There has been a noticeable shift within the clean energy industry over the last few months as the election season brings a fresh round of attacks.

From 2005 to 2008, advocates racked up an impressive array of policy support on the local and state levels due to strong bipartisan support. Many people believed that local momentum would carry forward on the national level and provide the catalyst for a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill after President Obama came into office in 2009.

Of course, it wasn’t enough. And the defeat of the climate bill in 2010 marked the beginning of an intensifying campaign against renewable energy. Now, with the Republican party using Solyndra as the center of its messaging strategy, that campaign has become a central theme of the 2012 election.

Renewable energy groups have come to grips with this reality and are adapting their messaging strategies accordingly. Consider this recent email, sent by Adam Browning of the Vote Solar Initiative, on the industry’s need to counter disinformation:

When people ask: What keeps you up at night? I tell them this: There’s an unholy amount of money being spent to attack renewables right now — an unprecedented blitz of solar slander, renewable-mongering and clean energy kvetching that could set policy efforts back decades.

Consider: Of the negative advertising in April of this this election cycle, 81% have targeted renewable energy for attack.  And when you factor that this presidential election is shaping up to be the most expensive in history, with experts estimating spending in the range of $6 billion dollars, well, we got trouble.

Since its founding, The Vote Solar Initiative has been all about helping states and municipalities understand the value of solar. They’ve had to deal with their fair share of misinformation over the years, but they’ve made extraordinarily impressive bipartisan progress on getting better regulatory standards and support mechanisms for solar in place.

But today, with organizations like Americans for Tax Reform, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute, and a growing army of Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists (supported by the Republican National Committee) all working to rhetorically smear renewables or take them down on the local level, a lot more people are waking up to the threat.

For sure, groups like Vote Solar want to maintain their non-partisan stance. They’ve worked in the bluest of the blue states and the reddest of the red states, communicating with regulators, policymakers and business owners about the benefits of solar. But they recognize that the political hits are going to pile up against them this election season. That’s a fact.

Consider these trends:

• American Energy Alliance, Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, and Crossroads GPS – the top outside interest group spenders – have spent a total $24.9 million on deceptive ads, many of them energy-related, the Annenberg Public Policy Center found.
• The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity has devoted more than 90 percent of its ad spending to energy ads. Two of these ads pushed the patently false claim, roundly rejected by fact-checkers, regarding clean energy jobs. Politico just reported the Koch-backed organizations plan to spend $400 million ahead of the 2012 election, with a large amount of that money likely going toward energy issues.
• 85 percent of the dollars spent on presidential ads by four top-spending third-party groups were for ads with at least one claim ruled deceptive by fact-checkers.
• One in four of the dollars spent on TV ads has funded mostly false advertising mentioning energy. This equals the amount of spending on health care ads, according to Kantar Media.

In other words, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent — virtually overnight — on straight-up lies designed to unravel the last decade of progress in renewable energy.

And just yesterday, the Sierra club issued a report detailing the flow of money from fossil fuel interests to organizations and individuals engaging in the campaign to take down renewable energy. The report outlines most of what we’ve been reporting on this website for the last year, but it’s a solid comprehensive overview of the players involved.

The report outlines political donations, industry dollars funding anti-renewable think tanks, and the relationship between local and national groups.

Read more

by Bill Becker

Among political insiders in Washington, the conventional wisdom is that action on global climate change is a dead issue for the foreseeable future. But that need not, and should not, be the case

The atmospheric thermostat isn’t on hold while we wait for a better political moment.  And outside the beltway where voters are dealing with drought, floods, fires and heat waves – and soon, higher food prices — the right political moment may already have arrived. What remains is for our current and prospective elected leaders to seize it.

That might not be as difficult as some think. In a poll last March by George Mason University and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 82 percent of respondents said they had personally experienced one or more extreme weather events during the previous year; more than one in three Americans said they had been personally harmed by extreme weather. A Gallup poll the same month found that 77 percent of Americans say they are “personally worried” about global warming. The well-documented risk is that these impacts will grow much more severe if we don’t address them.

At this point in the campaign, neither Gov. Romney nor President Obama has said much about the issue. It may be an uncomfortable topic for them. A year ago, Gov. Romney acknowledged anthropogenic global warming and said “it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases.”

Several months later, he flip-flopped without apology. In the only mention of the climate issue on his official campaign website, he supports taking away EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. Romney’s site lays out his positions on 24 issues, but environment is not among them.

On the closely related issue of energy policy, Gov. Romney boasts that “the United States is blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based energy resources” – the resources most responsible for anthropogenic global warming. He decries the federal government’s support for technologies such as wind and solar, but mentions nothing about subsidies to oil, coal, gas or nuclear power. He wants to restrict government support for renewable energy to basic research, in effect ending the government’s efforts to expedite the commercialization of technologies we need for a clean energy technology.

President Obama has been criticized for not doing enough in his first term. As president-elect in 2008, he said “now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all”, and his presidency would “mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change”. However, he failed to throw the full weight of his presidency behind the cap-and-trade bill that eventually died with a whimper in Congress in 2010.

With all due respect, the central theme of the President’s energy strategy – “All of the Above” – is a cop-out. It’s what politicians say when they want to make everyone happy, in this case the well-endowed fossil energy industries. The reality is that America needs to make some very tough choices about energy in the next four years, in favor of those that don’t pollute. Read more

The drought and heat gripping much of the United States this summer continue to worsen. According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, 50.3 percent of all counties in the U.S. — 1,584 across 32 states — are now under disaster designations, with 90 percent due to drought.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

“The drought has intensified in the most parched areas of the country, with more than a fifth of the contiguous United States experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, according to numbers released Thursday morning by the National Drought Mitigation Center.

“Just three weeks ago, the portion of the lower 48 states receiving those two most serious drought designations stood at 11.6 percent. That area has now doubled, to 22.3 percent. The jump in the past week from 20.6 percent represents an increase of about 32 million acres.””

The drought has taken a toll on the nation’s corn crops. According to the National Corn Growers Association’s Larry Fields, more than three quarters of the corn belt is being impacted by the drought.

“What I’m seeing here is a total crop failure,” farmer Larry Hasheider has seen much of his corn crop wither and die this summer. The drought is “like being sucker punched in the stomach,” said Hasheider in a video interview with AFP. Fortunately for Hasheider, some of his crop is irrigated and that portion is doing fine. However, only about 15 percent of the nation’s corn crop is irrigated, the rest is at the mercy of the rains.

Watch it:

In June, 3,282 daily heat records in the US were broken. In July, another 4,414 heat records fell, baking much of the U.S. corn belt in triple digit heat.

Farmers are now being forced to cut down their stunted plants for sale as animal feed, a product that will be in great demand because of smaller-than-projected corn and soy yields. With corn and soy bean prices at or near record highs, prices for livestock feed are rising as well. Those additional costs for farmers will be passed on to the consumer, most likely in meat, dairy and eggs. The Department of Agriculture estimates that the price of those three commodities will rise between 3% and 4% over the next year in grocery stores nation-wide.

The Earth has warmed only slightly more than 1°F since the Dust Bowl — and we are set to warm between 9-11°F this century if we stay anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions path. By continuing our business-as-usual behavior, experts warn that permanent dust bowl conditions could grip much of the Southwest and Great Plains.

– Max Frankel

In 2010, a Chinese ship carrying 72,000 U.S. tons of coal ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. Photo: AP

Two separate environmental coalitions are criticizing the Obama Administration for its intent to support coal and natural gas export terminals near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

According to an “intent to file suit” letter sent by the Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Environment, and the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the U.S. Export-Import bank is considering financing two liquid natural gas export facilities in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area that will have the cumulative capacity to handle 30 million metric tons of gas per year.

The groups say the Ex-Im bank, which helps broker sales of U.S. exports, has not properly considered the environmental impact of the “construction, dredging, operation, and shipping associated with these facilities,” which, according to the groups, would “diminish water quality, destroy habitat, and otherwise harm several ESA-listed species.”

Coincidentally, on the same day, a group of environmental and conservation organizations sent a letter to Ex-Im Bank President Fred Hochberg, criticizing his institution for reportedly considering providing financing for a large coal mine in Australia designed for increasing exports across the same Great Barrier Reef area.

According to the coalition, plans to build the Alpha Coal mine could result in up to five times more shipping traffic across the Great Barrier Reef. The groups also warned of the global warming impact of increasing coal exports to Asian and other energy-hungry regions:

The global warming impacts of the Alpha Coal mine are enormous. When burned, the coal from the Alpha mine would produce a volume of greenhouse gases larger than the combined emissions of Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, and Washington D.C. With the International Energy Agency warning that we have only five years to make a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic climate change, Ex-Im Bank financing of this project will put your institution squarely at odds with the international community’s understanding of the severity and consequence of climate change.

The Ex-Im Bank follows the Equator Principles and has declared pride about being environmentally responsible. Financing this project, or any of the coal export projects sited in the Great Barrier Reef, would make a mockery of these principles and policies. Worse, they would further undermine the legacy of your chairmanship and the reputation of the institution. We strongly urge you to publicly disassociate with the GVK project.

According to the World Resources Institute, up to 90 percent of the world’s corals could be threatened by bleaching, ship traffic, and overfishing by 2030.

In 2009, the Ex-Im Bank adopted a carbon management policy that would “address the climate change issues raised by the Bank’s export financing activities while remaining flexible and responsive to the needs of U.S. exporters.” The bank has approved hundreds of millions of dollars in financing for renewable energy projects overseas.

However, the coalition of environmental groups, which includes the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Australian Marine Conservation Society, say that by supporting damaging coal facilities in environmentally sensitive regions, the Ex-Im bank is not living up to the environmental standards it claims to uphold.

“How an institution with strict environmental polices and safeguards could even consider a project that would be sited inside one of the world’s great treasures — the Great Barrier Reef — defies logic,” said Justin Guay, head of the Sierra Club’s international program.

Guay pointed to the The Ex-Im bank’s sister agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), as a model for deploying sustainable energy projects around the world. That organization, which provides financial tools to help U.S. businesses expand in emerging markets, has directed most of its energy financing activity to sustainable projects. At the Rio+20 conference in June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that OPIC would provide $20 million in grants for African entrepreneurs that would leverage billions in economic activity for clean energy and water projects.

“Nothing could be more stark than the difference between Ex-Im and OPIC,” said Guay. “Ex-Im Bank has become a black stain on the Administration’s efforts to position the US to compete in the $267 Billion global clean energy industry.”

by Ron Kenedi, via Clean Edge

Last October, SolarWorld led a U.S. manufacturer coalition that asserted trade law violations by Chinese makers of solar cells. The coalition’s filing with the Department of Commerce led to significant tariffs being levied on solar products originating in China entering the U.S.

According to filing by the U.S. manufacturers, Chinese manufacturers received lavish incentives from China’s government that gave them an unfair cost/price advantage over U.S. manufacturers. In addition to this advantage, it is asserted that the Chinese makers sold product to U.S. customers at below manufacturing costs, a practice often referred to as dumping.

Chinese manufacturers and the Chinese government argue that they did not receive unlawful or excessive incentives and did not sell solar cells and modules at below cost. Also, they allege that not enough attention is given the other factors that allow a cost advantage over U.S. makers, namely “know how” and scale. They claim the solar manufacturers coalition’s trade case was brought forward because SolarWorld had lost its competitive edge and couldn’t compete successfully in a highly competitive marketplace.

Now, because of a loophole in the tariff judgment, only the solar cell, not the entire module, has to be manufactured outside of China to avoid all tariffs.

The case has been presented that SolarWorld itself was the recipient of large amounts of incentives from the German, U.S., and Oregon governments and has no right to complain about the special treatment received by Chinese makers from their government. There are also rumors of SolarWorld modules occasionally being sold in the U.S. for extremely low, below market prices.

The result of all this chest pounding and legal maneuverings (the extent of which might not be resolved for years) is that the U.S. solar industry and all its participants—from manufacturer to end-user—has suffered. The only winners are Taiwanese cell makers. Solar modules from China that are being sold in the U.S. are now more expensive because of retroactive tariff penalties that must be paid and the additional cost of securing “out of country” cells. That price increase is magnified as the product moves from maker to EPC to end-use customers in the case of project business, and from maker to distributors and dealers to end-use customers in the case of sales through channels. Each organization marks up the increase as the modules moves from manufacturing to installation. This higher price is even more striking today as euro weakness has caused a lowering of the module price in Europe creating a 20 percent or more difference between U.S. and European pricing. Read more

by Paulina Essunger

Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wants Americans to take responsibility for being “the fattest people in the world.”

Seems like a good idea: personal responsibility and accountability are important.

And Atlas is right about a lot of things: “the burden of obesity on the US health care system is at crisis levels (and it’s only expected to increase in coming decades); there is no silver bullet to solve [the obesity problem]; government policy can play a crucial role.”

Atlas points out:

Obesity, one of the most serious public health problems in America, has yet to be honestly discussed.

But in order to have that honest discussion about the obesity crisis, we’re going to have to stop ignoring the heavy animal in the middle of the room: the crisis in American walking.

It seems odd for someone who takes responsibility so seriously to say that increasing rates of obesity are “primarily due to overeating and insufficient exercise” without acknowledging a major factor leading to insufficient exercise: the changes in our transportation infrastructure that deprive us of opportunities for active transportation. Yet Atlas’ commentary ignores the elephant in the room.

We know that the less we use active transportation, the more obese we are. And we know that the more we use active transportation, the less obese we are.

Read more

The Senate Finance Committee voted to renew a tax credit for wind power that is set to expire at the end of this year, with several Republicans joining Democrats to support extending the credit for one more year at a cost of $3.3 billion. [New York Times]

The provision, which will apply to projects under construction by the end of 2013, was included in a $200 billion package of popular tax breaks that the committee passed on a bipartisan 19-5 vote. The bill is expected to go to the Senate floor when Congress returns from summer recess, although it is unclear if the House will take up similar legislation.

The wind industry considers the subsidy, called the production tax credit, to be vital as it tries to make wind power more competitive with electricity generated from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. Wind farms can generally choose to receive a continuing credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced or receive a one-time payment equivalent to 30 percent of the cost of developing a project.

Even as the drought worsened in the Midwest and Great Plains, Congress proved unable to provide relief for farmers and ranchers before leaving for a month of campaigning. [Los Angeles Times]

In yet another display of the inexorable interdependence of Earth’s ecosystems, a bad summer for Midwestern farmland has turned out to be a good one for life in the Gulf of Mexico. [New York Times]

The high temperature in Oklahoma City topped out at 112°F for the second straight day, extending the streak of consecutive 100°F days to 16. [Climate Central]

Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s claim that a single energy company could recover $1 trillion worth of oil and gas from the state’s shale is an exorbitant overestimate, according to experts interviewed by The Associated Press. [AP]

A two-day meeting hosted the by US of 17 countries opposed to the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS) has ended without a joint declaration. [Guardian]

India’s paralyzing power outages this week have focused attention on this year’s weak monsoon season, as below-normal water levels in some hydroelectric dams mean both less electricity to go around and farmers pumping more water instead of depending on rain. [Wall Street Journal]

A staff report just released on Solyndra doesn’t appear to back up some of the more lurid accusations that Republicans have made about the Solyndra affair in campaign ads, including Mitt Romney’s claims that money for Solyndra went to “campaign contributors” or “friends and family. [Politico]

The Navy’s plans to power warships with biofuels may not be out of gas quite yet. On Tuesday, the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee voted to continue funding the alternative energy program, keeping alive the Navy’s push for an ambitious “Great Green Fleet,” propelled by renewable fuels. [Wired]