On Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is holding hearings to provide an “update” on climate science. While presumably the Senators will discuss the new Koch-funded study that changed a prominent climate change “skeptic’s” mind, the Republicans on the Committee probably won’t want to hear it.

Almost to a man, the GOP Senators on this key committee have consistently denied the brute fact that humans are causing climate change and/or worked to obstruct any possible solution to the mess we’re making:

1. James Inhofe, Oklahoma: Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Committee, is one of America’s most famous climate deniers. He has written a book alleging that climate science is a conspiracy “perpetrated” by the United Nations and that any climate change that is happening is part of God’s irreversible plan for the Earth. When confronted with the fact that 97% of climate science accepted anthropogenic warming, he – surprise! – denied it.

2. David Vitter, Louisiana: Vitter has referred to evidence for climate change as “ridiculous pseudo-science garbage” and, though his home state was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and is at serious risk from future warming-caused storms, attempted to block federal funding for efforts to mitigate the worst byproducts of global warming.

3. John Barrasso, Wyoming: Barrasso appeared on Glenn Beck’s show to suggest he had a “smoking gun” suggesting the attempt to regulate CO2 emissions was simply an EPA power grab. Relatedly, Barrasso claimed the EPA’s main goal was no longer protecting the environment, but rather “remaking society,” and introduced legislation stripping the agency’s power to regulate carbon emissions.

4. Jeff Sessions, Alabama: Senator Sessions reserved his strongest ire for congressional regulation of carbon pollution, calling cap-and-trade a “conceit” that “we can manage the climate.” He has also, in the process of denying the moral importance of addressing the consequences of global warming, described CO2 as “a naturally occurring gas that plants breathe and they can’t grow without” as if that were some sort of evidence that it couldn’t harm the environment (which, of course, it isn’t.)

5. Mike Crapo, Idaho: Crapo’s official website features a page full of misinformation about climate science, claiming among other things that “the underlying cause of…climactic shifts is ultimately not well-understood” and implying that “[n]atural factors such as solar activity, volcanic eruptions and orbital changes” may explain our current period of warming (nope). He has also decried air pollution and then, in the same breath advocated expanded oil drilling in the United States.

6. Mike Johans, Nebraska: Like his compatriots, Johans has rejected the scientific consensus of anthropogenic warming, calling it “contested science.” Johans was also the author of a procedural maneuver designed explicitly to block the majority from overriding Republican obstructionism on cap-and-trade.

7. Lamar Alexander, Tennessee: Alexander is a comparative standout from the group – he believes climate change is both real, anthropogenic, and a serious problem – but that’s only if you’re grading on a curve. He opposed cap-and-trade but voted to block the EPA from regulating emissions because “that’s Congress’ job.” Though he appears to think a carbon tax is a somewhat better alternative, he has dithered on any real action to try to implement it.

There’s nothing about being a Republican or a conservative that requires legislators to be this blinkered about the climate change crisis: Former GOP Representative Bob Inglis recently founded an initiative to develop and push Republican ideas for pricing carbon.

Unfortunately, the vitriolic reaction to similar ideas from the Republican establishment and the views of the GOP leaders most responsible for establishing the party’s position on the global warming crisis suggests that we’ll have to wait for some time for Republican sanity on climate change.

Second-Quarter Earnings Race Ahead, Boosted by Tax Breaks

by Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

Middle-class families may have gotten some relief in the second quarter of 2012 due to slightly lower gasoline prices compared to the first quarter of the year, but billions of dollars in big profits continue to pile up at the Big Oil companies. In the first half of 2012, the five biggest oil companies—BP plc, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil Corp., and Royal Dutch Shell Group—earned a combined $62.2 billion, or $341 million per day. This compares to an average dip in the average price of gas at the pump for American consumers of a mere 3 cents per gallon between the first and second quarters.

Despite slightly lower oil and gasoline prices over the past three months, these companies still made a combined $236,000 per minute this year. This income is more than what 96 percent of American households earn in an entire year.

Profits continued to grow for ExxonMobil and Chevron, while dropping slightly for ConocoPhillips and Shell compared to last year. ExxonMobil saw a 67 percent increase in profits while Chevron enjoyed an 11 percent increase. The New York Times reported that these slightly lower profits compared to the second quarter of 2011 were linked to “international benchmark prices for oil [which] had declined by more than 7 percent in the second quarter, compared to the same period last year when turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East caused a spike in oil prices.

BP, the second-largest oil company in Europe, reported a loss of $1.4 billion for the second quarter of 2012. The Associated Press reported that BP said:

The underlying results were depressed by weaker oil and U.S. gas prices together with reductions in output due to extensive planned maintenance, particularly affecting high-margin production from the Gulf of Mexico.

Without BP, profits for the other big four companies are only 4 percent lower compared to the first quarter of 2012. Despite the 7 percent decline in oil prices, second-quarter 2012 gasoline prices were only 2 percent lower than the second quarter of 2011.

The huge earnings this quarter for four of the companies follow the big five companies’ record profit of $137 billion in 2011—amounting to $375 million per day—thanks again to high oil and gasoline prices. ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips were the first-, second-, and 13th-most profitable public U.S. companies in 2011, respectively.

What are these companies doing with this treasure? Some of these funds provide their $72 billion in cash reserves. And these five companies used 31 percent of their 2012 profits to buy back their own stock, which enriches shareholders but doesn’t add to oil supplies or investments in alternative fuels or other new technologies. ExxonMobil spent 42 percent of their profits repurchasing their own stock. Even with these huge earnings and large cash reserves, however, these companies produced 6 percent less oil than one year ago. (see table) Read more

As our climate warms, wet areas will generally get wetter (and dry areas drier). One of the consequences of global warming is the severity and frequency of rain and snow storms – fueled by the increase moisture in the atmosphere as the air warms.

A new report released by Environment America Research & Policy Center analyzed more than 80 million daily precipitation records across the United States from 1948 through 2011. The analysis reveals that climate change is now affecting the large rain or snowstorms.

The following are highlights from the report:

• Extreme downpours – rainstorms and snow falls … are now happening 30 percent more often on average across the contiguous United States than in 1948.
• New England has experienced the greatest change with intense rainstorms now happening 85 percent more often than in 1948.
• Not only are extreme downpours more frequent, but they are more intense. The total amount of precipitation produced by the largest storm in each year at each station increase by 10 percent over the period of analysis, on average across the contiguous United States.

Just like a baseball player on steroids hitting more homeruns, climate change is weather on steroids and industrial pollution if fueling the extreme weather. Though we are experiencing droughts due to the U.S. southwest and southeast drying out, precipitation is increasingly concentrated into heavy downpours space further apart.

The fingerprint of climate change can be clearly identified with the increase and severity of rain and snowstorms.

The report explains that due to humans increasing emissions of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere – including pollution from fossil fuels – warmer temperatures in the atmosphere cause more evaporation. With warm air sitting in the atmosphere holding more water, when it rain – it pours ultimately intensifying the water cycle.

Another finding in the report is that 43 states showed statistical “significant” increase in the frequency of extreme storms. The authors define “significant” as a high probability the trend is real based on statistical analysis. The map below identifies the regions of the U.S. and recognizes the increase in frequency of rain and snowstorms:

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by Robert J. Brulle, excerpted from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In a summer dominated by heat waves and a devastating nationwide drought, it would seem that climate change would be a major issue in the US presidential campaign. However, quite the opposite is happening. Neither President Barack Obama nor the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, has focused any attention on this critical issue.

In a recent speech on the Senate floor, Senator John Kerry characterized the political discourse in the United States as a “conspiracy of silence … a story of disgraceful denial, back-pedaling, and delay that has brought us perilously close to a climate change catastrophe.” This silence means that we can expect further delays in addressing climate change, delays that we cannot afford.

Presidential politics. Both presidential campaigns have ignored climate change on their web sites. The Romney site advocates vigorous energy development of coal, gas, oil, and nuclear power. Obama’s site focuses on an “all of the above” energy strategy, which advocates the development of all energy sources, including “clean” coal and alternative energy. The statements by the candidates echo this approach….

Public concern. The failure of either candidate to address climate change has had a significant effect on the level of public concern about this issue. Social science research shows that public opinion is heavily influenced by cues from elites — for example, statements issued by prominent politicians and their parties. Citizens use media coverage of controversial issues to gauge the positions of elites they find credible, and then interpret the news based on ideology and party identifications. In a recent study, my colleagues and I found partisan statements to be the largest single factor explaining the ups and downs of public worries about the threat of climate change — and a much more important factor than extreme weather events….

To read the entire piece, go to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Robert J. Brulle is a Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science at Drexel University.

Related Post:

• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”

Indian children read without power as a consequence of blackouts.

More than 600 million people in the northern and eastern parts of India lost power on Tuesday, putting roughly half of India’s population in the dark.

While the specific causes behind the mass blackouts remain unclear, the underlying cause is clear – India is reliant on an aging, inefficient government coal power monopoly that can’t meet the country’s energy needs:

Some analysts said public outrage over the widespread outages may force Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government to tackle reforms in the crisis-riddled power sector. Fuel shortages are crippling coal and gas-fired plants, forcing them to run below capacity or shut down for long stretches; state utilities have billions of dollars of accumulated losses; and, as has been on stark display, the nation’s creaky grid needs upgrading.

“Unless this government wants to commit political suicide, there’s no way they can ignore this,” said Abhey Yograj, managing director of Tecnova, a consulting firm that advises foreign companies on India.

While some are suggesting that increasing domestic coal production is the necessary next step in addressing India’s power problems, it’s not so clear that’s the case. One of the principal barriers to cheap coal production is environmental protection, and for good reason: The IMF estimates that coal pollution kills about 70,000 Indians per year and development of coal in India (and China) is undermining efforts to decrease global carbon emissions. Further, Indian coal development can create underground fires that cause houses to fall into the earth and fuels the corruption in the Indian energy sector that’s holding back meaningful reform. Solar power is actually less expensive than diesel in India and renewables more broadly are becoming increasingly plausible alternatives to expanded coal development.

In fact, the Indian government is pushing a National Solar Mission aimed at generating 12.5 % of India’s total electricity from renewable resources by 2020. By the end of 2012, the Solar Mission called for 810 megawatts of installed panels, but, according to a recently released report, India passed the 1 gigawatt mark in June of this year, a full 6 months ahead of the plan for 22 gigawatts by 2022. The report also found that India had only about 506 megawatts of installed capacity as recently as March, meaning that the country doubled its efforts in only two moths.

India has vast rural populations that often have limited access to electricity. The Solar Mission aims to provide more reliable sources of power to those citizens while reducing energy cost, decreasing reliance on foreign coal, and ameliorating the consequences of India’s economic growth for the environment.

Max Frankel contributed to this post.

Ralliers hold a sign at the No Fracking Rally

by Catherine Woodiwiss

Thousands of protestors gathered in the muggy heat on the National Mall in Washington, DC for the first-ever nationwide anti-fracking demonstration on Saturday, held by coalition group Stop the Frack Attack. Kicking off the rally were leaders from Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist traditions, demonstrating the increasing solidarity of religious and secular activist groups when it comes to protecting the environment.

“As persons of faith, and no particular faith, we gather to be protectors of this fragile planet,” said Rev. Bob Edgar, head of Common Cause. “So we are called to care for the earth – to stop fracking.”

The rally’s multi-faith cohort represents the rising voices of faith groups willing to take a stand on particular energy issues and climate concerns. As phrases like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have become ever more polarizing, some faith-climate activists within traditionally conservative denominations have coined terms like ‘creation care’ in the hopes of casting a wide net and building broad consensus among environmentally-concerned religious groups along the political spectrum.

But for groups like the Shalom Center and the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate (IMAC), joint organizers of the religious dimension of Saturday’s rally, the severity of health issues and ecological damage associated with fracking necessitate taking a stand.

Ted Glick, steering committee member of IMAC and a political director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, calls the impact of fracking – the process of forcing tons of high-pressure chemicalized water into shale rock – “outrageous.” “From huge greenhouse gas emissions, to high levels of chemicals and water mixing and pollution levels … this is not a [fringe] issue” he says. “People see this as an incredibly basic human rights issue.”

Climate activists have stood for decades on the irrefutable science which points to human-accelerated climate change and the significant public health hazards of global warming. But Saturday’s rally was also couched in sweeping moral language – an example of the increasingly values-based lens being applied to public discourse about climate change and green energy technology.

“It’s a real credit to the anti-fracking movement that they are bringing faith-based groups much more actively into the cause”, says Glick, who credited STFA with suggesting they host the religious rally on their main stage in conjunction with the official rally. “There is clearly an attentive energy across faith lines about how serious this is. That is a really good sign.”

Read more

powazny, via Flickr

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

The size of rainstorms hitting Los Angeles has been getting bigger over the past 60 years, according to a new report released today by the Environment California Research and Policy Center. The environmental advocacy group measured rainfall in the Los Angeles metro area since 1948 and found that a storm large enough to occur only once a year decades ago is now happening every 8.8 months. [Contra Costa Times]

Similar trends were seen throughout much of California and nationwide. Overall, California experienced a 13 percent increase in extreme rainstorms and snowstorms between 1948 and 2011, one of 43 states to see statistically significant increases.

The report “When It Rains, It Pours” attributed the nationwide rise in extreme storms to global warming, although some experts are still hesitant to link climate change to relatively short-term weather patterns. It’s also unclear what an increase in extreme storms means for Los Angeles’ water supply.

Travis Madsen, one of the report’s lead authors and a policy analyst at the Frontier Group, an environmental think tank, called extreme rainfall frequency “one of the clearest ways in which we can see the impact of the change in climate.”

The Obama administration was urged on Monday to stop diverting grain to gas amid warnings of an “imminent food crisis” caused by America’s drought.US government forecasts of a 4% rise in food prices for US consumers because of the drought have sharpened criticism of supports for producing fuel from corn-based ethanol. [Gaurdian]

The latest oil spill from Enbridge Inc.’s Mainline pipeline system is bad timing for Canadian pipeline companies, which are trying to gain public support for new oil projects in Canada and the U.S.The spill of some 1,200 barrels of oil in Wisconsin Friday occurred almost two years to the day after Enbridge spilled 20,000 barrels of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in the most costly onshore spill in U.S. history. [Wall Street Journal]

President Barack Obama on Monday signed a bill designed to expedite home building and energy development on tribal lands.The law, sponsored by Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., enables tribes to approve trust land leases directly, rather than waiting for approval from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Navajo Nation already has that authority. [Washington Post]

As polar bears become rarer, they may be forced to mate with brown bears, which this new study suggests has happened before in the distant past. Modern polar and brown bears can and do produce fertile offspring, but biologists classify them separate species because geographical distance usually prevents the two from ever meeting. Climate change is erasing the distance between the two species. Brown bears are moving north into polar bear territory, and polar bears are being forced off melting ice to spend more time on land, where they’re more likely to encounter brown bears. A Canadian hunter in 2006 shot a white bear with patches of brown fur and the humped claws of a grizzly—DNA tests confirmed this first modern report of a hybrid. [Mother Jones]

As the temperature keeps rising, so does the price of natural gas. Natural gas futures in New York have surged 69 percent since hitting a 10-year low this spring. Power plants are burning more natural gas for electricity as homes and businesses crank up the air conditioning. And natural gas companies are finally cutting back after a production boom that pushed supplies this winter to the highest level on record. [Washington Post]

Massachusetts lawmakers have approved a bill that would require utilities to purchase more of their electricity from renewable sources. The measure approved in the Senate and House on Monday would also require competitive bidding for long-term renewable energy contracts and reduce from 4 percent to 2.75 percent the guaranteed annual return that utilities would receive from those investments. [Boston]

General Electric scientists have developed a prototype electric motor designed to improve the performance and efficiency of hybrid and electric vehicles.The Interior Permanent Magnet traction motor improves on existing designs in several key areas, and would result in hybrids and electric vehicles with greater range, better performance and better cooling characteristics. [Boston]

Climate Change Minister Greg Barker will today cut the ribbon on Scotland’s first designated zone for the development of marine energy, delivering a major boost to the fledgling sector. [Gaurdian]

-Max Frankel

Coal and utilities groups launched a deep-pocketed campaign last month to defeat a November ballot initiative that would raise Michigan’s renewable energy standard for utilities to 25 percent.

The coalition — Clean Affordable Renewable Energy (CARE) for Michigan — has the backing of utilities companies DTE and Consumers Energy, the Detroit and Michigan Chambers of Commerce. Campaign filings show that a coal front group, American Coalition for Clean Coal, is also supporting the campaign against increased renewable energy for the state.

The industry-led group has raised nearly $6 million in its first few months, primarily from the state’s largest utilities companies. By comparison, proponents of the renewable energy standard have raised $2.2 million. MLive provides the details:

Consumers Energy and DTE Energy contributed most of the money. Each gave more than $2.9 million, either directly or through a parent company or subsidiary. DTE also made nearly $200,000 in in-kind contributions and Consumers gave $81,000 in in-kind contributions.

DTE and Consumers both used shareholder dollars to fund the campaign.

Twelve other individuals and companies made donations, including $25,000 from Southfield-based builder Barton Malow and $20,000 from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity in Washington, D.C., according to a campaign finance report filed today.

This campaign is only the tip of the iceberg of what fossil fuel interests are spending this election cycle. ACCCE has a broad $40 million ad campaign this year, spending on ads like ones in May that accuse the Environmental Protection Agency of attempting to raise electricity prices.

Economically, the Michigan initiative makes sense — the costs are much lower than anyone, even utilties, expected and the benefits abound. But the CARE campaign, helped along by none other than big coal, are looking to distort the broad, bipartisan support for renewables.

Last week, the NY Times online asked me to contribute to their “Room for Debate.” The questions were “Is the current drought raising the possibility of another Dust Bowl? If so, what can we do to prevent it?”  My response is below, followed by a terrific new video by Peter Sinclair on “2012 Drought Update.”

UPDATE: At the very end, I’m adding the news release for a new study that makes clear the West is facing, “a new climatology that would make the 21st century climate like mega-droughts of the last millennium,” as the lead scientist put it.

Only one thing can stop ever-worsening Dust Bowls here and around the world — slashing carbon pollution.

Climate scientists have predicted for decades that man-made global warming would worsen droughts and dust storms in the Southwest and around the world because of the combined effects of warming, drying and the melting of snow and ice.

The warming directly dries the soil out. It also leads to earlier snow melt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. It also shifts precipitation patterns, expanding the dry subtropics.

All of these predictions are being observed right now and some are occurring faster than scientists expected.

Now, studies project “extreme drought” conditions by midcentury over much of the most productive and densely populated areas on Earth — including southern Europe, Southeast Asia, Brazil, the southwest United States and large parts of Australia and Africa. One study found that those areas would see drought indices far worse than those of our Dust Bowl.

And, by century’s end, we would be 10 degrees or more warmer than the 1930s if we fail to act soon.

A 2009 study found that carbon pollution levels projected after midcentury would lead to “dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era” that are “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.”

The scientific “debate,” such as it is, is how far into the northern Great Plains and Midwest these Dust Bowl conditions will extend.

What can we do about this? The climatologist David Rind, who did pioneering work on drought projection with NASA, said back in 2005 that “if you get drought indices like these, there’s no adaptation that’s possible.”

The fact is human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is virtually impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment. The word “desert” comes from the Latin desertum for “an abandoned place.”

We aren’t doing a great job of feeding the 7 billion people we have now. How can we lose much of the most productive farmland here and around the world and feed another 2 billion people?

The only sane response is to reduce carbon pollution sharply. To avert the worst of dust-bowlification, we need global carbon pollution to peak early next decade, drop 50 percent below current levels by 2050, and stop entirely by century’s end. Every year we delay adds $500 billion to the cost of action.

My 2011 Nature article last year on “The next dust bowl” is here. Sinclair’s video follows:

Here is the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) release, “Turn of the century drought worst in 800 years, study says“:

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Photo Courtesy of National Park Service

A recently released study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, estimates that the technical potential of photovoltaic cells and concentrated solar power (CSP) in the United States is as much as 200,000 Gigawatts, enough to generate about 400,000 TWh of energy annually.

The report dismisses economic and political impacts on the solar industry and focuses solely on the scientific and engineering limitations. The types of solar power studied in the report were Urban Utility-Scale Photovoltaics, Rural Utility-Scale Photovoltaics, Rooftop Photovoltaics, and Concentrated Solar Power, which is a utility-scale project “in which the solar heat energy is collected in a central location.”

The report broke down each type of solar array:

Urban Utility-Scale PV :

“The total estimated annual technical potential in the United States for urban utility-scale PV is 2,232 terawatt-hours (TWh). Texas and California have the highest estimated technical potential, a result of a combination of good solar resource and large population.”

Rural Utility Scale PV:

“Rural utility-scale PV leads all other technologies in technical potential. This is a result of relatively high power density, the absence of minimum resource threshold, and the availability of large swaths for development. Texas accounts for roughly 14% (38,993 TWh) of the entire estimated U.S. technical potential for utility-scale PV (280,613 TWh).”

Rooftop PV:

Total annual technical potential for rooftop PV is estimated at 818 TWh. States with the largest technical potential typically have the largest populations. California has the highest technical potential of 106 TWh due to its mix of high population and relatively good solar resource.

CSP:

Technical potential for CSP exists predominately in the Southwest…. Texas has the highest estimated potential of 22,786 TWh, which accounts for roughly 20% of the entire estimated U.S. annual technical potential for CSP (116,146 TWh).

The report also conducted a state by state breakdown for potential energy from solar sources.

Read more

Photo Courtesy AP

by Doug Grandt, via the Oakland Tibune

Boy Scout spirits will soar Aug. 1 during the centennial celebration for Eagle Scouts everywhere.

Please join me in encouraging Eagle Scout — and Boy Scouts national President and Exxon Mobil CEO — Rex Tillerson to play a prominent role.

I have asked him to change the course of human history with true climate solutions leadership this year.

Eagle Scouts should live by “We leave our campsites cleaner than we found them” as well as the Scout Law and Scout Oath. We share reverence for God; our family, neighbors and society; and our environment, which supports life for all species.

Unfortunately, our actions belie our intentions.

During the past 200 years, the burning of carbon fuels has despoiled the environment. Scientists have predicted what spewing CO2 into the atmosphere will do to change the climate.

We are now seeing what scientists have warned us to expect — more extreme weather events, more intense forest fires, more killer floods, more record-breaking high temperatures, which outnumber record-breaking low temperatures by more than 7-1.

The dice are now loaded against humans’ long-term survival if we continue on our current path, and it is clear to the average citizen — you don’t have to be a scientist to recognize the obvious trends.

For two decades, our government has been unable to act on our behalf. Laws have been written, suits have been filed, people have demonstrated, corporations have lobbied — business as usual prevails.

Elected politicians cannot get the necessary job done. We need national and international recognizable individual leadership if we hope to change the course of our mother ship, which is now steaming headlong for a collision.

While we rearrange the deck chairs, we and our pristine vessel are heading for disaster, and only a shift from burning carbon fuels to carbon-free energy will set us on a safe course.

Eagle Scout Rex Tillerson is on record publicly supporting a steadily increasing carbon fee, which would not only pay for the externalized costs of polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but would also level the playing field for clean energy and promote innovative entrepreneurs to develop and implement more and more efficient pollution-free energy facilities. Read more

There are 5.4 million in-ground residential swimming pools in the Unites States, and, according to Opower,  the homes with those pools use 49% more electricity each year than homes without. The increase in energy use amounts to about $500 per home per year.

Pools themselves are extremely energy intensive to maintain, they collectively use between 9 and 14 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, more than 11 states plus the District of Columbia , annually.

The average pool contains about 20,000 gallons of water, roughly 5,000 gallons more than the typical human will drink in a lifetime, and pool pumps use up to 2,500 KWh per year to circulate and filter it. Outside of the air conditioner, the pool pump is the largest electricity consumer in the average pool-containing home. According to the study, at the national average of 11.8 cents per KWh, a pool pump alone can add as much as $300 a year to an electric bill.

However, Opower’s investigation revealed that its not just the actual pool that accounts for the massive increase in energy consumption of homes with swimming pools.

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by Michael Kodas, via OnEarth

Last fall scientists and foresters from more than a dozen nations gathered for the world’s first conference on the growing threat of megafires. Considering that the American West has experienced record-breaking fire seasons over the past decade, the choice of venue for the conference was a bit surprising: northern Florida.

Living in Colorado and watching as massive fires bloom across the Rocky Mountains — sparked  by a combination of heat, drought, and poor decisions about forest management and housing development — it would be easy to think that the East Coast is relatively safe from smoke plumes and fireballs. Indeeed, during last year’s conference visit to Tall Timbers, a nonprofit fire research station in Tallahassee, one of the scientists in my group pulled out his phone and announced that a wildfire was threatening his home back in Nevada.

But as we learned at Tall Timbers, the humid hardwood forests of the East have their own history of fire problems, and just like out West, climate change and a century of fire suppression have primed them for danger.

Last spring, a thin snowpack, high winds, and drought — the same conditions that drove fires in the Rocky Mountains this year — also fueled fires from New England to Florida. This year, all 25 states east of the Rockies experienced their warmest recorded January-to-March periods in more than 110 years of record keeping. Many also experienced extreme drought. Last April on Long Island, wildfires threatened Brookhaven National Laboratory, destroyed three homes and nine businesses, and burned three firefighters. In Connecticut, a wildfire shut down an Amtrak line. And in New Jersey, fire spread through 1,000 acres of the state’s beloved Pine Barrens. In Virginia’s George Washington National Forest, more than 20,000 acres burned in early April — four times the previous record. Throughout the spring, much of Florida and Georgia were in extreme to exceptional drought — drier even than in 2007, when a record-setting drought brought on the Big Turnaround fire, the biggest in both states’ recorded histories.

The size of Eastern wildfires may not rival Western blazes — half a dozen of the active fires in the West this week were larger than 100,000 acres — but the East Coast is more densely populated, meaning that smaller fires can still threaten a great number of lives and property and require large resources to fight. “Even if the fires don’t look that spectacular, they can do a lot of damage,” says Kevin Robertson, the fire ecology program director at Tall Timbers.

This month authorities declared more than 1,000 counties in 26 states as natural disaster areas, in what has become the worst drought to strike the nation in decades. The conditions that have already contributed to massive wildfires across the West are bringing more fires to parts of the eastern U.S., including North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, according to the federal National Climatic Data Center.

The East, in fact, has a forgotten history of big burns. In New Brunswick, Canada, the Miramichi fire of October 1825 — one of the three largest ever recorded in North America — burned over three million acres, devastating the towns of Newcastle and Fredericton and killing 190 people. Hundreds more drowned in rivers where they took shelter with their livestock.  And on October 8, 1871 — the same day that the Great Chicago Fire exploded — a wildfire twice the size of the state of Rhode Island overran Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing between 1,200 and 2,400 people, marking the greatest loss of life to a wildfire in the nation’s history. Seventy years later, British and American militaries studied the dynamics of the Peshtigo fire to plan the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.

Read more

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

As the Midwest bakes amid an unrelenting drought, farmers aren’t the only ones sweating.[Wall Street Journal]

Companies that rely on a big U.S. corn crop, such as grain exporter and ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland Co. have watched their share prices tumble the past several weeks as the prospect of ample supplies has shriveled and corn prices have skyrocketed to record highs.

Investors will get a glimpse into ADM’s challenges, and broader repercussions for the agribusiness sector, when the company reports fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday.

ADM Chief Executive Patricia Woertz warned investors at a mid-June conference that ethanol losses were mounting and its grain-handling business was underperforming previous forecasts. That was before crops started to feel the full effects of the worst U.S. drought in decades. ADM shares are down 15% in the past seven weeks.

State and county fairs in the sweltering and drought-stricken Midwest may see some skinnier pigs and smaller squash this year. The dozen pigs Greg Marzahl and his 15-year-old daughter are bringing to the Wisconsin State Fair are smaller than those he’d normally show. Marzahl, who had three grand champion pigs last year, said his pigs are around about 15 pounds smaller than the normal 275 pounds. The heat is affecting their virility and appetites, he said. [Huffington Post]

The best aircraft to fight the growing number of Western wildfires would be dozens of modern “scooper” planes that fill their bellies with water skimmed in seconds from a lake or river, and not the slower helicopters and tankers now in use, according to a study released on Monday by the RAND Corporation. But the chief of the federal Forest Service, which commissioned the study, has rejected its central finding.[The New York Times]

Enbridge, a beleaguered Canadian oil pipeline company, has spilled more than 50,000 gallons of light crude oil in rural Wisconsin —  shortly after the company said it had implemented safety reforms after a massive 2010 spill in Michigan. [LA Times]

Even though research clearly shows that present electric cars can satisfy the requirements of 95 percent of all trips made in the U.S., many car buyers say electric cars need to travel further per charge before they’ll consider buying one.[Christian Science Monitor]

China’s Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world’s highest rail system, is being threatened by desertification on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau as a result of global warming, experts concluded after conducting a probe.About 443 kilometers of the 1,956-km railway are in areas affected by desertification, including 103 km that lie in seriously desertified areas, Wang Jinchang, a senior engineer with the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company, told Xinhua Monday.Wang cited research showing that the threat of soil erosion has grown very fast in recent years, mostly near rivers and wetlands from Golmud and Lhasa, and the amount of affected rail tracks almost doubled from 2003 to 2009. [Global Times]

–Max Frankel

by Jonathan Koomey, via CSR Wire

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” — Henry Ford

The Pessimism Trap

One of my students at Yale in Fall 2009 emerged from my lecture summarizing the climate problem and told me it depressed her. “It seems so hopeless,” she said. I acknowledged that the problem was a daunting one, but explained again why I thought it wasn’t insoluble. And the problem of assuming we can’t fix the problem is that we’ll stop trying things that might actually work.  I call this “the pessimism trap.” If we don’t even try, we’re ensuring the bad results we fear will actually come to pass.

Here’s why I think we can still address the climate issue in a way that avoids catastrophe and preserves reasonable continuity for human society.  That outcome is not guaranteed, of course, but I’m still optimistic that we will, at long last, do the right thing.

By we, I mean first the United States, because most of the rest of the world already takes this issue seriously, and U.S. leadership can transform the current stalemate into real movement. I’m hopeful that Winston Churchill’s reading of the American character was correct when he said “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”

To Break the International Logjam, the U.S. Must Step Up to the Plate

To that end, the U.S. needs to adopt a carbon price, set real emissions targets, and begin aggressive mitigation as soon as possible. It also needs to take the international relations aspect of this problem seriously, because the climate problem can’t be solved without international cooperation, and the recent U.S. public debate (such as it was) almost completely ignores this fact.

Each major country or group of countries could by themselves destroy the climate, so we cannot avoid the need for binding international commitments, but those cannot come about without real progress in the US, which stands today as the biggest roadblock to prompt global action.

The Chinese have already indicated, by their substantial investments in renewable energy production, that they are prepared to build the technologies of the future (and to beat us in that game).  If we make a real commitment to meet the constraints of the Safer Climate case, we can give the Chinese a real run for their money, and that’s a race in which the whole planet wins.  Once we realize that this isn’t a “zero sum game”, it opens up possibilities that we haven’t thought of before.

Aggressive Climate Action Easier Than We Think

There is a tendency in formal modeling assessments of the climate problem towards pessimism about the future, as I discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 of Cold Cash, Cool Climate. Our own cognitive limitations make us unable to fully evaluate all of the options before us, and as has been shown many times before, any evaluation of options that excludes important ones will underestimate the possibilities for action and overestimate its cost.

But of course, we always exclude important possibilities (because we can’t think of everything), so this bias is systemic. In addition, the methods used in these analyses embed structural rigidities in the forecasts that wouldn’t actually be present in a world aggressively pursuing the Safer Climate case, like assuming that institutional behavior and the structure of property rights remain constant.

They also ignore critical factors like increasing returns to scale, which make emissions reductions significantly easier as long as we start down a path of implementation that is a promising one. So aggressive climate action will almost certainly be easier than we think, although by no stretch of the imagination should effort at the required level be called “easy”. Read more

By Rebecca Lefton and Samuel Grausz

Addressing the projected growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation sector will be integral to solving climate change. Aviation accounts for 13 percent of global transportation carbon dioxide emissions, and emissions from aviation are on track to quadruple by 2050 if left unchecked.

The share of aviation’s contributions to total global transportation emissions is even larger if non-carbon-dioxide emissions are included. In addition to carbon dioxide, aircraft emit other gases that lead to global warming—including water vapor, black carbon, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and sulfur oxides (SOx). The climate impact is potentially double, too, because airlines emit all of these greenhouse gases directly into the upper atmosphere.

Complicating the problem, the number of passengers on U.S. airlines is projected to double to 1 billion in the next 10 years, and the number of passengers globally will more than double to 6 billion by 2026.

Sustainable growth of the airline industry—which already contributes $1.3 trillion to the domestic economy annually, supports 10 million U.S. jobs and 15 million jobs worldwide, and sustains tens of millions more jobs for the tourism industry—is key to the health of our economy and our environment.

So what is being done to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the aviation sector? How can public and private sectors ensure the growth of the airline industry without harming the climate?

This issue brief will examine these questions by looking at steps the United States and Europe are taking.

What the United States is doing to bring down aviation emissions

Read more

by Daniel J. Weiss and Seth Hanlon

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic plan slashes corporate tax rates while failing to identify a single corporate tax loophole to eliminate. Highly profitable large oil companies that already enjoy lucrative tax breaks stand to receive some of the biggest benefits from Gov. Romney’s plan.

The world’s five biggest public oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—would keep special tax breaks worth $2.4 billion each year. And by cutting corporate tax rates, the Romney plan could lower the companies’ annual tax bill by another $2.3 billion, based on an analysis of the companies’ tax expense for 2011. The special tax breaks, supplemented by Gov. Romney’s lower corporate rates, could benefit the oil companies by more than $4 billion annually.

As we will show, these five companies are hardly in need of a tax cut: They earned a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011 due to high oil and gasoline prices.

Breaking down Gov. Romney’s tax breaks for Big Oil

Gov. Romney’s economic plan proposes to cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent—nearly a one-third reduction. That could provide a combined tax cut of at least $2.3 billion annually to the five largest publicly owned oil companies, according to an analysis of their 2011 public financial statements. That includes $1.5 billion for the three domestic oil companies and $800 million for the two foreign-owned companies. Since it is of course impossible to predict their future profits, this estimate is based on their 2011 financial data, including their U.S. federal income tax expense. (See the methodology section for more information.)

In addition, existing oil tax breaks would be protected under Gov. Romney’s plan. Though he has spoken in general terms about broadening the tax base, he has failed to name even one corporate tax loophole he would eliminate. His campaign has specifically criticized President Barack Obama’s efforts to close oil tax loopholes. And his chief energy advisor, oil executive and Romney super PAC donor Harold Hamm, has urged Congress to maintain the oil industry’s special tax breaks.

Preserving Big Oil’s existing tax breaks would save the five companies $2.4 billion annually, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. The value of these tax breaks for each company is not public. But using the rough proxy of apportioning them according to the companies’ U.S. revenue, the three American companies receive approximately $1.9 billion of these tax breaks while the two foreign companies receive $500 million.

Under reasonable assumptions, the five oil companies’ total annual tax bills would be $4.2 billion less than they would be without the special tax breaks that Gov. Romney would preserve and without Gov. Romney’s corporate tax rate cut. (This is less than the sum of the estimates of the two elements of Gov. Romney’s plan because of interactions between them—reducing tax rates lowers the value of deductions.)

None of these figures includes the impact of Gov. Romney’s proposals to exempt overseas profits from U.S. taxes or to allow existing overseas profits to be repatriated at a special low tax rate. The three U.S. companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips—stashed away a combined $76 billion in profits overseas at the end of 2011. Adding in the benefits to the oil companies of these parts of the Romney plan could greatly increase their largess from a Romney presidency.

The oil tax windfall would be the same under the House-passed fiscal year 2013 budget resolution sponsored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), which Gov. Romney endorsed. The Ryan budget also lowers the corporate rate to 25 percent while keeping the existing tax breaks for these five companies. Gov. Romney heartily endorsed the Ryan budget plan, saying, “I applaud it. It’s an excellent piece of work, and very much needed.”

The chart below shows the oil companies’ average annual tax breaks and their new cuts under the Romney-Ryan plan in addition to their profits last year.

Big Oil companies are the last ones that should be getting tax cuts

Read more

Daniel Bowen, via Flickr

by Rona Fried, via Sustainable Business

Having a green certified home adds 9% to its appraised sales value in California, finds a new study.

The study is the first rigorous, large-scale economic analysis of the value of green home labels in California and was conducted by state university professors.

Researchers conducted a pricing analysis of all 1.6 million single-family home sales in California from 2007-2012, controlling for all other variables that typically influence selling price, such as location, size, age and amenities.

They documented that homes labeled with Energy Star, LEED or Greenpoint Rated (California’s label) sell for a premium of 9% compared to average similar homes.

The average sales price of a non-certified California home is $400,000. Green certification raises the price by more than $34,800.

Interesting that the sales premium is greater than the cost of the green features people are paying for and it’s greater than resulting utility savings. The most common green features are insulation and air sealing of attic and walls, weather stripping and efficient HVAC – none of which are particularly expensive.

The authors conclude that part of the premium is the certification itself – the premium is highest in areas of California that also have the highest sales of hybrid cars. People will pay more to buy a house that’s green-certified because it fits their values.

They also found premiums to be higher in parts of the state that tend to have hotter climates, indicating that people valued these certifications as reassurance that their homes would stay cooler without more energy costs.

A report released last year by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab showed that having solar PV boosted the sales price in California. The premium was about the same as the cost of the solar system.

In Los Angeles County, the sales price of three homes was compared before and after they got green certification, and found a rise of 5.5-9%.

“Green upgrades aren’t usually tracked as home features on real estate listing services, which makes it challenging for appraisers to determine the monetary value of the upgrades,” says Debra Little, the appraiser. “We used methodologies beyond the typical appraisal scope, taking into account the energy efficiency benefits as well as factors such as healthier indoor air quality and sealing air leaks – which improves the durability and effective life of a home. We ultimately determined that the many benefits of green homes do lead to higher home values in the local market.”

Home #1, Whittier, CA

Read more

“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Via BEST.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming.

UPDATE (9 pm, 7/28): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.”

Here is the money graf:

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Yes, yes, I know, the finding itself is “dog bites man.” What makes this “man bites dog” is that Muller has been a skeptic of climate science, and the single biggest funder of this study is the “Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000).” The Kochs are the leading funder of climate disinformation in the world!

It gets better:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions!

UPDATE (9 AM, 7/29): The UK Guardian has a good story up, “Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds: Earth’s land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible.”

And here’s an amusing tweet from a top U.S. climatologist, Michael Mann:

Below is some background on BEST followed by a longer excerpt of the op-ed.

Read more

Photo Courtesy AP

According to the British government, the Ozone concentration in southern England on Thursday was nearly twice the World Health Organization’s guidelines and the highest its been since 2006, just in time for the start of the Summer 2012 London Olympics.

The increased pollution, coupled with a heat wave, is expected to make things much more difficult for athletes competing in the games:

According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, [exercise-induced bronchoconstriction or EIB] affects an estimated 20% of top athletes and an estimated 1 in 6 of all Olympic athletes.

“It has been well documented that elite athletes in the Olympics have an increased prevalence of EIB. They may not have suspected it, since they don’t have chronic asthma but rather a narrowing of the airways that comes specifically with exercise,” explained William S. Silvers, MD, FAAAAI, of the AAAAI’s Sports Medicine Committee.

An added concern for athletes with asthma and EIB is the amount of pollution in London, which may cause symptoms to worsen. Ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide and other pollutants can inflame the airways of sensitive people and even cause an asthma attack.

Professor Frank Kelly, Director of King’s College London’s Environmental Research Group, said recently that athletes “won’t be able to get enough oxygen in the body to perform at the highest level. What that means is they probably won’t be breaking any records under these conditions.” He added that the condition are “not ideal for athletics and certainly not for long distance events.”

In addition to the ozone, London also has a “higher concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere than Beijing, China, had during the last summer Olympic games before the Chinese government banned half of all cars in an effort to reduce pollution.”

Though athletes, who breathe heavily during competition and training, will be the most vulnerable to air pollution, spectators will not be immune to the conditions:

“Probably about 20 percent of the healthy population will feel some tightening of the chest as they go about daily normal activities,” said Kelly…. Government officials said most people were not affected by short term peaks in ozone but those with existing heart or lung conditions may experience increased symptoms.”

Prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, there were concerns about severe effects that the air might have on the athletes, particularly distance runners. The concerns turned out to be unfounded as everything turned out alright but as pollution from anthropogenic sources continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, the air quality at future Olympic games will continue to deteriorate. Add that to the massive changes in sports we’ll see thanks to climate change, and the Olympics in 20 years might look nothing like the London Games.

– Max Frankel