I’m sure by now you’ve seen excerpts from the infamous Romney video where he is speaking to a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser. The remarks are striking to me because of what they — and recent polling — say about the collapsing GOP view of our social contract.

Here it is:

Here are some key excerpts:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.

Hmm. Does Romney think people not entitled to food? Let them eat cake!

My job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful….

No, he’ll never convince those 47% that they should take personal responsibility and feed themselves. Seriously!  Then again, Romney probably won’t convince anyone of anything because he is one of the worst communicators to win any party’s presidential nominees in US history. Then again, he’s made a good living not worrying about “those people” — all 150 million of them!

Others have debunked the “analysis” in these remarks (see here and here).

If I can “name it” then I’m also interested to know whether Romney thinks people are entitled to cleaner air and cleaner water — and a livable climate. Or are those matters of “personal responsibility” too? In regulation-free Romney-land, corporations are apparently entitled to do whatever they want (see “Permitting Poison In The Air Means More Money For The Romney-Ryan Campaign“).

Is there no “personal responsibility” not to poison people, not to foul the air and water? Isn’t Romney the guy who said corporations are people?

The Washington Post points us to a fascinating June Pew poll in its analysis of the nonsensical politics of Romney’s callous remarks, “Most independents believe the government should guarantee food and shelter.” I know it is hard for Romney to believe that those independents actually care about their fellow human beings. After all, what’s in it for them? Are they their brothers’ keepers?

The Pew poll noted that partisan polarization has increased in several areas of the social contract — no more so than in the area of the environment.

Republican agreement that we need stronger laws and regulations affecting the environment has collapsed. But other polling suggests this is mostly the Tea Party crowd who get their “news” from right-wing media — see “Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming.“ After all, Yale reported this year that “75 Percent of Americans Support Regulating CO2 As A Pollutant.”

Conservative columnist David Brooks writes in his debunking column, “Thurston Howell Romney“:

Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.

How much has the Republican Party changed? Here is Teddy Roosevelt in his famous 1910, “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas:

… the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part….

I guess he’d be called a socialist today.

by Jennifer Chu, via MIT News

Extreme precipitation in the tropics comes in many forms: thunderstorm complexes, flood-inducing monsoons and wide-sweeping cyclones like the recent Hurricane Isaac.

Global warming is expected to intensify extreme precipitation, but the rate at which it does so in the tropics has remained unclear. Now an MIT study has given an estimate based on model simulations and observations: With every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature, the study finds, tropical regions will see 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes, with possible impacts for flooding in populous regions.

“The study includes some populous countries that are vulnerable to climate change,” says Paul O’Gorman, the Victor P. Starr Career Development Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, “and impacts of changes in rainfall could be important there.”

O’Gorman found that, compared to other regions of the world, extreme rainfall in the tropics responds differently to climate change. “It seems rainfall extremes in tropical regions are more sensitive to global warming,” O’Gorman says. “We have yet to understand the mechanism for this higher sensitivity.”

Results from the study are published online this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

A warm rain will fall

Global warming’s effect on rainfall in general is relatively well-understood: As carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, they increase the temperature, which in turn leads to increases in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. When storm systems develop, the increased humidity prompts heavier rain events that become more extreme as the climate warms.

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by Trevor Winnie, via Clean Edge

The case for technologies that harness renewable resources, improve efficiency, and reduce emissions has never been stronger, and the industry known as clean tech continues to grow at a staggering pace – global revenues for the “Big Three” sectors of wind power, solar PV, and biofuels hit $246.1 billion in 2011 after a decade of annual growth averaging more than 30 percent. But such an all-encompassing classification – spanning clean energy, advanced transportation, advanced materials, and clean water technologies – has lately made the industry an easy target for opposition, especially in the U.S., where divisive national politics have made pragmatism a rare commodity.

As a longtime analyst at clean-tech research firm Clean Edge and contributor to the recently published book Clean Tech Nation (coauthored by Clean Edge colleagues Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder), I should be on the front lines defending the clean-tech moniker. But given the noticeable intensifying of false debates surrounding clean tech in the last year, it’s worth taking a moment to examine ways in which the industry’s far-reaching identity has opened the door to some misplaced antagonism.

#1: Energy Sources as Sports Teams

Unless you are employed in a particular sector of the energy industry, as long as the car runs, the lights are bright, the showers hot, and the beer cold, it makes little sense as a consumer to root for one specific energy source against another, as if they were sports teams. Solar power isn’t the Miami Heat, and – as much as T. Boone Pickens would like you to believe it – natural gas isn’t the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Of course, it’s imperative to evaluate energy sources based on availability, affordability, and environmental impact. But blind support of identifiers like traditional energy, alternative energy, renewables, or clean energy – which aggregate many dissimilar resources and technologies – can quickly create an “us versus them” culture. And that’s exactly what seems to be playing out on the national political stage in this election season. When the failure of one longshot solar startup (that shall not be named) can be used to demonize all aspects of a multi-hundred billion dollar industry, perhaps the umbrella is too large.

#2: The Misrepresented History (and Current Reality) of Energy Subsidies

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by Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

In the 2008 presidential race, both major parties’ candidates—then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)—had similar proposals to reduce industrial carbon pollution to slow climate change. Although the two candidates disagreed about many issues, public health protection from air pollution wasn’t one of them.

What a difference four years makes. Since taking office, President Obama has proposed and adopted significant pollution reductions protective enough to safeguard public health as required by the Clean Air Act. Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—this year’s Republican presidential candidate—promises to remove these protections, which would lead to 21,600 unnecessary premature deaths, 199,000 asthma attacks, and 12,540 hospitalizations every year, based on Environmental Protection Agency projections. In fact, Gov. Romney even questions whether humans are predominantly responsible for climate change.

Gov. Romney opposes these pollution-reduction measures that would shield children, seniors, and other vulnerable people from mercury, carcinogens, and carbon pollution.And his vice-presidential running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), voted more than a dozen times over the past 18 months to block these and other public health safeguards.

Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan’s promise to invalidate defenses against industrial chemical hazards would have tragic health consequences for hundreds of thousands of Americans. As we later explain in detail, this harm to public health would also cost our economy up to $187 billion annually due to premature deaths, health care expenses, and lost productivity.

Why are the two Republican candidates so opposed to protecting Americans’ health from air pollution? Gov. Romney now boasts millions of dollars in campaign contributions from big oil, coal, and utility companies—$3 million in direct campaign donations so far from individuals and political action committees affiliated with these three industries.

Meanwhile, outside organizations and super PACs have done the dirty work for the Romney-Ryan campaign by attacking President Obama and his energy policies so the campaign doesn’t have to. The Washington Post reported that outside groups spent more than $23.7 million through mid-June on ads criticizing the Obama administra­tion’s energy policies.

This issue brief details the connections between the fundraising of the Romney-Ryan cam­paign and their dirty energy policies that threaten the health of us all. We begin by looking at the safeguards put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency since 2009 and then detail how a Romney-Ryan administration would gut these safeguards, and who specifically benefits from such actions. As we will demonstrate, more air pollution for Americans to breathe in means more money in the pockets of the Romney-Ryan campaign.

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by Laurie Johnson, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The U.S. government is significantly underestimating the negative impacts climate change will impose on our children and grandchildren, according to a new study published this week in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.

In the article, my coauthor Chris Hope (Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) and I show how regulatory agencies are using a faulty model to estimate carbon pollution damages that all but ignores the economic damages climate change will inflict on future generations.

After valuing these costs more completely, our study finds that carbon pollution will impose damages between 2.6 to more than 12 times higher than the government’s main estimate. The government put the value of the damage caused by carbon pollution at $21 per ton of CO2, whereas our revised estimates place the cost at between $55 and $266 per ton. Importantly, even these revised estimates may be too low: They correspond to what might happen if future temperature increases are in the middle of scientists’ projections—not any of the worse-case scenarios they warn us about. Additionally, the model left out many damages that couldn’t be quantified.

The government’s approach matters a lot because its numbers are used to decide what actions should be taken now to fight climate disruption, such as the choice of what type of electric power we should build, which would change if more accurate estimates were used.

We incorporate the estimated climate costs (ours and the government’s) into the cost of electricity generation, concluding that the real price of fossil fuel generation is much higher than cleaner energy sources after properly accounting for pollution damages.

While natural gas might appear to be the cheapest generation option for new power plants, using renewable sources or advanced fossil fuel generation with pollution capture technology is more cost effective in the long run than building new conventional plants using either natural gas or coal, with real economic benefits accruing quickly and increasing over time.

In supplementary analysis to the paper, I also find that it would be cost effective to replace some of our existing power plants with cleaner sources, rather than continuing to operate them.

This blog distills some of the technical details in the study, for readers interested in the underlying analysis and its assumptions. First I outline the major flaw in the government’s approach that we critique, namely how it “discounts” future climate damages. In this section I include some necessary technical background on discounting and its rationale, and how our discounting differs with that of the government. Next, I give five fundamental reasons behind our critique of the government’s discounting.

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A group of 19 leading companies has sent a letter to Congress asking lawmakers to immediately extend a key tax credit for wind that is set to expire at the end of the year.

The diverse coalition of firms, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss, Starbucks, and Yahoo!, says that raising taxes on the wind sector would be bad for businesses that buy large amounts of wind electricity.

These companies join a very large bi-partisan chorus of renewable energy supporters asking Congress to give the wind industry some certainty and put the sector on a level tax playing field with the oil and gas industry, which enjoys billions of dollars in permanent tax benefits.

Over the last year, the National Governor’s Association, County Commissioners, and numerous Republican politicians have all sent separate letters to Congressional leaders in support of extending federal wind tax credits for at least another year. Now this latest group of prominent companies is playing up another theme: Ending support for wind isn’t just bad for the wind industry, it’s bad for downstream non-utility companies that procure energy from wind:

As major U.S. employers and some of the largest non-utility purchasers of renewable energy, we urge you to extend the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind energy before the end of the 112th Congress. A failure to pass an extension will amount to levying a tax on companies committed to buying American energy and growing the U.S. economy. In today’s economic climate, a taxhike on American businesses buying American renewable energy is unwarranted.

In the past decade American businesses have significantly ramped up their purchase of American wind energy. For consumers of wind electricity, the economic benefits of the PTC are tremendous. Electricity rates, which reflect marginal costs for power plant operations and fuel prices, consistently decrease when wind enters the market. Because wind prices can be locked in up front, businesses incorporating wind into their energy portfolios are better equipped to hedge market volatility in traditional fuels markets caused by supply shocks. We are concerned that allowing the PTC to expire will immediately raise prices for the renewable electricity we buy today.

The PTC has enabled the industry to slash wind energy costs – 90% since 1980 – a big reason why companies like ours are buying increasing amounts of renewable energy. Wind now supplies over 3% of US demand and accounts for 35% of new power capacity installed in the last four years. In the seven years that the PTC has been continuously in place, installed wind capacity has grown sevenfold to nearly 47 Gigawatts representing more than $79 billion in private investment.

As Congress investigates ways to spur business growth, we urge you to ensure an extension of the PTC. Failure to extend the PTC for wind would tax our companies and thousands of others like us that purchase significant amounts of renewable energy and hurt our bottom lines at a time when the economy is struggling to recover. Extending the PTC lowers prices for all consumers, keeps America competitive in a global marketplace and creates homegrown American jobs.

These 19 leading companies are part of the Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP), a project from the sustainability advocacy group Ceres. They say that failure to extend the wind credit will add new costs to businesses throughout the economy. Interestingly, far-right conservative groups aggressively opposed to raising taxes are the only ones coming out in opposition to the wind tax credit.

Over last five years, wind has brought $20 billion of annual private investment to the U.S., according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). There are now 75,000 jobs across the country in wind manufacturing, operations, maintenance and education. However, a report from Navigant Consulting prepared for AWEA concludes that failure to extend the wind tax credit could result in up to 37,000 job losses in the coming year.

Related Stories:

• Romney’s Opposition To Wind Tax Credit May Become A Political Liability In Iowa: ‘This Is A Very Big Deal For Us’
• Company Would Abandon Ohio Wind Project Without Tax Credit, Losing 200 Jobs In John Boehner’s Home State
• Congress is Killing Wind Energy Jobs, Says Bipartisan Governors Group: No Wonder It’s Less Popular Than Nixon or BP
• Lawmakers Across the Political Spectrum Speak Up: We Want The Wind Tax Credit Extended
• Policy Uncertainty Threatens 1,600 American Wind Jobs at Vestas — and 37,000 Jobs Nationwide
• Republican Senator On Romney’s Anti-Wind Position: It Was ‘Like A Knife In My Back’

by Debra Jacobson

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine, who lives in South Florida, told me that she was considering voting for Mitt Romney in the Presidential Election – the first time that she had considered voting for a Republican for President.  Her stated reason was that she thought that “change” was needed.  Although I understood the economic challenges experienced by my friend immediately following the 2008 economic collapse, I responded that the changes embodied in Romney’s economic and budget policies were not in her best interests.  In fact, I strongly believe that Governor Romney’s policies on a wide variety of issues — ranging from health care and Medicare to financial regulation and women’s issues – are adverse to my friend’s best interests.

As an adjunct professor who teaches energy law and policy, however, I am most knowledgeable about the adverse impacts of candidate Romney’s proposed policies on energy and environmental matters, particularly his dangerous views on climate change.  Although Romney was a strong supporter of incentives for renewable energy and action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when he was Governor of Massachusetts, he has flip-flopped on these issues in his effort to win the Republican Presidential nomination.

As I watched the TV footage showing the devastating impacts of Hurricane Isaac battering the Gulf Coast, my anger about Romney’s proposed policies has intensified.  Even if a single storm can’t be definitely connected to climate change, the leading scientists of the world agree that climate change increases the risk of extreme weather events, including heavy rainfall.

My message to my friend is now clear – one type of change you can count on with Mitt Romney is UNRESTRAINED CLIMATE CHANGE!  And the effects of unrestrained climate change will be disastrous to South Florida.  This is a particularly serious issue for my friend, whose major equity is her ownership of a condo on the South Florida coastline.

At a climate change conference sponsored by Florida Atlantic University in June 2012, scientists emphasized that South Florida has more people and property at risk from rising sea levels than any state in the country.  And even before such change, scientists have warned that Florida coastal residents could expect increasing damage from hurricane storm surge and flooding, rising insurance rates, and shrinking freshwater supplies as sea water rise taints coastal wells. And Florida taxpayers will bear the costs of modifying local infrastructure to address these problems.  For example, the City of Hallandale Beach, Florida is considering a plant to drill new wells several miles inland at a cost of three million dollars – a very large investment for a city with a $100 million dollar budget.

And, of course, I would ask my friend to think about the debt that Mitt Romney wants to leave to our children and grandchildren – not only the debt of a budget plan that does not add up – but also the debt of squandering our planet (including our beautiful beaches) and leaving the exorbitant bills to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars on more seawall barriers and other costly infrastructure improvements that may not even provide protection from the eventual storms.

When Governor Romney denigrated President Obama’s efforts to protect the planet from sea level rise in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention and stressed that he would protect families instead, his comments were both wrong-headed and immoral.  Only someone who had spent his week immersed in the bubble of the Republican convention would issue remarks so insensitive to families who had been forced to escape through rooftops because of rising waters from extreme weather.  Only someone who ignored the tenets of the major religions of the world (including his own Mormon faith) requiring us to be “stewards of the earth” would reject that precept that is intended to protect our families and future generations.

Debra Jacobson is a Professorial Lecturer in Energy Law at The George Washington University Law School.  She also is President of DJ Consulting LLC.

When Arctic sea ice fell to its lowest level ever recorded this August, the ice covered an area 45 percent smaller than it did in the 1990′s. The amount of ice that melted in the Arctic this year is roughly the size of Canada and Texas combined.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just released a video illustrating the record melt:

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center also released its latest data on Arctic ice on Monday. The previous record for Arctic ice melt was in 2007; however, as the data show, this year brought an additional loss of ice equivalent to the size of Texas. During August of 2012, Arctic ice disappeared at a rate of 35,400 miles per day.

Researchers are calling the melt “astonishing” and  “urgent.” One prominent scientist, Cambridge University’s Peter Wadhams, is now projecting that summer sea ice in the Arctic may entirely disappear in the next four years — calling the implications “terrible.”

“As the sea ice retreats in summer the ocean warms up (to 7C in 2011) and this warms the seabed too. The continental shelves of the Arctic are composed of offshore permafrost, frozen sediment left over from the last ice age. As the water warms the permafrost melts and releases huge quantities of trapped methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas so this will give a big boost to global warming,” he told the Guardian newspaper.

The National Climatic Data Center also released data showing this summer was the third-warmest ever recorded globally, with August marking the 330th consecutive month when temperatures were above the 20th century average.

One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years. [Guardian]

In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for “urgent” consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures.

“This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates”.

While the USA sweated through one of its warmest summers on record, so, too, did the rest of the globe, federal scientists from the National Climatic Data Center announced Monday. [USA Today]

After reading all the briefs, a judge ruled Monday that Michael Mann’s e-mail correspondence was exempt from the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and did not have to be provided to the American Tradition Institute, which was trying to delve into the discussions and data behind Mann’s conclusions that humans are causing the Earth to grow hotter. [Washington Post]

A liberal Democrat says House Republicans have summoned the spirit of George Orwell’s 1984 by dropping language about climate change from their bill to thwart regulations that affect the coal industry. [The Hill]

Wildfires hurt air quality across Oregon and Washington on Monday as forecasters issued a stagnant-weather advisory at least through Wednesday afternoon. [Oregonian]

A new 1,000-acre wildfire started in Utah’s west desert Monday even as crews fought another blaze southwest of Provo. [Salt Lake Tribune]

Russell E. Train, a renowned conservationist who played a central role in the creation of groundbreaking laws and effective enforcement in response to rising concerns about environmental protection in America, died on Monday at his farm in Bozman, Md. He was 92. [New York Times]

We have dramatically shrinking glaciers. We have compelling science. We have adorable polar bears treading water. But wouldn’t you know it, what really makes us fret over climate change is making it all about us. [Calgary Herald]