By Jessica Goad

Today the Center for American Progress and the Sierra Club released a series of short documentary videos called “Public Lands, Private Profits.”

One of the stories, “A Grand Threat,” profiles the new rush to extract uranium around Grand Canyon National Park. A Canadian company is currently excavating uranium at one mine on the north rim of the canyon, and it has plans for more mines in the near future.

Although Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar set one million acres off-limits to mineral extraction this past January, that decision applied only to new mining claims, not those already in existence.  There are approximately 3,500 mining claims that may be valid — potentially resulting in up to 11 uranium mines near the Grand Canyon.

Shockingly, these new mines are moving forward under environmental studies and plans of operation last approved in the 1980s. Although the Interior Department and the Forest Service have full authority to demand updated environmental reviews, they have not taken that step.

And just two weeks ago, Kaibab National Forest Supervisor Mike Williams agreed to let Denison move forward with its plans to develop the Canyon Mine (featured in the video) under environmental and cultural impact studies from 1986.

Last week, Denison Mines sold its U.S. assets to Energy Fuels Incorporated. Denison declined to comment, but Energy Fuels explained that it is “highly cognizant” of the responsibilities of mining in the region.

Opponents of uranium mining fear that any water pollution could take years to clean up. To find out more about this issue or to take action, visit the Sierra Club’s website.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

by Richard W. Caperton

Imagine a government program that had produced dozens of success stories, cost less than expected, and helped build an industry of the future. Wouldn’t you want to expand that program?  Yes, you probably would.  Unless, of course, you were Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL).

If you were Rep. Cliff Stearns, you would introduce legislation to end the program.  And, if the program somehow did survive, your legislation would make sure that it operated with more bureaucratic red tape and weaker financial standing.

Welcome to the bizarre politics around the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program. Tomorrow, two subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will consider a piece of legislation written by Stearns called the “No More Solyndras Act.”  Every aspect of this bill is bad. If Congress really wants to improve the loan guarantee program, they should do so by allowing it to fund many more projects with a full portfolio of financial tools. Let’s look at why.

The Loan Guarantee Program has been a success

First, some background. DOE’s loan guarantee program was created in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and was strengthened in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus bill). The program is built to provide financing to new clean energy technologies that the private sector is unable to finance.  These companies are trying to cross the “Valley of Death,” where they need many millions — even billions — of dollars to build new projects.  Traditional lenders won’t finance these projects because they’re generally the first-of-a-kind, and venture capitalists who would finance innovative projects simply don’t have enough money to meet these companies’ needs.  So, the government stepped in and guaranteed that they’ll pay back a loan if the company is unable to.  This guarantee unlocks capital.

The program has been an overwhelming success.  The loan guarantee program alone financed 32 projects in more than 20 states, ultimately creating 22,000 jobs directly. Best of all, the government only spent $2.5 billion to mobilize more than $20 billion in private capital.

Even projects without guarantees have benefited from the process. For example, the due diligence process helped bring in a $1 billion investment from Bank of America for the largest residential solar project in U.S. history. The chief executive officer of the solar company deploying the project said that without the due diligence process to attract private lenders, “We would not have been able to make the economics of this project work.”

Enter the “No More Solyndras Act”: A potential disaster

Despite the fact that the Title XVII loan guarantee program has been a success and should be expanded, Rep. Stearns’ legislation would effectively end the program, mandate unnecessary and duplicate consultations, and tie the government’s hands behind when it’s representing taxpayers.

The “No More Solyndras Act” does three main things:

1. It sets a retrospective deadline by which applications must have been received in order to be considered for loan guarantees. No application that was submitted after December 31, 2011, is eligible for a new guarantee.
2. It creates a new process for the Secretary of the Treasury to influence the outcome of a decision on a guarantee, and requires the Secretary of Energy to explain why he or she did or did not follow Treasury’s recommendation.
3. It says that taxpayers must always be the senior debt holder, even after a restructuring of a guarantee for a troubled company.

Each of these is a mistake.

Read more

Maybe it’s the record heat we just experienced in Washington, but I am very confused.

Since last summer, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been saying that “we don’t know” if humans are causing climate change — flipping in the opposite direction from his earlier position as Governor, when he called for a “no regrets policy” on addressing climate change.

But as we head into the general election, a surrogate from the Romney campaign now indicates the candidate has again changed his stance, declaring that he is “certainly not a denier” of climate science.

Speaking at a debate on energy issues today between representatives of the Romney and Obama campaigns, former Deputy Secretary of Energy Linda Gillespie Stunz implied multiple times that Mitt Romney would be open to action on the issue.

Stunz mostly danced around the questions on climate, criticizing EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and dismissing any domestic action without more international coordination. But in providing her answers, she also strongly hinted that a Romney Administration would engage in international talks on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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by Brad Johnson

Freshman Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), notorious for his close ties to the Koch brothers, doesn’t believe that oil companies get subsidies. Walking in an Independence Day parade in Plymouth, MA, the senator declared his allegiance to the oil industry, which receives $7 billion in subsidies a year:

BROWN: Oil companies don’t get subsidies. . . . I’m positive. They’re able to take deduction like every other business. If we’re going to reform the tax code, we should do that.

Watch the video from American Bridge:

Brown’s denial of oil subsidies is nothing new; he has similarly questioned the facts of climate change. Brown was forced to contribute to charity after the American Petroleum Institute ran radio and print ads supporting his position on tax breaks for big oil companies. Brown stands in opposition to the growing global movement to end fossil fuel subsidies.

I have been critical of the media for ignoring the link between man-made global warming and the off-the-charts extreme weather we have been seeing. And many have documented how they have been downplaying the story of the century in the last couple of years.

But the extreme weather has been so unprecedented — and NOAA and leading climate scientists have been so blunt — that we have the unprecedented situation of the evening news shows last night on ABC, CBS, and NBC (and PBS) all talking about the link between greenhouse gases and the stunning heat wave. All the videos are posted below (with some of the best excerpts).

Here’s the excellent ABC World News piece, where Sam Champion, ABC News weather editor, says to anchor, Diane Sawyer

“If you want my opinion, Diane, now’s the time we start limiting manmade greenhouse gases.”

And here’s the CBS News video, with the accompanying online story, “NOAA links extreme weather to climate change“:

On Tuesday, for the first time, government scientists are saying recent extreme weather events are likely connected to man-made climate change. It’s the conclusion of a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The report says last year’s record drought in Texas was made “roughly 20 times more likely” because of man made climate change, specifically meaning warming that comes from greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide. The study, requested by NOAA, looked at 50 years of weather data in Texas and concluded that man-made warming had to be a factor in the drought.

The head of NOAA’s climate office, Tom Karl, said: “What we’re seeing, not only in Texas but in other phenomena in other parts of the world, where we can’t explain these events by natural variability alone. They’re just too rare, too uncommon.”

Read more

What Cupertino, California is getting

What Cupertino, California needs

by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

I never intended to become so knowledgeable about Apple, Inc.’s new “spaceship” headquarters being developed in Cupertino, California.  Really, I didn’t.  But the design seemed to me to be way overscaled for humans and particularly wrong for a classic slice of California sprawl that is begging to be retrofitted into a more walkable and people-oriented environment.  Apple is already a world leader in consumer technology; this was its chance to be a world leader also for community-oriented sustainability.

The corporation has already shown a commendable ability to support transit and walkability in certain neighborhoods where it has retail outlets.  Another high-tech giant with a need for security, Amazon, is showing how to revive an older neighborhood for its new, highly walkable headquarters in Seattle.  Google has signaled its strong desire to position its future headquarters amid a mixed-use, housing- and transit-rich environment.  So the potential was there.

Instead, Apple chose to design its new headquarters as if it were a new consumer product, an “iBuilding” of sorts with a clean, high-concept design that reinforces the company’s futuristic corporate brand.  In that sense, it probably succeeded:  the building is cool-looking in an abstract sort of way, the kind of structure that will make people go “wow.”  But it does nothing to make Silicon Valley a better environment for people, and might even make it harder to improve the walkability of Cupertino by sealing off potential walking routes.

So I called them on it, twice.  And, man, did I get hammered by an army of Apple loyalists.  “You’re just a hater and a loser” was one of the comments, and I think the writer probably spoke for 90 percent of the people who bothered to write.  It didn’t help that one of the sites that publishes my work decided to run a headline that said “Why Apple’s new headquarters is bad for America.”  That wasn’t quite what I said or believed, but I do believe the design is bad for Cupertino, and a poor representative of how suburban communities should be evolving in the twenty-first century.

Read more

World Bank Photo Collection, via Flickr

by Michael Brune and Andrew S. Kanter, via The Huffington Post

Coal kills. Don’t take it from us; that’s what International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde told a Washington, D.C., audience recently, noting that coal pollution is responsible for 70,000 premature deaths each year in India alone. Shockingly, that is only the tip of the iceberg. Even in developed countries like the United States, coal burning is responsible for approximately 13,200 deaths, 9,700 hospitalizations, and more than 20,000 heart attacks annually.

Even though this public health catastrophe is entirely avoidable, coal plants are still being built around the world — even though clean energy can be brought online more cheaply. We have an opportunity to make international coal development a relic of the past, and one man is in the unique position to do this: the World Bank’s new president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim.

No one understands the trade-offs between development and public health better than Dr. Kim. He is a lifelong health advocate who cofounded the influential group Partners in Health, and he has tackled the issue head-on in his book, Dying for Growth. He contends that when “the imperatives of growth at any cost increasingly determine economic and social policy and the behavior of global corporations, more people join the ranks of the poor and greater numbers suffer and die.” This simple but profound statement underscores why people in villages across India are standing up, fighting back, and even dying to beat back coal pollution.

Thus far, the World Bank has erred on the side of growth at any cost. But we now know the true medical and public health consequences of dirty coal plants. We also know that technology available today can dramatically reduce toxic pollution from coal plants — including carbon monoxide, particulate matter, mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium. The World Bank has not even required the coal plants it funds to use this technology, ostensibly because it wants to keep costs down and power cheap.

Dr. Kim can work with the World Bank’s board to shape policy that better takes into account our current understanding of the threat that coal-burning poses to the health and well-being of all the people on this planet. He can advocate for an end to massive investment in new, uncontrolled coal-fired power plants around the world.

One such project in India, the enormous Tata Mundra plant, which is about the size of eight typical U.S. coal plants, is located just 1,500 feet from an even larger coal plant — and neither plant has any pollution-control equipment for deadly fine-particulate pollutants. Despite fierce resistance from activists like Bharat Patel, the World Bank continues to bankroll the project. And Tata Mundra is now seeking a government bailout (paid for by India’s people) because, despite Tata Power’s claims to the contrary, coal is no longer an inexpensive form of electricity. Read more

by KC Golden, via the GRIP Blog

My first foray into this topic, “Sex is better with energy efficiency,” was warmly – aye, steamingly – received.  (We are a simple people, no?)  So let’s dive deeper…

First, for the record:  Jimmy Carter is a great man, a courageous humanitarian, and a vastly underappreciated former President.  It’s not his fault.  But one of the founding myths of the modern energy efficiency “movement”, if we can call it that, is that his “moral equivalent of war” speech and his fireside chats on energy were a huge cultural setback for conservation.

By framing energy conservation as a moral proposition (goes the myth) he made it somehow trivial, sentimental, insubstantial.  In order to elevate energy efficiency to its proper place as a big manly energy alternative, we must think of it not as a lecture, not as a lifestyle admonition, but as an energy resource — just like a power plant.   We must never, ever call it “conservation,” because that smacks of moralism; we must call it “efficiency” in order to underscore its practical, effective, hard-nosed utility as an energy option.

I wish to explode this myth.

The problem wasn’t that Jimmy Carter framed conservation as a moral issue. It IS a moral issue (AND a our largest, cheapest, most important energy resource). The problem, in a nutshell, was The Sweater.

To observe that The Sweater was profoundly unattractive is to dwell on the obvious.  But the issue goes well beyond the butt-ugliness.  The problem was that The Sweater, and its wearer, came to symbolize national impotence, and the weakness rubbed off on energy conservation.  Look at that damned cardigan; a bald eagle wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing!  It’s fuzzy and pathetic and yella!

Once again, Jimmy Carter is a great man and it wasn’t his fault, but his Presidency occupies a place of doubt and deprecation in an American myth that celebrates exceptionalism and virility.  That he was followed by the strapping, ruddy, anti-ambivalent  Ronald Reagan was no accident.  “Morning in America” was the light at the end of the dark tunnel of national tentativeness for which the Carter era is (inaccurately) remembered.  The cardigan became a pathetic symbol of that, and the “malaise” oozed out all over energy conservation.

Which is why, inspired by a great upwelling of national pride, or something, I googled up these images.  I think you will agree that they illustrate a keen grasp of marketing on my part.

(Important preliminary research finding:  Penelope Cruz apparently does not wear sweaters.) Read more

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

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed multiple corrosion cracks and “pervasive organizational failures” at the Calgary-based Enbridge pipeline company for a more-than-20,000-barrel oil spill two years ago near Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. [Washington Post]

The cost of the spill has reached $800 million and is rising, the NTSB said, making the pipeline rupture the most expensive on-shore oil spill in U.S. history. The pipeline’s contents — heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands — have made the spill a closely watched case with implications for other pipelines carrying such crude.

The NTSB also blamed “weak federal regulations” by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for the accident, which spilled at least 843,444 gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo in Marshall, Mich. The oil spread into a 40-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo and a nearby wetlands area.

Corn prices soared toward new highs on Monday amid growing fears that the drought scorching the U.S. Midwest will prove to be the harshest in decades. [Wall Street Journal]

Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet’s climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research. [Guardian]

The influence of manmade global warming on the climate system continues to grow, with human fingerprints identified in more than two dozen climate “indicators” examined by an international research team — from air temperatures to ocean acidity — for a comprehensive annual “State of the Climate” report released Tuesday. [Climate Central]

The ultra-conservative American Tradition Institute has expanded its legal pursuit of climate scientists, using transparency laws to try to flush out potentially damaging emails. [Guardian]

The renewable fuel standard (RFS) for transportation fuel is becoming another proxy battleground between Republicans and Democrats in the renewable energy debate, as the parties demonstrated Tuesday during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing. [The Hill]

The world is warming, incomes are rising, and smaller families are living in larger houses in hotter places. One result is a booming market for air conditioning — world sales in 2011 were up 13 percent over 2010, and that growth is expected to accelerate in coming decades. [Guardian]