This is a review of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines by Michael Mann.

by Chris Mooney, via Desmogblog

I first became familiar with the name Michael Mann in the year 2003. I was working on what would become my book The Republican War on Science, and had learned of two related events: The controversy over the Soon and Baliunas paper in Climate Research, purporting to refute Mann and his colleagues’ famous 1998 “hockey stick” study; and a congressional hearing convened by Senator James Inhofe, at which Mann testified. Inhofe tried to wheel out the Soon and Baliunas work as if they’d dealt some sort of killer blow against climate science. In fact, just before the hearing, several editors of Climate Research had resigned over the paper.

I went on to stand up for Mann, and his work, in Republican War. Little did I know, at the time, that he himself would become the leading defender of his scientific field against political attacks.

Recently, Mann came out with a new book about his travails entitled The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines, detailing his decade long battle against political attacks and misrepresentations. The response has been all too predictable. For months, conservatives have been giving it one star reviews on Amazon.com, some of which suggest that they probably haven’t read it.

What is most fascinating to me is that the science the right is attacking Mann over—principally, the 1998 hockey stick study and its 1999 extension, as prominently exhibited in 2001 by the IPCC—is relatively old news. Indeed, and as Mann himself explains in the book, “attacks against the hockey stick …were not really about the work itself.” That work has been supported by other researchers—there is now a veritable “hockey team,” Mann notes—and anyways, the case for human caused global warming never depended on the validity of the hockey stick alone. It was always just one part of a far broader body of evidence.

Thus, conservatives who fixated on Mann, and continue to do so, tell us through their own actions that this is not really about scientific inquiry at all. If it was, then they’d be doing something quite different from giving Mann one star Amazon reviews.

But of course, climate researchers have been making observations like these for years. It hasn’t mattered nearly as much as it should, though, because they’ve often lacked the communication skills to get their point across. If anything, their scientific training has tended to hobble them in a brass knuckles fight such as this one. And that, to me, is where Mann’s new book matters the most: It shows that he has developed the communication skills to match his unquestionable scientific talent—and moreover, that he has done so because the right forced him to.

That’s why Mann is such an inspiring example for all who care about the climate issue—and why his book is required reading. From the early “hockey stick” battles all the way up through “ClimateGate” and the Ken Cuccinelli inquiry, Mann didn’t give an inch. He didn’t back down; to the contrary, he showed what toughness actually means. And in the process, from the founding of RealClimate.org in 2004 up through the publication of this book, he evolved into a passionate communicator and advocate. Having had him on my podcast Point of Inquiry and heard him lecture, I can assure you that many scientists should take a lesson from him. Read more

by Paul Schwabe, via the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Until recently, the low-income housing community has been a tough nut for the solar industry to crack.

Low-income housing developments have historically avoided going solar due to the obvious difficulties of incorporating high-cost, discretionary photovoltaic (PV) systems into affordable housing. However, a unique mix of local, utility, and federal support combined with a little financial creativity allowed a community in Colorado to demonstrate the application of PV into a low-income housing program.

Here’s how it worked.

Figure 1. Solar PV and a low-income housing development in Denver, Colorado [1]

It Takes a Village

In northeast Denver, Colorado, a partnership of community stakeholders came together to pilot the first U.S. low-income housing project to take on solar. The partnership itself was a large and diverse collaboration of various interests groups. No less than six organizations were involved in the effort, including:

Read more

AP/ David J. Phillip

By Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

Two essential Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, regulations to protect children, seniors, the infirm, and others from air pollution are under attack from the coal industry and many utilities.

Last year the EPA issued two rules that would reduce smog, acid rain, and airborne toxic chemicals: the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.

On July 6, 2011, the EPA finalized the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution—two of the main ingredients in acid rain and smog—from power plants in upwind states that were polluting downwind states. An interactive EPA map demonstrates that pollution doesn’t stop at state borders.

Then, on December 16, 2011, the EPA finalized the first standards to reduce mercury, arsenic, lead, and other toxic air pollution 21 years after controls on such pollution became law.

Today more than 130 coal companies, electric utilities, trade associations, other polluting industries, and states are suing the EPA in federal court to obliterate, undermine, or delay these essential health protection standards. A parallel effort is underway to block the mercury reduction rule in the Senate, which is scheduled to vote on it this week. This CAP investigation found that these utilities were responsible for 33,000 pounds of mercury and 6.5 billion pounds of smog and acid rain pollution in 2010 alone.

This brief takes a closer look at these utilities’ lawsuits against the EPA. The paper explains the public health and economic benefits of the rules and utility companies’ efforts to block them. We also look at how heavily these companies are spending to convince lawmakers to block the rules. The courts and Congress should support public health protections and “just say no” to these dirty efforts.

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, and Jackie Weidman is Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. This is a cross-post.

Thanks to John Walke, clean air director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council; the American Lung Association; and Celine Ramstein, former intern with CAP’s Energy Policy Team.

Download this issue brief (pdf)

Read the full brief in your web browser (Scribd)

View full list of companies and organizations suing the EPA over pollution rules (xls)

Read letter from Daniel J. Weiss to UARG members about this issue brief (doc)

The surge in U.S. production of shale gas is creating a surge in permit requests to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals. That’s because the glut of U.S. gas has dropped domestic prices sharply below global price levels.

But if avoiding catastrophic climate change is your goal, then spending huge sums on even conventional natural gas infrastructure is not the answer, as a recent International Energy Agency report made clear:

The specific emissions from a gas-fired power plant will be higher than average global CO2 intensity in electricity generation by 2025, raising questions around the long-term viability of some gas infrastructure investment if climate change objectives are to be met.

And liquefying natural gas is an energy intensive and leaky process. When you factor in shipping overseas, you get an energy penalty of 20% or more. The extra greenhouse gas emissions can equal 30% or more of combustion emissions, according to a 2009 Reference Report by the Joint Research Centreof the European Commission, Liquefied Natural Gas for Europe – Some Important Issues for Consideration.

Such extra emissions all but eliminate whatever small, short-term benefit there might be of building billion-dollar export terminals and other LNG infrastructure, which in any case will last many decades, long after the electric grid will not benefit from replacing coal with gas.

Furthermore, the U.S. Energy Information Administration concluded in a 2012 report on natural gas exports done for DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy that such exports would also increase domestic greenhouse gas emissions:

[W]hen also accounting for emissions related to natural gas used in the liquefaction process, additional exports increase CO2 levels under all cases and export scenarios, particularly in the earlier years of the projection period.

Asserting any net benefit for the importer requires assuming the new gas replaces only coal — and isn’t used for, say, natural gas vehicles, which are worse for the climate or that it doesn’t replace new renewables.  If even a modest fraction of the imported LNG displaces renewables, it renders the entire expenditure for LNG counterproductive from day one.

Remember, a major new 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study on “technology warming potentials” (TWPs) found that a big switch from coal to gas would only reduce TWP by about 25% over the first three decades (see “Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere Absent A Carbon Price AND Strong Standards To Reduce Methane Leakage“). And that is based on “EPA’s latest estimate of the amount of CH4 released because of leaks and venting in the natural gas network between production wells and the local distribution network” of 2.4%. Many experts believe the leakage rate is higher than 2.4%, particularly for shale gas. Also, recent air sampling by NOAA over Colorado found 4% methane leakage, more than double industry claims.

A different 2012 study by climatologist Ken Caldeira and tech guru Nathan Myhrvold finds basically no benefit in the switch whatsoever — see You Can’t Slow Projected Warming With Gas, You Need ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power.

So spending vast sums of money to export natural gas from this country is a bad idea for the climate.  A new paper published last week by Brooking’s Hamilton Project, “A Strategy for U.S. Natural Gas Exports,” asserts a different conclusion, primarily because it ignores all of the issues discussed above. Indeed, the paper rather amazingly asserts “Natural gas, though, has the same climate consequences whether it is burned in the United States, Europe, or Asia,” which would be true for exported U.S. gas only if we could use magic to take the U.S. shale gas and put it into European or Asian gas-fired power plants. In the real world, it takes a massive amount of energy and greenhouse gas emissions to get gas from here to those markets, as is well known in the climate policy arena.

BOTTOM LINE: Investing billions of dollars in new shale gas infrastructure for domestic use is, at best, of limited value for a short period of time if we put in place both a CO2 price and regulations to minimize methane leakage. Exporting gas vitiates even that limited value and so investing billions in LNG infrastructure is, at best, a waste of resources better utilized for deploying truly low-carbon energy. At worst, it helps accelerates the world past the 2°C warming threshold into Terra incognita — a planet of amplifying feedbacks and multiple simultaneous catastrophic impacts.

Eutrophication&hypoxia, via Flickr

by Jamie Henn, via The Huffington Post

How can world leaders at the Rio+20 Earth Summit next week show that they are serious about sustainable development and environmental protection? The answer is simple: end fossil fuel subsidies.

Every year, governments around the world give nearly $1 trillion dollars of public money to the fossil fuel industry. Three years ago, the G20 committed to phase-out these handouts to coal, oil and gas companies, but they haven’t taken any action since.

Now is the perfect time. This June 18, finance ministers and heads of state from G20 countries will come together in Los Cabos, Mexico. Three days later, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers will join over 50,000 people at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest environmental conference in world history. Both meetings offer a clear opportunity for world leaders to step up to the plate and stop these outrageous handouts.

After all, how can you have a serious discussion about funding sustainable development without taking on the hundreds of billions of dollars handed over to the fossil fuel sector each year? A mere fraction of these subsidies could jumpstart thousands of clean energy projects around the world. Large scale transfers of money from dirty to clean investments could catalyze the type of worldwide energy transformation that is desperately needed.

It’s still unclear if leaders will take the type of bold action necessary, but the push to end fossil fuel subsidies is gaining momentum around the world. On June 18, a dozen major groups — from World Wildlife Fund to Avaaz — are taking part in a 24-hour “Twitter Storm” to try and flood the online airwaves with the #endfossilfuelsubsidies hashtag. The coalition may even be within striking distance of taking down Justin Bieber’s twitter world record for the most tweets on a single hashtag.

The slogan for the Rio+20 meetings is, “The Future We Want.” By next week, we’ll know if our politicians have lived up to that promise or once again bought into “The Future Exxon Wants,” a world where our tax dollars continue to get sucked up by the world’s richest corporations so that they can continue to profit from destroying the planet.

Jamie Henn is the Co-founder and Communications Director at 350.0rg. This piece was originally published at The Huffington Post and was reprinted with permission.

F. Herbert Bormann, the Yale and Dartmouth ecologist who discovered Acid Rain in 1971, died June 7th at the age of 90. Acid rain has become one of the most ubiquitous impacts of industrial pollution and has served as a rallying point for eco-activists and a catalyst for governmental environmental action, such as the Clean Air Act.

Acid rain is caused by increased levels of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides in the air, primarily due to smokestack emissions. In 1971, Bormann discovered that the water in the New Hampshire forest where he was conducting his research was considerably more acidic than normal. Subsequent tests showed that the acidity of water all over the east coast had increased up to 1,000 percent since the 1950s.

Bormann and others chronicled the effects of acid rain. Plants suffer problems with leaves and bark when subjected to acidic water many vital soil microbes can’t survive in such conditions. The changing pH of rivers and lakes can lead to a number of well documented problems in fish and other aquatic animals.  In certain pHs, fish eggs wont open and insects die en mass. The brook trout has been largely eliminated from the Adirondack region because of increased water acidity. Humans can also suffer serious health consequences when we consume food tainted by acid rain.

The widespread problem of acid rain was sharply reduced to a great extent by the institution of a cap and trade system. In 1990, after a 10 year study into the issue, Congress passed the Clean Air Act (Dr. Bormann testified at the hearings). Title IV of the act established decreasing caps on sulfur dioxide emissions and allowed companies and power plants to determine for themselves how they would comply with the law.

The Acid Rain Program has been hailed as a great success for the EPA. The EPA exceeded its long term sulfur dioxide goal in 2010 and SO2 emissions levels have dropped 40% since the 1990s. Acid rain levels have dropped 65% since 1976. Evidence also suggests that  annual emissions of sulfur dioxide were reduced by 8 million tons, nitrous oxide by 2.7 million tons, and mercury by 10 tons, thanks to the cap and trade program.

Mitt Romney, along with scores of other conservatives, has decried cap and trade programs for raising costs of production by forcing companies to control their pollution. According to Mr. Romney, the EPA has “endless new regulations touching on countless other forms of economic activity—regulations that drive up costs, hinder investment, and destroy jobs”. He went on to say that “there are other people who would like to put in place a cap-and-trade program and dramatically increase the cost of energy. That’s their view. And by the way, that would kill a lot of jobs.”

However, Mark Leavitt, the man who would lead Romney’s transition team if he were to win the coming election, doesn’t agree with the presumptive nominee on this issue:

We need to take the giant step toward national market-based solutions; to do that we need only look to our own experience. That is exactly what we’re doing with cap and trade. The cap and trade strategy was key to the breakthrough against acid rain. It is central to Clear Skies. The cap and trade approach shows us again and again that people do more and they do it faster when they have an incentive to do what’s in the public’s interest.

Acid rain is still a problem, as is industrial pollution in general. But since the 1970s, and primarily after the Clean Air Act, great strides have been taken to reduce the number and intensity of acid rain occurrences. The project has been, for the most part, a success and the lessons learned from the cap and trade initiative should be applied elsewhere.

Related Post:

• Why did environmentalists pursue cap-and-trade and was it a doomed strategy?

Max Frankel is a senior at Vassar College and an intern at the Center for American Progress.

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

The wildfire in Colorado continues to rage, 9 days after it was first sparked. The destruction toll so far is one death, 181 homes and 55,050 acres destroyed, with 1,200 evacuation notices still in place. Climate scientists have said for years that climate change worsens the intensity and frequency of wildfires. Colorado’s “severe to extreme” drought conditions have only worsened the conditions. [LA Times]

In Norfolk, Virginia’s second-largest city, with 250,000 residents, Faella’s concerns aren’t the isolated fears of one woman living on the river’s edge. The entire city is worried. [Washington Post]

Prince Charles delivered a climate warning to Rio+20: “Like a sleepwalker, we seem unable to wake up to the fact that so many of the catastrophic consequences of carrying on with ‘business-as-usual’ are bearing down on us faster than we think, already dragging many millions more people into poverty and dangerously weakening global food, water and energy security for the future.” [BBC]

The Bakken formation’s oil bonanza was triggered eons ago in a story involving a cast of millions, earthly upheavals, heat and pressure — lots and lots of pressure. It’s actually a very depressing story. In a good way. Good for oil development, at least. [AP]

Senators in both parties are trying to use the farm bill to go after EPA regulations and permits as a potential last-ditch effort to affect agency policy before the election. The amendments range from the usual moves against the agency’s renewable fuels mandate and so-called farm dust controls to efforts to limit pesticide permits and boost the power of the agency’s liaison to farmers. [Politico]

Finally, Romney used weather metaphors on his bus tour this weekend to signal “brighter days ahead” for the country, if Romney won in November. If Romney enacts his fossil fueled vision for America, the future would be anything but bright. [National Journal]

Gage Skidmore, via Flickr

by Shauna Theel, via Media Matters

Donald Trump recently declared on CNBC that “Saudi Arabia is doing Obama a big fat favor” by increasing oil production in order to bring gasoline prices down, and that if Obama is re-elected the “favor will be repaid many times over.” Fox Nation took this conspiracy even further, calling it a “SECRET SAUDI OIL DEAL TO WIN REELECTION”; Real Clear Politics, Breitbart.com, and Newsmax also promoted Trump’s comments.

This has put conservatives in the bizarre position of claiming that Obama is nefariously lowering gasoline prices in order to help the economy and win re-election, after previously claiming that Obama was trying to raise gas prices.

And the claim that there is a “SECRET” “DEAL” is ridiculous: it is public knowledge that the U.S. has pressured Saudi Arabia to boost its oil output. The administration’s apparent success in doing so undercuts Trump’s previous attack that the Saudis were not ramping up production because Obama was a poor “messenger” or was too busy on “his basketball court” or something.

The Saudis have no incentive to do “Obama a big fat favor” unless it is in their own self-interest. As the Washington Post reported, energy economist Phillip Vergeler believes that Saudi Arabia is trying to “stay in the good graces of United States and Europe” by providing “economic stimulus,” but they are also acting in order to slow down shale production in North America and put pressure on Iran.

Vergeler explained that Saudi Arabia is concerned about Iran’s nuclear program and “The Saudis know that lower [oil] prices are a much better way to put pressure on Iran than sanctions.” And the Wall Street Journal reported that a senior executive at a major oil company believes that Saudi Arabia’s “desire to harm Iran … may trump any budgetary concerns of its own” because the Saudis are able to “run deficits for years without any impairment to their triple A position.” Furthermore, consultant Robert McNally told the Washington Post that “Iranians accuse Saudi Arabia of exploiting sanctions to steal Iran’s market share.”

Sadly, the ramblings of Donald Trump, a man best known for shouting “You’re fired!” at C-list celebrities and generating birtherpalooza, are being put forward by the media as serious political commentary and covered by the broadcast news networks more than climate change.

Shauna Theel is a contributing writer for Media Matters. This piece was originally published at Media Matters and was reprinted with permission.