by Jeremy Symons, via  the National Wildlife Federation

Answer: One trillion tons of carbon pollution.

40,000 heat records have already been broken this year across the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the signs of an unbalanced climate system have been felt in recent years not just in heatwaves, but increasingly in the form of unusually severe wind storms. This past weekend’s storm brought 80 mph wind gusts that snapped three trees in our backyard like pretzels, even though they were each a foot thick. Once again, my insurance company is teaching me new weather terminolgy to explain the latest climate disasters. A few years ago, the term was “micro-bursts” (not quite tornadoes, but similar impact). Now it is “derecho” (not quite hurricanes, but similar impact).

Whatever you call it, we need to face up to the fact that our weather has turned dangerous because our climate is breaking down.  Virginia has had 27 national disaster declarations due to storms in the past 20 years, three times as many as the prior 20 years. Meanwhile, wildfires and droughts are threatening people and wildlife elsewhere in the nation, particularly in the West, including the National Wildlife Federation’s staff in Colorado. More than two million acres have burned in U.S. wildfires already this year. Global warming has created longer wildfire seasons in the West due to heat and drought (warmer winters has also allowed pests to floursih, killing large numbers of pine trees that add fuel to the fires).

The current heat wave and climate disasters shouldn’t be catching us by surprise. Since the year 2000, we have witnessed nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which tracks global surface temperatures. The first three months of this year has been the warmest first quarter ever in the United States, and March was an alarming 8 degrees warmer than average. As the planet heats, weather patterns are destabilized. Warm air sucks more water from the ground and holds more water (about 4% more for every 1 degree F increase in temperature). That’s one of the reasons our warming planet has been creating historic droughts out West and dumping torrential rains in the Midwest (in Iowa, for example, there have been four “100-year” flood events in the past 5 years, and 17 emergency disaster declarations for floods in the past two decades).

Scary Weather is a Warning:  We Need to Act

For the moment, we are paying attention to the weatherman, and the weather is scary.  But the media is still asleep at the switch when it comes to reporting the real story:  What is causing this climate to unravel?

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences completed an exhaustive review of scientific research and concluded more forcefully than ever in a landmark 2011 report that pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes is destabilizing our climate.  Here is how they put it in scientific terms:

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The Union of Concerned Scientists – Cooler Smarter

Event at Politics and Prose: Details here and below
Jul 7 2012 6:00 pm

When it comes to climate change, each individual’s everyday decisions have tremendous impact. This science-based guide, informed by a two-year study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization that combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions—looks at transportation, home energy use, and personal consumption, showing how people can cut carbon emissions by 20%.

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by Tony Iallonardo, via National Wildlife Federation

Polluters seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the Keystone XL controversy.  Rather than temper the headlong rush to exploit tar sands, they’re getting sneakier.

The tactics: Gut environmental and public review while breaking up their grandiose proposals into smaller pieces to avoid detection.  If they succeed, Americans will be stuck with a massive infrastructure of spill-prone pipelines delivering the dirtiest oil ever around the globe.

Deny Deny Deny

Big Oil has long employed deceptive tactics, but reeling from some recent setbacks, we are watching their new  game plan come to light.  With more than a million gallons of spilled tar sands crude still fouling Michigan’s Kalamazoo River since a spill nearly two years ago, the company behind that  pipeline, Enbridge Energy Partners is now denying a plan to ship tar sands oil through New England.

Their departing CEO, Patrick Daniel, showed no remorse and gave no apologies for one of the biggest fossil fuel disasters in North America in history. Instead he sounded frustrated last week, saying he wishes the tar sands pipeline business hadn’t become so controversial.  Good riddance Mr. Daniel.

Last spring, his company announced a plan to reverse the direction of a pipeline called line 9, so that it could carry crude east rather than west.  No big deal, right?  What Enbridge didn’t do was show all it’s cards. The real plan is to send dirty tar sands oil across several Great Lakes and New England states to Portland, Maine, for transfer by ship to refineries or for export. The project, called Trailbreaker, was floated two years ago, and then abandoned when the recession set in.

When local groups in New England announced opposition a few weeks back to piping tar sands near precious rivers in the area, Enbridge reached up its sleeve for the denial card. A spokesman for Enbridge told the Associated Press, “We have been absolutely clear on the fact that the company is not pursuing the Trailbreaker Project.”

That’s not credible.  As NWFs Curtis Fisher retorted in the AP article, Enbridge denied it was looking at reversing line 9, until they went ahead and announced they wanted to reverse line 9. In fact, the company is salivating at the prospect of moving (BY THEIR 2008 ESTIMATE) 150,000 barrels of tar sludge a day to Portland, Maine.

“We’re pretty excited about [Trailbreaker],” an oil executive said in a 2008 presentation,”because it provides capacity on an as-needed basis, and it involves existing assets so it can be completed at low cost and on a quick turnaround.”

So what’s the truth?  Enbridge appears to be playing a dangerous game of denial, putting the pieces in place for a tar sands route to New England, while denying the once and future Trailbreaker (or something by a different name) is happening. Elephant in the room, what elephant?

Divide and Conquer

Meanwhile, another pipeline giant, TransCanada, has split the 2,000 mile Keystone XL into two, in an attempt to move the project piecemeal and shrink the scope of the State Department’s environmental review. Wildlife Promise recently referred to this as “divide and conquer.”

[A]after Keystone XL was rejected the first time, TransCanada decided to split off the “Gulf Coast segment” of the pipeline, which stretches through Oklahoma and Texas, as a stand-alone project. Because this route doesn’t cross the US border, it avoided the need for the Presidential Permit and the review it entails.

That particular tactic paid off for TransCanada last month, as the Army Corps of engineers  gave a green light to construction of XL in Oklahoma and Texas.   The oil execs at TransCanada probably had some high-fives last month as well when the State Department announced its new environmental review will ignore the southern segment of Keystone XL.

[Click here to take action and stop latest attempt to resurrect Keystone XL.] Read more

A penny for your cyberthoughts.

America’s Hotter Than…

By Mike Luckovich, From the Cartoonist Group.

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