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:

Read more

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.