The second lamest part of the Republican National Convention — after Clint Eastwood’s incoherent ramble — was this part of Romney’s speech:

President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans — [pauses for audience laughter(!)] — and to heal the planet. MY promise is to help you and your family.

TPM posted this comment which I agree with:

This is obviously meant to portray Obama as grandiose and foolish, making wild promises he can’t keep —- about things that don’t matter to people.

However, it creates an odd distinction, as if the health of the planet and help for one’s family are different altogether and one’s family will do well even if the planet is doing poorly. Meanwhile, this summer, families in Colorado have lost their homes to fire and families through the Midwest have suffered intense heat and farmers’ crops have failed. Belief that global warming is happening has increased.

If the Obama people were to take this comment seriously, not just ignore or dismiss it as a nasty crack, but take it seriously as a policy matter, they really could have a winning issue in some swing states.

IF (see “Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?”)

One can mock Obama for not doing enough to keep this important promise, but not for making it in the first place.

Chris Hayes on MSNBC rightly says the audience laughter at the whole notion of fighting sea level rise will some day “be in documentaries as a moment of just ‘what-were-they-thinking’ madness.” Hear! Hear!

This wasn’t a great speech. It was devoid of metaphor and vision.

It was a checklist, as Tom Brokaw said on NBC afterwords — and was marred by Eastwood’s bomb.

Recently, climate change has been the Voldemort of the Obama Administration: ”The Threat-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

In January, the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address, since, what really does the gravest threat to Americans and indeed all homo “sapiens” have to do with the state of the union? Then the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation.

But in an April Rolling Stone interview, Obama pulled a Harry Potter, saying outright that he thought “climate change” would be a campaign issue. Nervous campaign aides looked around to see if invoking the threat that must not be named would somehow cause it to mysteriously appear. And it did, as the nation went through brutal heatwaves and wildfires and a record-smashing drought.

Having learned his lesson, the President was back to being “Silent On Climate Change In his Big Iowa Energy Speech” by the end of May. Then earlier this month, the president recounted the story of climate change record-breaking heat and ever-worsening drought, but wisely decided not to tempt fate by naming names or causes or what’s gonna happen in the future if we keep doing bloody little or any of that scary sciency stuff.

But it turns out that the President was just being coy. He will talk about climate change to select audiences, you know, the kind that are going to suffer the most from climate change — thanks to their parents’ greed and myopia: college students, Generation CO2.

Here is Obama at Iowa State University Tuesday afternoon:

Hello, Cyclones!  Thank you….

The decisions we make as a country on big issues like the economy and jobs and taxes and education and energy and war and climate change — all these decisions will directly affect your life in very personal ways. And I’ve got to say, this is something I’m acutely aware of when I make these decisions, because they’re decisions that are going to affect Malia and Sasha, my daughters, as well. It’s the way it’s always been — one generation makes decisions on behalf of the next.

But here’s the thing, Cyclones — your generation chooses which path we take as a country….

Will this be a country that keeps moving away from foreign oil and towards renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and biofuels — (applause) — energy that makes our economy more secure, but also makes our planet more secure? (Applause.) …

You believed four years ago that we could use less foreign oil and reduce the carbon pollution that threatens our planet.  And in just four years, we’ve doubled — doubled — the generation of clean, renewable energy like wind and solar.  (Applause.)

We developed new fuel standards so that your car will get nearly 55 miles per gallon by the middle of the next decade.  (Applause.)  That’s going to save you money at the pump.  That will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a level roughly equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from all the cars in the world.  (Applause.)

Today, America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly 20 years.  We’re on track to emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than we have in nearly 20 years. You can keep those trends going.  You believed in America, and that’s what’s brought about change.

Governor Romney wants to pass a new $5 trillion tax cut targeted towards the wealthiest Americans. That’s not going to cut our debt. Ignoring inequality doesn’t make it go away. Denying climate change won’t make it stop. These things won’t make for a brighter future. They won’t make your future stronger.

Go, team! Of course, Obama was only kidding when he told the students their generation chooses which path we take as a country. He wasn’t was addressing Hogwarts students, after all.

In the real world, the students’ parents and grandparents have already set the world on a path towards catastrophic warming and only their parents and grandparents can reverse course fast enough to prevent bringing unimaginable peril to all the world’s children.

Note to team Obama: Not talking about climate change doesn’t make it stop, either (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“)

Since the Iowa State team is the Cyclones, Obama was being very gutsy here, taking the risk that by mentioning climate change he would be blamed if an actual cyclone made land fall that day.

The fact that one did, however, should merely be taken as coincidence because a few hours later, at Colorado State University, Obama said:

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by Greg Rucks and Alisha Kuzma, via Rocky Mountain Institute

America has been built and shaped by its ability to move people and goods freely and quickly, fueled by oil. But this “freedom” comes at a cost. Transportation is America’s number-two consumer cost after housing. American drivers pay $8,000 a year for an auto they drive only 4 percent of the time.

According to RMI research, using vehicles more productively can provide the same or better access to transportation services with 46–84 percent less driving. Fortunately, we can now access and share detailed transportation data on an unprecedented scale, allowing creative software app developers to expand and enhance our mobility options. It all amounts to an emerging new transportation paradigm.

Imagine, for example, this scenario:

While eating breakfast, you receive a notification on your smartphone alerting you to weather-induced traffic delays along your normal route to work. You decide to take the suggested alternative route that will save you 15 minutes. You then reserve parking in a nearby garage at a fraction of the cost because you received a half-price push notification coupon.

While walking to your car, you notice a street lamp with a burnt-out light bulb. You snap a photo with your smartphone and place a work order with the city, and in doing so, qualify yourself for a monthly cash prize drawing.

On your drive, your car alerts you to two potential rideshares along your current route who have five-star ratings, so you agree to pick them up and make a few bucks. When you drop the passengers off, their mobile phones automatically complete the payment transaction.

In the parking garage, you redeem your coupon and pay the discounted daily rate, all on your smartphone, which then automatically logs the location of your parking spot so that it can help you find it later.

The 3 I’s of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Many emerging factors are making this vision a reality, and many areas of the country have made strides toward it. Scaling these solutions to their full potential will require a transportation system that is instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent:

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by Verity Payne, via the Carbon Brief

Two new research papers published today improve our understanding of the planet’s methane emissions, and might raise worries about the role of the gas in warming the planet. The first suggests that there may be extensive methane deposits under the Antarctic ice sheets. Meanwhile, the second concludes that emissions of the gas from Arctic permafrost have been underestimated.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas – accounting for around 14 per cent of the warming effect of current man made greenhouse gas emissions. Recent research has focused on measuring emissions from methane sources, both natural and manmade.

Antarctic methane reservoirs

Scientists have been particularly interested in methane emitted from the Arctic. This is because the region is warming particularly rapidly. In addition, methane released from melting permafrost and escaping methane hydrate deposits could exacerbate climate change. But research published today in the journal Nature suggests for the first time that there might also be large stores of methane at the other end of the planet, under the Antarctic ice sheet.

Plants thrived on Antarctica before the continent was covered by ice some 35 million years ago. Lab experiments show that microbes living beneath the ice are able to convert plant remains into methane, and scientists calculate that half of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (1 million square kilometers) and a quarter of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (2.5 million square kilometers) could cover carbon-rich sediments containing up to 4 billion metric tons of methane in the form of methane hydrates. These are an ice-like substance formed when methane and water combine.

The researchers suggest methane could be released if ice sheets retreat as global warming continues. According to study co-author Slawek Tulaczyk, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, the findings underline “the need for continued scientific exploration of remote sub-ice environments in Antarctica, because they may have far greater impact on Earth’s climate system than we have appreciated in the past.”

Media outlets have reported the findings widely, with most headlines focusing on potential impacts of escaping methane. For example, Reuters headlines the story ‘ Antarctic methane could worsen global warming – scientists‘, while the UK Press Agency goes for ‘ Methane fear beneath Antarctic ice‘.

So how realistic is the prospect of enough of the Antarctic melting to release methane that might be beneath the ice?

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It’s not a new solar manufacturing plant. It’s not a revolutionary wind turbine. And it’s not a fancy new electric vehicle. But a big clean energy initiative announced by the White House today may be a bigger deal than all of those combined.

Yes, the President is pursuing industrial energy efficiency — a lot of it.

Earlier today, Obama signed an Executive Order that sets a national goal of 40,000 MW of new combined heat and power (CHP) installations in the next 10 years, while directing various departments to initiate policies and technical assistance programs to help implement projects.

According to the White House, achieving these targets could bring between $40 billion and $80 billion in new capital investments to the manufacturing sector over the next decade.

CHP — a process that uses excess heat from electricity generation for air-conditioning or water heating, or uses excess heat to generate electricity — is well proven in both manufacturing and at power plants (see also “Recycled Energy — A core climate solution“). The U.S. currently has about 80,000 megawatts of electricity capacity from CHP — or about 9 percent of the nation’s overall portfolio.

However, as illustrated from the chart below put together by the Pew Environment Group, the U.S. is still far behind other nations in implementation:

The industrial sector accounts for about 30 percent of all energy use in America. So the U.S. can still do a lot more to make its industrial base more efficient — thus reducing carbon emissions, saving manufacturers money, and making them more competitive. The Obama Administration plan would increase America’s capacity of CHP by 50 percent over the next decade.

According to the Department of Energy, that could save up to $10 billion per year in energy costs and reduce annual CO2 emissions by 150 million metric tons, or the equivalent of taking 25 million cars of the road.

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by Walter Frick, via BostInno

The central energy challenge we face as a nation and a planet is the transition away from fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change, to clean sources of energy. The most important debates in this area concern just how quickly this must be accomplished and how to do it in the cheapest way possible. Last week Mitt Romney’s campaign released its energy plan, which completely ignores all of this.

Instead, the plan focuses on the goal of North American energy independence by 2020 through expanded fossil fuel production. Unfortunately, as Michael Levi, an energy policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in a review of the plan for Foreign Policy, “achieving energy independence through expanded supplies is a pipe dream.” You can read his review to find out why. I want to focus on the plan’s dismissal of clean energy.

The Romney Plan’s Only Mention of Clean Energy

The only mention of clean energy comes in the plan’s Innovation section, where it states support for basic research into new energy technologies, and notes that expanded development should apply equally to all sources. There’s no way to read this as anything except a commitment to drastically scale back existing clean energy programs like tax credits, applied research, and funding for commercialization. The terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are totally absent.

Boston’s Cleantech Community on the Plan

I emailed a number of Boston’s most astute cleantech analysts and businesspeople for comment on the plan and what I heard was (unsurprisingly) overwhelmingly negative.

“It’s a political document not worth serious analysis,” said Mitch Tyson, a serial cleantech entrepreneur and a lecturer at Brandeis.

As Bilal Zuberi, cleantech VC at General Catalyst, put it:

I wish Mitt Romney understood the need for a true long term energy strategy for the US. Instead he is delivering where he sees money in the short term, i.e. continued focus on same old oil and gas sectors that have made us pawns in the hands of foreign governments.

I expected a Presidential candidate to understand he will be responsible for making decisions that would affect multiple generations. I don’t see how his energy policy at all link to the steady and growing concern across America for environmental pollution, global warming, and sustainable development.

Marcie Black of Bandgap Engineering pointed out another sin of omission: though it calls out clean energy subsidies, the document makes no mention of U.S. fossil fuel subsidies which are on the order of $10 billion per year.

Jim Cabot, SVP at Rasky Baerlein and a former EPA official, took issue with the plan’s nod towards resolving energy permitting issues. “Over the years I have found that blaming permitting is often a red herring for other more substantive problems,” he wrote. “Oh, and the approach of ‘I’ll just roll the dice with the future of the planet by rapidly accelerating carbon emissions’ gives me pause too.”

Romney Used to Appreciate Clean Energy, At Least a Little

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George Monbiot has a new piece in the Guardian titled “The day the world went mad,” which looks at the underwhelming reaction in the press and political sphere to the August 27th announcement of record Arctic ice melt.

As Arctic sea ice faces a death spiral due to human-caused global warming, Monbiot points to the complete lack of attention: Instead of focusing on the Arctic, a British parliament committee on climate change debated building new runways for Heathrow Airport; meanwhile in the U.S., the Republicans were holding a convention celebrating fossil fuels and the party’s active denial of climate change:

“I wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms….When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday’s date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.”

Well, not everyone was ignoring the insanity of the situation. Speaking on Current TV’s coverage of the National Republican Convention, Al Gore had some strong words for the press:

“The whole North polar ice cap is disappearing in  front of our eyes. Twelve massive million dollar plus climate related disasters…and they keep coming…Just as [the media] did not report the truth about the proposal to invade Iraq, we are not getting the accurate impression about this challenge that we have to face. To stop putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution up into the atmosphere every single day… They aren’t only doing nothing about it, there’s hardly any discussion about it. It drives me crazy.”

Watch it:

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An Indian supporter holds a placard during a protest against what they say is illegal migration of Muslims from Bangladesh to the northeastern Indian state of Assam. The conflict in the state could get worse as the effects of climate change become more drastic.

by Arpita Bhattacharyya

Recent violence between the Bodo tribe and immigrant minorities in the northeastern Indian state of Assam has cost the lives of at least 96 people and caused more than 300,000 residents to flee their homes for refugee camps. The violence also led to mass panic among northeastern migrants across India, when text messages and videos circulated social media sites warning of attacks on northeastern migrants in southern Indian cities such as Bangalore and Pune in retaliation for the deaths of Muslim minorities in Assam.

The violence and resulting panic revealed a fragile peace in Assam and demonstrated the speed with which historical tensions can bubble over into larger confrontations that could roil the whole country. A lot of this tension could worsen with the confluence of climate change, migration patterns, and community security in Assam and India—a confluence that the Center for American Progress is examining in a series of papers and events on climate change, migration, and security. Before looking at those patterns in Assam, let’s first take a look back at Assam’s history to better understand today’s conflicts.

Assam’s troubled past

Assam is located in the northeastern part of India and shares a border with China, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. This underdeveloped region, which is connected to India politically by a small land bridge, is also known as the “Seven Sisters” and includes the states Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram. The surrounding countries’ cultures have influenced Assam, creating a patchwork of ethnic, religious, and linguistic traditions that distinguish the Seven Sisters from the rest of India. The Bodos are one of the main indigenous tribes located in the western region of Assam. In the 2001 Census the Bodos made up around 5 percent of Assam’s entire population.

The Bodo insurgents have been fighting for years for statehood in India. In 2003 they were granted special status through the creation of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts in exchange for ceasing their insurgency. The total area of Bodoland is about 8,970 square kilometers—roughly the size of Cyprus—and includes more than 3,000 villages. The status allows the Bodoland Territorial Council to legislate on communal-level issues such as agriculture, education, and tourism. Though the Bodos govern the districts, the tribe only makes up one-third of the overall population therein. The remainder of the residents belong to other indigenous tribal groups or are native Assamese.

Muslims are the second-largest group in the region, and tensions have long simmered between Bodos and Muslim residents over land-ownership rights. The most recent incident before the current violence was in 2008, when fighting between the two groups resulted in 55 deaths, more than 100 injuries, and 200,000 people escaping to refugee camps. The main issue between the two groups is land, with Bodos claiming that undocumented Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh are taking land rightfully owned by Bodos. Muslim communities, however, view the accusation of illegal Muslim Bangladeshi settlement as a false campaign to restrict their rights and drive Muslims from the area.

Moreover, Bengali-speaking Muslims settled in the area long before the British Partition created the state of Bangladesh in 1947. This makes it difficult to determine who is a Bengali-speaking Muslim long-term resident versus an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant.

Before 1947 India and Bangladesh were unified and ruled as British India—thus the issue of illegal immigration did not exist. Following independence from Britain, present-day Bangladesh was East Pakistan until 1971, when East Pakistan fought for independence from West Pakistan. During that war, 10 million East Pakistanis (including many Bengali-speaking Muslims) fled to India. Given this history, it is difficult to distinguish between Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam who lived in the area before the Partition, those who moved during the 1971 war as refugees, and those who moved after the war, including the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants whom the Bodos distinguish.

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by Stephen Mulkey, via Climate Access

Recent papers in the journal Nature show that we have transgressed the boundaries of a safe operating space for humanity with respect to several key environmental factors. Chief among these is climate change, which amplifies the effects of all other critical factors such as freshwater depletion, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion, and changes in land use. There is now mounting evidence that sometime during this century we will reach a state shift in the planet’s ability to support us. Climate change will affect every facet of the academy and change the practice of essentially all fields of study.

Unity College aspires to be America’s Environmental College and thus climate change must be a centerpiece of our programming. It is nothing short of mission critical that we get this right. At my request the faculty and Board of Trustees have adopted Sustainability Science (sensu U.S. National Academy of Science) as our overarching framework for all academic programming, and especially for upper division courses. Although this approach addresses all aspects of global environmental change, because of its innovative delivery, it is especially suited to the urgency of climate change. As a four-year liberal arts academy, a focus this specific has sweeping implications for our programming, but it does not obviate the need for critical skills such as oral and written literacy.  Thus I am quick to point out that the humanities are foundational to implementation of Sustainability Science as pedagogy.

As multiple components of our life support deteriorate, I think it likely that this century is destined to be the Century of the Environment. There can be little doubt that a child born today faces the prospect of living in a vastly diminished world unless we are able to make significant adjustments in our use of natural resources and bring new sources of energy rapidly online.  Development of a sustainable relationship with our natural resources is an imperative for our survival as we face the ultimate test of our adaptability as a species. Owing to the lead-time required to address climate change, it is likely that we have little more than a decade to vigorously transition towards sustainability. Because our curriculum is science-based, we do not shy away from acknowledging that the consequences of failing to respond will be catastrophic and irrevocable over a millennial time scale. Such a broad frame for the work of Unity College gives profound meaning to everything we do.

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A vast reservoir of the potent greenhouse gas methane may be locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a study suggests. [Guardian]

“Our laboratory experiments tell us that these sub-ice environments are also biologically active, meaning that this organic carbon is probably being metabolised into carbon dioxide and methane gas by microbes.”

The amount of frozen and free methane gas beneath the ice sheets could amount to 4bn tonnes, the researchers estimate.

Disappearing ice could free enough of the gas to have an impact on future global climate change, they believe.

“Our study highlights the need for continued scientific exploration of remote sub-ice environments in Antarctica because they may have far greater impact on Earth’s climate system than we have appreciated in the past,” said Prof Tulaczyk.

The G.O.P. platform approved Tuesday in Florida included tough language on many expected issues like abortion, but also takes a stand on an issue that has historically been out of the party’s mainstream: Agenda 21. [New York Times]

Isaac’s whistling winds lashed this city and the storm dumped nearly a foot of rain on its desolate streets, but the system of levee pumps, walls and gates appeared to withstand one of the stiffest challenges yet. To the north and south, though, people had to be evacuated or rescued as Isaac lingered over Louisiana. [Washington Post]

Although it made landfall more than 12 hours earlier, Hurricane Isaac continued to pummel southern Louisiana Wednesday morning as the huge Category 1 storm stalled in its motion to the northwest. [Climate Central]

Climate change is already hurting seven national seashores on the Atlantic Coast and threatens to submerge some of their land within a century, according to a report Wednesday by environmental groups. [USA Today]

A total of 1,590 cases of West Nile virus, including 66 deaths, were reported through late August this year in the United States, the highest human toll by that point in the calendar since the mosquito-borne disease was first detected in the country in 1999, health officials said on Wednesday. [Reuters]

Prices for wheat, corn and soybeans rose. That was partly from Hurricane Isaac. Its rain might be welcome after a drought, but it’s unlikely to have much effect on crops that have been suffering all summer. It will also cut into harvesting time in the Southeast. [Associated Press]

Higher prices and crop-insurance payments will outweigh losses from dry conditions, propelling aggregate farm profits to $122.2 billion this year, up 3.7 percent from 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast yesterday. [Businessweek]

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