Record-breaking heat is helping to fuel an ever-worsening drought, which is in turn devastating our forests and crops.

Does science have anything to say about what is causing all these off-the-charts records today — and, more importantly, what the future holds if we keep doing what we are doing?

Apparently not, according to the man who famously promised that his election would usher in “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Here is Obama’s “weekly address” (which should really be described as “address weakly”):

This may be the President’s idea of an “All-Hands-On-Deck Response” but it is also a “No-Brains-On-Deck Response.” Where is a frog with a brain stem when you need one?

Obama ends by saying of his proposed drought response, “If we look out for each other, we’ll come out of this stronger than before.” Actually, if we keep ignoring climate science and climate scientists, the only thing that will come out of this stronger than before will be the droughts of the future — see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now.”

And yes, it was just April that Obama told Rolling Stone that because of the poor economy:

… it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.

Four months down, two to go. If not now, when? If not the President, who?

Team Obama needs to read the new Yale public opinion analysis, “The Political Benefits of Taking a Pro-Climate Stand in 2012” along with these other polls and studies:

• Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?
• “Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming“
• Stanford’s Krosnick: “Our research suggests that it would be wise for the President and for all other elected officials who believe that climate change is a problem and merits government attention to say this publicly and vigorously, because most Americans share these views.  Expressing and pursuing green goals on climate change will gain votes on election day and seem likely to increase the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.”

by Bracken Hendricks and Adam James

Question: What is the Department of Energy doing to address the fact that American homeowners and businesses spend about $300 billion on energy bills per year?

Answer: Helping the private sector to create new markets that provide thousands of workers with paychecks, and launch innovative new business models for capturing energy efficiency.

The Better Buildings Neighborhoods program, formerly known as the “Retrofit Ramp-Up,” was launched in April of 2010 with the aim of jumpstarting state and locally based energy efficiency programs using Recovery Act grants as one-time seed funding. To date, $508 million in grant funding has gone out to 41 different programs, serving hundreds of communities nationwide.

The 2009 “Recovery through Retrofit” report spearheaded by Vice President Biden and the White House Council on Environmental Quality identified several key barriers that have slowed the growth of a residential energy efficiency market. These barriers to scale include:

• Access to Information: Average consumers rarely have easy and understandable data about their home’s energy usage, the return-on-investment for upgrades, or the various options available to them.
• Access to Financing: A lot of energy efficient upgrades make good financial sense over the long run, but the up-front capital costs are intimidating. Financing can soften the blow and space payments out over a period of time which mirrors the way consumers see energy bills.
• Access to Skilled Workers: Despite large numbers of construction workers being out of work, the pool of skilled labor is constrained. This can be traced to a lack of demand for these services. Who stakes their livelihood where a solid market doesn’t yet exist?

With these barriers in mind, the Better Buildings Neighborhoods programs set out to create the conditions for a scalable energy efficiency market. Their approach: strategic and creative use of ARRA grant funds as seed money (requiring recipients to leverage private capital 3:1) to get programs off the ground, build constituencies and stakeholders for these programs, and extract lessons learned to inform future program design.

Halfway through the funding and about two thirds of the way through its lifetime, the program has already demonstrated important success.

Read more

If you want to understand just how extreme and conspiratorial many in the “mainstream” Republican party have become, look no further than a resolution on Agenda 21 passed quietly in January.

Agenda 21 is a completely non-binding international framework for sustainability passed in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. The framework, which sets out very loose aspirational goals for making communities more efficient and less carbon-intensive, was signed by then President George H.W. Bush and later upheld by Presidents Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush.

Since the framework was adopted, right-wing conspiracy theorists have pushed bizarre theories about Agenda 21 being a central tool for the United Nations to create a one-world government and take away the rights of local property owners. In recent years, elevated by the megaphone of extreme pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, these conspiracies made their way into mainstream politics. Today, Agenda 21ers — many affiliated with the Tea Party and the John Birch Society — are peddling fears about Agenda 21 in order to stop basic efficiency and renewable energy programs on the state level.

Conspiracy theorists active in politics have called Agenda 21 “socialism on steroids” that would cause Americans to be “herded into centers like the UN wants.”

And in an April presentation on Agenda 21, activist Victoria Baer had this to say about John McCain’s support of ethanol, which she also claimed was part of a UN plot: “We should have left him in Hanoi with Jane Fonda…he is a traitor, a pure traitor.”

Yes, Baer called John McCain — a decorated Vietnam War veteran who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war — a traitor who should be “left in Hanoi” because he supported minimal increases in domestic ethanol production.

Baer also claims that the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. National Parks Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — agencies founded more than 100 years before Agenda 21 — are “all out of the UN to have these wonderful little furry animal organizations to cut our land away from us.”

In fact, the Agenda 21 language explicitly states that countries and local communities have “the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies.”

So what do these historically-challenged and completely inaccurate claims have to do with the Republican party? The Republican National Committee has officially adopted these conspiracy theories as its national platform. In January, the RNC adopted a resolution calling Agenda 21 “insidious” and “covert.”

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Last Friday I was at Joe’s Pub in NYC to witness Daria Musk’s live interactive global concert (videos below). Daria is a very talented singer-songwriter who has become an internet sensation rising faster than sales of the latest iPad.

While Joe’s Pub seats only about 160, Daria’s interactive concerts reach more than a thousand times as many people online around the world through the technology of Google+ Hangouts. And that means they have a much lower carbon than those deafening big stadium concerts.

For those raised on the old-fashioned way of attending concerts, you can read about the new wave in the new Rolling Stone article on Daria, which explains:

Singer-songwriter Daria Musk had much to celebrate last Friday when she performed at New York City’s Joe’s Pub. It has been one year almost to the day since she held her first Google+ Hangout concert – a musical version of a video teleconference where she and producer R.A.M. Rich perform their ornately textured pop music on-camera, interacting with people around the globe – so she had dubbed the night her Hangoutiversary.

Because of these concerts’ success, over 1.8 million people have added Musk to their Google+ circles (the equivalent to “liking” a page on Facebook) since July 2011. “You’re here,” she told the audience. “When you play online for too long, you start worrying about seeing people in person.” But despite playing to a live audience of up to about 160, she broadcast her show online, reaching what she estimates as hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Here is just one of her songs from the evening, which also shows how the interactive Google+ hangout feature works:

As you can hear, she has a great voice. She is also a talented songwriter. As readers of my new book, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga, know, people don’t just get the language intelligence needed to write lyrics by accident.

In the book I give the example of Bob Dylan, a true master lyricist. He learned from studying the great poets and lyricists. In fact, his desire to improve his language intelligence was so great that he regularly visited the New York Public Library’s microfilm room to read newspapers from the 1850s and 1860s. Why? As he explains in his autobiography, “I wasn’t so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times.”

I was able to spend time with Daria and her family before and after the concert, where I learned her mother was a teacher and Shakespeare lover who actually runs a Shakespeare repertory company for the younger crowds. Studying Shakespeare and listening to his plays is one of the best ways to get language intelligence.

The big news of Daria’s concert was that thanks to musicians like her, Google has amped up the quality of the sound in its hangouts:

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Photo: Businesswire

by Silvio Marcacci, via CleanTechnica

How important is the wind industry to the U.S. economy? Since 2009, the wind industry has doubled its capacity, installing enough projects nationwide to power 12 million homes and supporting 75,000 jobs. Each year, the industry attracts $20 billion in private capital to the U.S. And most importantly, nearly 70 percent of all equipment used for wind farms comes from domestic manufacturers, according to the Department of Energy.

Mitt Romney has made his position clear on the campaign trail: He wants to increase taxes on the wind industry by eliminating a key federal credit — potentially threatening 37,000 jobs — and maintain nearly $40 billion dollars in tax credits for the mature oil and gas industry. Romney’s campaign admits this. And this stance has made a lot of Midwestern Republicans upset.

“The whole issue here is about fairness and equity. The older, carbon-based forms of generation have enjoyed benefits and tax subsidies within the tax code for 90 years,” says Harold Prior, Director of the Iowa Wind Energy Association. “While wind and solar and a lot of other renewables depend on highly visible, short-term tax subsidies that face expiration…and it really does not create a very predictable situation for the industry’s growth.”

So what’s at stake in the Midwest? Business leaders in Iowa — a swing state that gets 20 percent of its electricity from wind — explain why the tax credit is so important to local economies there:

Hot is a relative term for people used to the scorching summer weather in this city built on land better suited for cactus than lawns. But nine straight days of excessive heat seem to have stretched even the most elastic tolerance levels to their limits. [New York Times]

The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning on Aug. 6 and has extended it all the way through 8 p.m. on Wednesday. Ken Waters, the agency’s warning-coordination meteorologist in Phoenix, spoke cautiously, though, saying there is “a little bit of relief” in sight, but “not much, really,” just “a bit of a drop in temperatures.”

Another sign it is hot? The tone of resignation in a meteorologist’s forecast.

The proof is in the numbers.

The last time the temperature dipped below 90 degrees in Phoenix was at 6 a.m. on Aug. 6. Two days later came the hottest day of the current heat wave — “I guess we can call it that,” Mr. Waters conceded — and the hottest Aug. 8 ever in Phoenix, when the high reached 116. (The record of 122 degrees was reached on June 26, 1990.)

Rep. Cliff Stearns was refusing to concede late Tuesday night to a veterinarian who has never held elected office. But by all appearances, Florida voters had delivered a stunning defeat to the Republican subcommittee chairman who put the White House on the hot seat over Solyndra and helped trigger this year’s Komen-Planned Parenthood blowup. [Politico]

President Obama and Mitt Romney traded blows over energy policy in separate campaign appearances Tuesday, as the campaigns settled into a new phase of trying to gain the upper hand on key issues. [Washington Post]

Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas has announced that due to uncertainty surrounding the extension of the wind energy production tax credit (PTC), it has laid off an undisclosed number of workers at its Pueblo, Colo., manufacturing facility. [North American Windpower]

According to a paper just published in Nature Climate Change, the combination of global warming and urbanization could drive local temperatures up by a whopping 7°F by 2050 in some parts of the U.S. — some two or three times higher than the effects of global warming alone. [Climate Central]

A fast-moving wildfire stoked by triple-digit temperatures burned 3,000 acres Tuesday in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains, creeping perilously close to tinder-dry areas of the San Bernardino National Forest, officials said. [Los Angeles Times]

Only two per cent of Canadians who responded to a new opinion poll believe climate change is not occurring. [CTV News]

Earnest, well-meaning environmental messages are supposed to be ineffective relics of a bygone age, when bumper stickers still worked and treehuggers hadn’t realised that self-interest speaks louder than Mother Earth ever could. [Wired]