This year’s drought ranks as one of the top 10 worst U.S. droughts for the last century. With more than half the country (54 percent) experiencing drought conditions, it’s the single worst drought since the 1950s.

It is hot all over. NOAA said in its June “State of the Climate Global Analysis“:

This is the second month in a row that the global land temperature was the warmest on record for that month.

While it has been hotter than the 1930s in many places in this country, the drought hasn’t been quite as bad as the worst of the original Dust Bowl. But if we don’t act soon to slash greenhouse gas emissions, we are on our way to far worse as climate change fuels more frequent and more extreme droughts across the U.S. (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temps — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

Climate Progress has documented how unrestrained fossil fuel pollution is leading to worsening droughts. Texas’ severe drought of the past memory was made 20 times more likely from global warming, as one study explained. The Nature article last year, “The Next Dust Bowl,” explained, “warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil.”

Climatologist Jonathan Overpeck at Arizona University told the AP:

This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.

This drought is hitting farmers hard — and ranchers, too. As Reuters put it:

Ravaged by fires, Western ranchers face “scary” summer

… recent wildfires in states such as Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming have displaced thousands of cows from federal rangelands which may not be fit for grazing for years. Where range has not been destroyed, drought has lessened forage.

“We’re going to run out of grass. It’s shaping up to be scary,” University of Idaho Extension Agent Rauhn Panting said.

The next to be hit is the American consumer.The Agriculture Department has declared the largest federal disaster zone in its history for 26 states, as corn and grain crops dry up, particularly in the midwest where 63 percent of the midwest has moderate to extreme drought. Corn production shrunk 7 percent in the last week, according to a Reuters poll: “What began the season as a potentially record corn crop as farmers planted the biggest area since 1937, may now be the smallest in at least five years.”

Consumers will feel the drought’s burden through rising food prices:

“For sure, the full effect of this drought will not be until 2013. It’ll be 2013 when we see it and its in the whole supermarket,” Richard Volpe, an economist with the USDA’s Economic Research Service said. ”But if the price of corn shoots up, we’d see this effect within about two to three months. That doesn’t mean we’ll see a complete jump into food prices. It’s just that we should start to see the effects.”

Michael Swanson, agricultural economist at the largest commercial agriculture lender, said:

“It might be a $50 billion event for the economy as it blends into everything over the next four quarters.”

Related Post:

• Will The Epic Drought “Darken Obama Reelection Prospects”?

by Tom Kenworthy

As controversy over the use of hydraulic fracturing mounts across the U.S., the Natural Resources Defense Council has produced a handy fact sheet on best practices that can reduce risks of pollution from the technique.

The four-page publication details the various risks to both surface and underground water from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is used in oil and gas drilling operations and has become more widespread with the development of large new reserves found in shale rock formations.

Fracking is used to stimulate oil and gas production and involves the injection of a mix of water, chemicals and sand underground at high pressure to fracture rock and release the oil or gas.

Risks to surface water supplies include depletion of fresh water supplies, spills of fracking chemicals, and leaks of flowback fluids that can include fracking chemicals once the well is completed. Threats to underground water supplies can come when wells are poorly constructed, when fractures extend farther than planned, and when old oil and gas wells that have been capped serve as a migration corridor for fracking fluids used in new wells nearby.

In order to avoid those possible problems, NRDC recommends, among other things, that the public be fully informed of chemicals used in fracking, that fracking be regulated under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and that wastes associated with oil and gas development be regulated under federal and state hazardous waste laws.

In addition, NRDC lists many best industry practices that should be uniformly used, including better site planning and analysis, careful well construction, cementing and casing, and proper handling of wastewater.

This list of recommendations is a must-read for industry, policymakers, and environmental groups.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.

The Arctic is undergoing rapid changes accelerated by a warming planet, opening up new potential shipping routes, tourism opportunities, and fossil fuel reserves.

Royal Dutch Shell is leading the charge in oil extraction. The company has already shipped its fleet of rigs up to Alaska where it is waiting for the go-ahead from the federal government to begin exploratory drilling in icy Arctic waters.

Other companies such as Exxon Mobil, Gazprom, Statoil, and Total are also planning on expanding future operations in the Arctic.

But a growing group of disaster-response officials, political leaders, environmental groups, and scientists are all raising concerns about the environmental impact of this new drilling activity. With virtually no infrastructure in place to clean up an oil spill, the consequences of a well blow-out could be disastrous.

The long-term consequences could be equally bad. As Arctic sea ice continues its death spiral, fossil fuel companies seeing new opportunities under the waters are swooping in — increasing the extraction of carbon-based fuels that are contributing to global warming.

In this podcast, linked above, we’ll speak with Michael Conathan, director of oceans policy at the Center for American Progress, who has been watching the activity in the Arctic closely. He’ll discuss a new report, Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling, and talk about the various environmental and infrastructure challenges in the region.

You can follow our podcast RSS feed here. A transcript of the conversation is below:

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On the eve of Mitt Romney’s campaign stop in Ohio, a new report from the Advanced Energy Economy Institute finds that the Buckeye State is home to 25,000 jobs in “22 advanced energy industry segments.”

Though Romney has repeatedly claimed that green jobs are “illusory,” the AEE report finds there are more advanced energy jobs in Ohio than the agriculture and mining industries combined:

“In Ohio, with its productive manufacturing base, robust infrastructure and transportation system, low cost of doing business, and excellent educational system, the advanced energy industry has established a strong foothold and has great capacity to grow.”

The jobs identified in the report are spread among 410 companies that work in “renewable energy, energy efficiency or high-tech manufacturing.” More than 7,000 of the jobs are in building materials, more than 4,000 are in heating, cooling and ventilation, and about 1,400 are in nuclear energy.

According to a recent report the Brookings Institution, green jobs in Ohio pay an average of $3,500 more than typical blue collar jobs. That report, which used a broader definition of the clean economy, also found that Ohio has over 105,000 jobs in the sector.

Ignoring the gains made in the clean economy — a sector that now employs more than 3 million Americans nationwide — Romney recently debuted a television ad attacking the industry. Ironically, there are 64,000 jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries in Romney’s home state of Massachusetts.

House Speaker John Boehner, who represents the state of Ohio, also seems to be ignoring — if not outright rejecting — the growth in this sector. Under Boehner’s leadership, the Republican-lead House has failed to extend the wind production tax credit (PTC), creating uncertainty in the wind market and leading to the abandonment of a $20 million wind project in Ohio that would have created as many as 200 new jobs. There are currently 6,000 wind jobs in Ohio — a large number of which could be threatened if the PTC isn’t extended.

Boehner has also railed against the 1603 grant program as a “Solyndra-style stimulus program.” That program, which helped tens of thousands of renewable energy projects get developed while also creating or saving up to 75,000 jobs, allowed the industry to post solid growth during the depths of the economic slowdown.

Boehner and Romney continue to ignore the tens of thousands of green jobs in their home states in order to satisfy their false narrative that clean energy doesn’t work.

– Max Frankel

Stephen Covey, author of the mega-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, died Monday at the age of 79.

Back in the summer of 1993,  I was fortunate to sit in on a “7 Habits” training that Covey himself kicked off with a 3-hour session.  We got star treatment because the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O’Leary, brought the entire senior staff of the Department of Energy out to the Milliken Institute for training in total quality management.

Coincidentally, I had  just finished the manuscript for my book Lean and Clean Management: How to Boost Profits and Productivity by Reducing Pollution, which discusses TQM and its intimate relationship with pollution prevention. You can buy copies here for as little as 10 cents plus shipping! I believe it is still a good book on systems thinking; in any case, it was that manuscript that got me an invite to the training even though I was just a newly-hired Special Assistant for Policy and Planning to Deputy Secretary Bill White.

Covey was awesome. He was a genuinely optimistic and passionate person who cared about people. I spent about an hour yesterday looking through a dozen boxes to find my notes, but while I found my date book that shows I attended this in August 1993, I may have written the notes on a handout and not a notebook, which means it will take me a lot longer to find assuming I still have it.

I distinctly remember Covey talking about his limp, but I can’t remember the details, which I have found online here. Covey loved athletics in school, but then got “slipped epiphysis, which is a deterioration of the thigh and hip bone during the growth process.” That put him in crutches starting in junior high school. The result:

“It totally shifted me from athletics to academics, which I’m grateful for now.  So it turned out to be a blessing in my life; but the time, you know, I thought my life was about over,  particularly  when I was told I had to go on crutches for a full year.  Then I tried to get back fast, too fast, and I was impatient, and I had to do that like over again for an entire year! Then it went to my next leg…. But anyway, that totally changed my approach to academics, and I began to love learning for its own sake.”

The rest, as they say, is history. This is, as Shakespeare put it in Romeo and Juliet, “adversity’s sweet milk.”

The 7 Habits is one of the few self-help books I would recommend without hesitation because it is based on examining what the most effective people do. And what the most effective people do is act systematically. Covey’s approach to analyzing what the best people was one of the inspirations for my new book — out next month —  in which I examine what the most effective communicators do. If course, they use a system also: rhetoric.

The 7 habits are ones that everyone would be wise to follow, but because they are systems oriented — and because they are aimed at bringing about change — they have a particular value for climate hawks who want to change the energy system in time to preserve a livable eco-system. Here is the short version of them (with my additions in parentheses and links to Covey’s longer description of them):

SELF-MASTERY (independent systems thinking)

• Habit 1: Be Proactive
• Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
• Habit 3: Put first things first (prioritize)

INTERDEPENDENCE (working with others systematically)

• Habit 4: Think Win-Win
• Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
• Habit 6: Synergize

SELF-RENEWAL

• Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw (continuously improve)

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by Andrew Freedman, via Climate Central

As the climate has warmed during the past several decades, there has been a growing imbalance between record daily high temperatures in the contiguous U.S. and record daily lows. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio has been closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade (2000-2009). This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found, and is instead consistent with global warming.

When you look at individual years, the imbalance can be more stark. For example, through late June 2012, daily record highs were outnumbering record daily lows by a ratio of 9-to-1.The study used computer models to project how the records ratios might shift in future decades as the amount of greenhouse gases in the air continues to increase. The results showed that the ratio of daily record highs to daily record lows in the lower 48 states could soar to 20-to-1 by mid-century, and 50-to-1 by 2100.

Andrew Freedman is the Senior Science Writer for Climate Central. This piece was originally published at Climate Central and was reprinted with permission.

Related Post:

• Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.

In an interview with Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) this morning, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien did what many television anchors have failed to do in discussions about the clean energy loan guarantee program: come prepared with facts.

Senator Johnson attempted to re-hash “pants on fire” GOP talking points on Solyndra and the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. But rather than take the claims at face value, O’Brien, who had clearly done her homework, easily deflated Johnson’s claims with a blunt statement of the facts.

Late in the interview, O’Brien incredulously responded to Johnson’s rant about the Soviet Union: “You surely are not suggesting that the concept behind Solyndra and other green energy technologies like Solyndra is comparable to the Soviet Union and Cuba, right?”

Johnson confirms he is indeed comparing loan guarantees — a policy long supported by mainstream Republicans — to Soviet economics. Ironically, Johnson’s manufacturing company, Pacur, expanded in the 1980′s with the help of a $2.5 million government-subsidized loan.

Check out the interview below. As candidates continue to push the bogus “crony capitalism” messaging around clean energy, let’s hope more television reporters can be this prepared:

A group of prominent American climate scientists sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today urging her to consider the climate impacts of developing the Keystone XL pipeline.

Last summer, Secretary Clinton said she would “leave no stone unturned” in the State Department’s review of the pipeline. However, in its report on the project last August — released before President Obama denied the permit and encouraged TransCanada to choose another route — the State Department made almost no mention of climate change.

That’s a pretty big stone left unturned, say the nation’s top scientists.

The letter, which includes signatures from James Hansen and Michael Mann, says that avoiding climate change in an environmental review is “neither wise nor credible.”

This lack of serious consideration of climate change isn’t much a surprise. The Obama Administration has created a double standard on climate through both the Keystone XL pipeline and its support for Arctic offshore drilling.

In the case of Arctic drilling, the Interior Department noted in its environmental review of Shell’s drilling plans that the region is “experiencing variations that are accelerating faster than previously realized.” But the Interior Department did not use this assessment to question the prudence of drilling for more fossil fuels that will only accelerate that warming trend.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, President Obama said he believes “that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.” But when asked to respond to NASA Climatologist James Hansen, who said that opening up tar sands is “game over” for the climate, the President avoided making a direct connection between Keystone XL and climate change:

James Hansen is a scientist who has done an enormous amount not only to understand climate change, but also to help publicize the issue. I have the utmost respect for scientists. But it’s important to understand that Canada is going to be moving forward with tar sands, regardless of what we do. That’s their national policy, they’re pursuing it. With respect to Keystone, my goal has been to have an honest process, and I have adamantly objected to Congress trying to circumvent a process that was well-established not just under Democratic administrations, but also under Republican administrations.

The reason that Keystone got so much attention is not because that particular pipeline is a make-or-break issue for climate change, but because those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem.

However, even with the President admitting that people are frustrated about inaction on climate, The White House and the State Department have largely avoided examination of the climate impacts of building the pipeline — a project that would bring up to 800,000 barrels of tar sands crude into the U.S. each day. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that tar sands emit up to 82 percent more greenhouse gases that average crude.

In that Rolling Stone interview, President Obama said he believed climate change would be an election-year issue. Encouraging the State Department to take a serious look at the climate impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline would be a great start.

Below is the letter sent this morning to Secretary Clinton:

Read more

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

Chancellor Angela Merkel warned on Monday that global warming will accelerate at a dramatic rate unless leaders reach a deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible. [Reuters]

A drought gripping the Corn Belt and more than half the United States has reached proportions not seen in more than 50 years, the government reported Monday, jacking up crop prices and threatening to drive up the cost of food. [Washington Post]

Shoppers across the country should stand up and take notice of the Midwestern drought that has already hurt supplies of corn and soybeans. [MSNBC]

Global warming, a concern for its effects on the world’s oceans, is also causing harm to the globe’s freshwater lakes, researchers in Switzerland say. [UPI]

Deploying giant space mirrors and spraying particles from stadium-sized balloons may sound like an engineer’s wild fantasy, but climate models suggest that the potential of geoengineering to offset rising atmospheric carbon dioxide may be significantly overstated. [Wired UK]

The government’s current policies will only deliver one-third of the 150 terawatt hours (TWh) of annual energy savings that are potentially available by 2030, according to new research that should help shape its forthcoming energy-efficiency policy. [Business Green]

A wide swath of the U.S., from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic, was bracing for the onslaught of another heat wave Monday and Tuesday as high temperatures approaching triple digits was in the forecast for cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago. [Climate Central]