FORT GARLAND, Colorado — Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) is the latest Republican to come out against Mitt Romney’s plan to end the production tax credit for the wind industry.

In an interview with ThinkProgress, Tipton rejected Romney’s pledge to end the wind tax credit, saying that the industry needs at least two years before it can be self-sustainable. “Do you want to cut it off when they’re on the cusp of being where we want them to be and to be able to create jobs and to be able to part of the energy solution?” Tipton asked, before answering his own question: “No, I don’t think we do.”

TIPTON: This is an industry that has explained to us a viable technology that can be competitive with other fuel sources that are going to be out there. Is it going to be the primary one that could actually fill in to be able to take off some of that load?

KEYES: So you’re saying probably maintain it for two years?

TIPTON: That’s what we’ve called for. We’re actually going to work with the industry because that’s what they tell us, then they don’t need this. Do you want to cut it off when they’re on the cusp of being where we want them to be and to be able to create jobs and to be able to part of the energy solution? No, I don’t think we do.

Listen to it:

Romney’s push to end the wind energy production tax credit would put 37,000 jobs at risk, particularly in midwestern states. Not only is he at odds with wind supporters in his party, but also western voters, where two-thirds of voters agree wind and solar will create new jobs in their states. Colorado was home to nearly 5,000 wind jobs in 2011.

Tipton joins a growing list of Republicans from states like Iowa are pushing back hard against Romney’s proposal. Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) attacked his own party’s presidential candidate, saying that he “a lack of full understanding of how important the wind energy tax credit is for Iowa and our nation.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) went further, calling Romney’s plan “a knife in my back.”

by Mindy Selman, via the World Resources Institute

Our water systems are currently being threatened by the crops we grow and food we produce. In many countries, agriculture is the leading source of nutrient pollution in waterways—a situation that’s expected to worsen as the global population increases and the demand for food grows.

So it’s timely that next week’s World Water Week, an annual conference organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, is focusing on water and food security.

WRI’s water quality team will be in Stockholm next week to discuss this very topic at a side event entitled, “Securing Water Quality While Providing Food Security: The Nutrient Question,” an event co-organized by Water Environment Federation and Environmental Defense Fund. This session, which takes place on August 29th, will build on the work WRI’s water quality team has done with its partner, Dr. Bob Diaz at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, to evaluate the scale and scope of global nutrient-related water quality challenges, including how these issues are driven by agriculture.

Eutrophication: A Growing Problem

Nutrient pollution in water, or eutrophication, is a problem that’s grown exponentially in the past 50 years. While nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus are needed to grow food and maintain healthy ecosystems, too many of these substances can cause havoc in freshwater and coastal ecosystems. Fertilizers and manure from agricultural fields, as well as sewage and runoff from our urban centers are increasingly making their way into waterways, polluting these bodies of water with excessive amounts of nutrients.

Too many nutrients in the water can fuel large algae blooms, including toxic algae. This algae can smother the coral reefs and sea grasses that provide valuable habitat for aquatic species, result in fish kills, and shift the structure of aquatic ecosystems. Plus, when algae blooms die, they suck oxygen out of the water. Under the right conditions, these die-offs create hypoxic areas or dead zones, areas where fish and other aquatic creatures cannot survive. Globally, eutrophication of coastal systems has risen from fewer than 75 systems in 1960 to more than 800 systems today. Of these, more than 500 have experienced hypoxia.

In many nations–including the U.S.–agriculture is the largest source of nutrients to our aquatic systems. Beginning in the early 20th century, people perfected a process for converting non-reactive forms of nitrogen into reactive forms that can be used as fertilizers. This spurred the Green Revolution, leading to a boom of fertilizer use and greatly increased crop yields.

But agricultural intensification had many unintended environmental consequences. Over the past 100 years, human activities have tripled the levels of phosphorus and doubled the levels of reactive nitrogen in the environment compared to natural levels. However, much of the nitrogen and phosphorus used to grow crops washes into rivers and streams during rainstorms or gets released into the atmosphere. Only 20 percent of the nitrogen used in agricultural production is actually consumed as food–the rest is lost to the environment, eventually making its way into our lakes, rivers and estuaries.

Read more

by Roland Hwang, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Lost in the current debate about “offshoring” is the remarkable story of the “onshoring” of fuel-efficiency manufacturing.  Thanks in large part to stronger standards, American drivers no longer have to buy foreign if they want to trade in their gas guzzler for gas sippers. Fuel-efficiency is driving sales and jobs growth in the auto industry.  And as demand grows, so does the business case to make fuel efficient cars and components in America.

Hybrid productions exemplify this trend.  With U.S. hybrid sales booming (up 63% this year), Toyota and Honda are bringing production to the U.S.  Most recently, Honda Motor Co. plans to invest $40 million and bring all global Civic Hybrid manufacturing to its Greensburg, Indiana manufacturing plant from Japan, creating 300 jobs by the end of the year.

Earlier this year, Toyota announced it would bring production of its Highlander mid-size SUV, including the Highlander Hybrid, to its Princeton, Indiana plant from its current plant in Japan.  The move to expand capacity represents an investment of $400 million and will add another 400 jobs.  Furthermore, Toyota plans to begin producing the Prius hybrid in the U.S. by 2015, bringing production inshore from Japan to a yet-to-be specified plant.

With greater hybrid production, comes even more jobs related to building the key components, already Ford Motor Co., the domestic hybrid sales leader, has invested over $135 million into creating a “center of excellence” for electric vehicles in the Detroit area, including moving battery pack assembly to the Rawsonville Plant in Ypsilanti, MI, and electric drive transaxles at the Van Dyke Transmission Plant in Sterling Heights, MI.

In an example of “insourcing” production, or moving production in-house that was previously done by a supplier or contractor, as well as “onshoring,” bringing production back to America from overseas, Ford is shifting battery pack production to Ypsilanti, MI from a Mexican supplier, and the critical transaxle production from a supplier in Japan, creating 170 jobs between the plants. Read more

by Kristin Hyde via Climate Access

At a gathering of ranchers in Kansas City last weekend, every meeting and meal was opened with a prayer, including a plea for rain to end this devastating drought.  Drought-caused price spikes for feed are forcing many livestock producers to slaughter their herds to a level they can afford to feed.  You won’t often see a direct link in these stories to climate change, and you are even less likely to hear such a link made by the farmers and ranchers themselves.   The key is to understand farmers’ perspectives, be strategic about effective engagement and find common ground.

by Mike Casey, via Scaling Green

Texts from Hillary co-creator and Tigercomm veteran Stacy Lambe recently became an editor at the popular “social news” website BuzzFeed. He’s now in Manhattan, generating items for the site’s 30 million visitors a month. (Technorati ranks it second only to Huffington Post).

Stacy’s gone from pitching to being pitched, DC to Manhattan, and from focusing on one sector to many. Essentially, he’s your ideal Scaling Green Communicating Energy guest lecturer.

One of our central questions for him was: How can clean economy companies get on to high-traffic sites? Stacy was polite about it, but he had a message for communicators in industries run by engineers and former finance people: clean economy companies and issues tend to be boring.

I think clean energy just has to find something to take it from the very niche world it’s in…  and find a way that is much more broad and shareable.

How to fix that? Be (really) short, punchy, visual and shareable (lists and pictures of kitties help a lot, too).

But Stacy made a larger point: The format of our content has to be part of the attraction for the millions of BuzzFeed readers. How “shareable” and fun it is to people who don’t live and breathe the latest wind turbine engineering development matters a lot if you want to break out on the Internet:

[Buzz] is really boiling down to very visual, but very punchy and approachable either information or word choice itself…

Greenpeace’s Shell website just kind of blew up in the past couple days. They had [these] kind of user-created ads that were very shareable content, perfect for BuzzFeed…and for an audience member who doesn’t have a take on the issue. They also allow us to put in some information or draw attention to a cause that doesn’t necessarily get talked about.

How to develop that ability? Trial and error, riffing off what other people are doing:

You have to see what works, but don’t be afraid to recreate or try something that’s already in existence. There’s going to be shared concepts out there, so take something that you know evokes a reaction, evokes a feeling, and then [try] to capture that.

This is good, essential stuff. Stacy was giving cleantech a path out of the “niche” (read: boring) category, a challenge identified by other lecturers (e.g., Climate Progress’ Stephen Lacey last November). For cleantech B2B companies, it’s easy to view outlets such as BuzzFeed as lying well outside annual corporate communication plans. The connection to customers and investors is too diffuse. But for B2C companies and collective cleantech brand defense against dirty-energy-funded attacks, the BuzzFeeds of the worlds are where the action is taking place.

Cleantech is not in BuzzFeed’s world, at least not very often right now, but we don’t have to stay that way. Americans like what we’re doing, and we can engage them a lot more if we meet them on their terms.

See a clip of the interview with Stacy here:

Mike Casey is the President and Founder of Tigercomm, a leading clean energy communications firm. This piece was originally published at Tigercomm’s Scaling Green blog and was reprinted with permission.

Arctic sea ice is set to reach its lowest ever recorded extent as early as this weekend, in “dramatic changes” signalling that man-made global warming is having a major impact on the polar region. [Guardian]

With the melt happening at an unprecedented rate of more than 100,000 sq km a day, and at least a week of further melt expected before ice begins to reform ahead of the northern winter, satellites are expected to confirm the record – currently set in 2007 – within days.

“Unless something really unusual happens we will see the record broken in the next few days. It might happen this weekend, almost certainly next week,” Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, told the Guardian.

A spokesman for President Obama’s reelection campaign suggested Thursday that climate change is unlikely to take center stage in the 2012 White House battle, noting that Obama’s contrast with GOP rival Mitt Romney is already apparent. [The Hill]

The wells supplying people’s homes are running dry here at the heart of the nation’s drought, which the government announced on Thursday has spread to 63.2 percent of the country, centered in the parched earth of the southern Midwest. [New York Times]

The worst U.S. drought in more than half a century has rallied critics of the federal renewable fuel standard, which will reserve about 40% of the nation’s corn crop for ethanol production this year. [Los Angeles Times]

Police in Indiana say they’re finding an unexpected benefit to the drought baking the American Midwest: Marijuana crops are easier to find. [NBC]

The Republican National Convention is only three days away, and Tropical Storm Isaac is threatening to crash the party. The big question is will it just filch a few hors d’oeuvres and clear out, or wreck the entire affair? [New York Times]

Fires across the West have left some states with thin budgets to scramble to get people, planes, bulldozers and other tools on fire lines to beat back the flames. [National Public Radio]

Climate change and the subprime mortgage crisis share two trends: They had early signs that some people ignored or denied, and they can strain the economy, experts said Wednesday. [Bozeman Daily Chronicle]