A 1991 ad from a coal front group called Information Council on the Environment.

The coal industry has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to convince people that it can create an environmentally friendly product. However, whether it be the technological and cost barriers associated with capturing and storing carbon dioxide or the devastating impact of mountaintop mining on groundwater, ecosystems and human health, the concept of “clean” coal is a proven myth.

The coal industry’s push to brand coal as “clean” seems like a new phenomenon. In fact, as a new database of coal advertisements shows, this messaging strategy has been used by the industry since at least the 1920′s.

The database was put together by Greenpeace’s Quit Coal campaign. It features ads questioning global warming, obscuring the impact of acid rain, and railing on Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

Here’s an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal from 1979 in which American Electric Power touts clean coal as the solution to “help make the America we see ahead a better America.”

It’s not just modern environmental laws that have forced the coal industry to re-brand itself. Here’s an ad from the New York Times from 1921 touting the superiority of clean coal:

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by Tom Kenworthy

Testifying before a House subcommittee today, Mitt Romney’s chief energy adviser assured lawmakers that the candidate’s energy plan would not lead to oil and gas drilling in U.S. national parks and monuments.

“Nobody’s talking about parks and monuments,” said Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, Inc, who is also the lead architect of the Romney energy plan unveiled last month. That plan proposes giving states control over energy development on federal lands, a dramatic and unprecedented shift in the management of hundreds of millions of acres of public lands.

Hamm’s assurance about not drilling in national parks is one good step. But there are still many other questions about Romney’s plan for energy development on public lands left unanswered.

Like many of his policy positions, the Romney energy plan and its proposed changes for control over drilling on federal lands is quite vague on details. The plan says the state management would not include “lands specifically designated off-limits,” but did not identify which lands would fall into that category.

What about the more than 100 million acres in the U.S. protected by Congress since 1964 as wilderness? What about national wildlife refuges? What about national forest and rangeland areas with interim wilderness protections pending decisions by Congress on whether to include them in the full wilderness system? What about wild and scenic river corridors? What about areas of critical environmental concern overseen by the Bureau of Land Management? What about national recreation areas?

In a report released yesterday based on data provided by the National Park Service, the Center for American Progress identified 30 units of the national parks system that could be drilled for oil and natural gas. A dozen park service units already have oil and gas operations.

Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, referenced that report during his testimony to the energy and power subcommittee today. Trading federal oversight of drilling on public lands for state control could lead to oil and gas development in Everglades National Park and the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, explained Weiss.

Clearly alarmed by the potential political ramifications of drilling in some of America’s most revered landscapes, GOP members of the subcommittee rushed to explain that Romney’s plan envisions no such things.

“No one’s talking about putting an oil well on a sacred site like” the Flight 93 Memorial, said Rep. Morgan Griffin (R-Va.). “The Romney plan specifically excludes lands that are designated as off limits.”

That’s good to hear. But there are still plenty of other details within Romney’s plan that haven’t been addressed.

Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

by Andrew Winston

It finally seems to be dawning on many Americans that there’s something to this climate change thing. The historic drought has been hard to ignore. While belief in a long-term trend because it’s hot out right now is a bit ridiculous, it’s a start.

You can see a shift in how the media covers weather. The statement “because of climate change…” is often stated clearly without caveats such as, “what some scientists think may be a warming planet.” You see it in the UN calling for action to help the hungry cope with rising food prices “in an age of increasing population, demand and climate change.”

And you see it in the growing number of mega-corporations — including America’s Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Cisco, HP, J&J, Nike, and P&G — signing on to the “2 Degree Challenge Communiqué,” a call for the world’s governments to take strong action to slow greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change is basically accepted as fact the world over. But you wouldn’t know it watching our political conventions (or at least one of them). So while the world seems to be waking up to a fundamental, existential threat to our species (and not to “the planet,” which will be fine with or without us), the US policy debate remains mostly deaf, dumb, and blind.

Climate change has become a political “third rail,” harder to talk about than changing Social Security or Medicare. We didn’t hear any mention of it at the GOP convention, except as a punchline, and we didn’t hear much at the DNC convention…except for one quick, but important, remark from President Obama. Former President Clinton mentioned energy efficiency and Vice President Biden said the words “clean energy” once. But then President Obama, after duly noting the chance to create more natural gas jobs, spoke about building wind turbines and reducing dependence on foreign oil. Finally, he stepped firmly on the third rail: “Climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke; they are a threat to our children’s future.”

This is great, but let’s not get too excited. One line does not a policy make.

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Last month, the Energy Information Administration released data showing a strong drop in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in the first quarter of 2012. With CO2 emissions falling to their lowest levels in 20 years, some expressed optimism that it was representative of a positive long-term shift.

However, as we pointed out, it looks like this drop in America’s “carbon weight” is mostly based on a fad diet consisting of natural gas — a fuel considered the “crack cocaine” of the utility sector — not necessarily on a new, healthy energy diet of efficiency and renewables. (Going even deeper, the EIA figures don’t factor in methane from natural gas, so we still don’t know how much the boom in gas has impacted our overall greenhouse gas emissions).

New data from the EIA backs up concerns that the 2012 drop in CO2 isn’t as big as it seems.

According to the agency’s latest short-term outlook, CO2 emissions in the power sector are set to rise by 2.8 percent in 2013 after declining by 2.3 percent in 2011 and 2.4 percent in 2012. Why? Because natural gas prices are on the upswing, thus reducing gas consumption in the electric power sector and encouraging more consumption of coal:

After declining by 2.3 percent in 2011, fossil fuel emissions are projected to further decline by 2.4 percent in 2012, but this decline is followed by an increase of 2.8 percent in 2013. Petroleum emissions decline in 2012 (1.4 percent) and grow only 0.2 percent in 2013. Natural gas emissions rise by 5.2 percent and 0.1 percent in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Coal emissions decline 8.9 percent in 2012, but their projected rise of 8.5 percent in 2013 is spurred by a 19‐percent increase in the cost of natural gas for electricity while the cost of coal for power generation stays flat.

The share of total generation fueled by natural gas during the first half of 2012 averaged 30.4 percent compared with 22.3 percent during the same period last year. This increase in fuel share was driven by a cost of natural gas that was very low relative to the cost of coal. However, in June, the average Henry Hub natural gas spot price surpassed the average spot price for Central Appalachian coal for the first time since October 2011, indicating that the recent trend of substituting coal‐fired generation with natural‐gas‐fired generation may be slowing and will likely reverse. In light of the data indicating that power generators have recently been more responsive to changes in relative fuel costs, EIA has revised its projections for the generation fuel mix during 2013. EIA now expects that the higher natural gas prices next year will lead to a 9.5‐percent decline in natural gas‐fired generation while coal‐fired generation increases by 9.3 percent.

EIA expects non-hydro renewables to grow in 2013, but only by about 4.1 percent.

The impact of rising natural gas prices is the really interesting story here. Even with a modest increase in average gas prices — from $2.65 per MMBtu to $3.34 per MMBtu — we see a fairly substantial shift back toward coal consumption. And with some experts reporting that we only have between 10-20 years of abundant natural gas (not 100, as the industry claims), a much steeper price increase is probable, which could possibly fuel even greater increases in coal burning.

At  the same time, rising gas prices will also take some of the pressure off renewables that compete directly with the resource. However, as this data shows, it may also encourage more coal generation in the short and mid term. We’ve made progress in reducing emissions from fossil fuels in the electric power sector, but it’s still uncertain how steady those decreases will prove.

IPCC 2007 projections for Arctic sea-ice 2080-2100 (right image)

by David Spratt, via Climate Code Red

The Arctic sea-ice big melt of 2012 “has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us”, according to Kim Holmen, Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) international director.

From Svalbard (halfway between mainland Norway and Greenland), the BBC’s David Shukman reported on 7 September that Holmen had described the current melt rate “a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago”.

As detailed last week, the thin crust of sea-ice which floats on the north polar sea is now only half of the average minimum summer extent of the 1980, and just one-quarter of the volume twenty years ago.

Yet the IPCC 2007 report suggested sea-ice would last all, if not most, of this century: “in some projections using SRES scenarios, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century”. One modelling image in the IPCC report (below)shows sea-ice still existent in period 2080-2100. This has proven to be dramatically conservative.

“As a scientist, I know that this is unprecedented in at least as much as 1,500 years. It is truly amazing – it is a huge dramatic change in the system”, says the NPI’s Dr Edmond Hansen. It is “not some short-lived phenomenon – this is an ongoing trend. You lose more and more ice and it is accelerating – you can just look at the graphs, the observations, and you can see what’s happening.”

And the trend is clear. Cambridge Professor and Arctic expert Peter Wadhams predicts Arctic summer sea ice “all gone by 2015”, except perhaps for a small multi-year remnant. Other Arctic specialists are now saying we will see an ice-free Arctic in summer within a decade or so.

Clearly the  IPPC 2007 report is no longer scientifically adequate on the Arctic – and much else – and Holmen’s call to “adjust our understanding of the system and… adjust our science” is timely. The nub of the problem is that climate policy-making in Australia, and internationally, is stuck in the IPCC 2007 frame and is thereby disconnected from what is occurring on the ground, in the seas and at the poles. For that reason it can only fail.

The IPCC 2007 report dramatically underestimated sea-level rises to 2100, as being in the range of 0.18–0.59 metre this century, “excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow”. Because ice sheet melting and carbon-cycle feedbacks such as permafrost are non-linear or difficult to model, the IPCC report projections “do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks nor the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, therefore the upper values of the ranges are not to be considered upper bounds for sea level rise.” The use of paleo-climate (climate history) data as a guide to future sea levels, as advocated by researchers such as James Hansen of NASA, was excluded.

Four of six emissions IPCC scenarios found the “best estimate” of warming to 2100 to be at or below 2.8°C, whilst the trigger for substantial Greenland ice mass loss was put at at 2.7°C with a range of 1.9-4.6°C, “if global average warming were sustained for millennia” (my emphasis).

Put this IPCC 2007 picture together, and the science frame we get is:

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by Jessica Goad

Yesterday the House of Representatives voted 225-189 to pass a bill authorizing a controversial land transfer that would almost certainly result in the mining of public lands in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest.  These lands have numerous other values like hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, and recreation.

At issue is a bill introduced by Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN), called the “Minnesota Education Investment and Employment Act” (H.R. 5544). The bill would give 86,000 acres of state-owned “school trust” lands within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the federal government in exchange for similar but unspecified acreage in Superior National Forest outside of the wilderness area.

This bill is problematic on a number of levels. First, many of the lands within the Superior National Forest that would be transferred to the state have natural resources like sulfide ore which contains metals like copper and nickel.  Transferring these mineral-rich lands to the state would almost certainly result in their being mined, because the Minnesota state constitution dictates that these school trust lands be utilized for “maximum long-term economic return.”  As the Minneapolis Star Tribune editorialized:

This land swap isn’t about Minnesota’s hard-pressed schoolchildren. It’s about converting forest land to mining.

Craavack’s bill would also bypass the federal environmental review process that allows for an assessment of the impacts that the land exchange and resulting mining would have on the water and air quality of the Boundary Waters. In fact, the bill goes so far as to exempt the land exchange from the National Environmental Policy Act and its public review provisions by classifying it as “not a major federal action” which would be subject to NEPA.

Sulfide mining operations can be dirty and risky if not done properly. They can pollute rivers and streams, cause acid mine drainage, and tear up landscapes.

And yet Cravaack claimed in an editorial that “…this bill would not take away a single environmental protection or regulation.”

A number of sportsmen groups are opposed to the bill because mining by its very nature blocks access to prime wildlife habitat and hunting and fishing.  As David Lien of the group Minnesota Backcountry Hunters and Anglers wrote:

Over 100 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed the Superior National Forest as a place “reserved from settlement” and “set apart as a public reservation, for the use and benefit of the people.” If HR 5544 passes, that will no longer be the case for 86,000 acres of public lands in the [Superior National Forest].

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The record loss of Arctic sea ice this summer will echo throughout the weather patterns affecting the U.S. and Europe this winter, climate scientists said on Wednesday, since added heat in the Arctic influences the jet stream and may make extreme weather and climate events more likely. [Climate Central]

The “astounding” loss of sea ice this year is adding a huge amount of heat to the Arctic Ocean and the atmosphere, said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s like having a new energy source for the atmosphere.”

… Peter Wadhams, the head of the polar ocean physics group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told BBC News on September 6 that the added heat from sea ice loss is equivalent to the warming from 20 years of carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas that is causing manmade global warming.

For more detail, see Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events “Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves.”

The Agriculture Department on Wednesday slightly lowered its forecast of corn and soybean yields as record heat continued to batter crops in the Midwest, making it likely that farmers will bring in one of the lowest harvests in years. [New York Times]

Firefighters battled stubborn blazes that kept residents from homes in Montana, Wyoming and Washington as authorities worried the weather could worsen the volatile situation. [San Francisco Gate]

Health officials say they’re convinced this will be the worst year for West Nile virus deaths and severe illnesses since the disease hit America’s shores in 1999. [Washington Post]

A recent study done by the Natural Resources and Defense Council highlights the best and worst states equipped with plans to combat water shortage and other problems expected to occur from globally increasing temperatures due to climate change. One of only nine, California was given top awards for an integrated and comprehensive preparedness plan that addresses all relevant water sectors and state agencies. [Huffington Post]

Growing installations of rooftop solar panels are increasing concern that U.S. utilities may refuse to buy power generated by the systems, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. [Bloomberg]

After raising more than $100 million over the past seven years, GreenVolts, a California startup that makes concentrating photovoltaic systems, has closed its doors after a major investor abruptly withdrew financial support for the company. [Forbes]

Back in August, the Obama administration announced strict new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks. By 2025, passenger vehicles sold in the United States are supposed to get, on average, 54.5 miles per gallon. So how does these rules stack up internationally? [Wonk Blog]

European officials signaled on Tuesday that they may recommend the suspension of the continent’s carbon emission fees for airlines to avert a trade war with major economic powers such as China and the United States, allowing time to forge a global agreement on climate charges for the aviation industry. [Guardian]