rising sea levels. [News Observer]

Melting ice cellars and rotting whale meat, the arrival of beaver fever in a once-pristine land, and water supplies that might go dry are just a few of the health risks posed by climate change in the Arctic. [Alaska Dispatch]

Evidence continues to mount that melting Arctic ice is having a significant effect in the mid-latitudes, where most people live, and it’s not something that’s going to take decades to develop. [Summit County Citizens Voice]

Authorities say a gas drilling operation in the Sardis, W.Va. area hit an aquifer and inadvertently re-pressurized a handful of old water wells Wednesday, creating a backyard geyser at least 10 feet high and several smaller gushers. [Associated Press]

In a project that aimed to analyze public perceptions of global warming, the researchers focused on ‘psychological distance’ in prompting people to go greener and the significance of uncertainty as justification for inaction. [phys.org]

Mali and neighboring Niger are facing swarms of locusts, which were left uncontrolled while Libya and Algeria, which normally keep local locusts from moving south, grappled with conflicts and insecurity of their own. [Los Angeles Times]