Betsy Taylor of Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions has put together an excellent messaging guide on climate and clean energy, “Climate Solutions for a Stronger America.”

She first “commissioned a national survey of likely voters to determine how leaders can engage and win on climate and energy in key races around the country.” She then consulted with leading communications experts to weave together a coherent narrative from the threads of those findings.

Readers know I’m a big believer in coherent narratives. Taylor’s guide is a must-read.

Here is more on the three major messages:

Key Finding 1: Extreme Weather

Voters have taken note of the nation’s unusual and severe weather—the tornadoes, heat waves, wildfires, and drought. The public clearly gets that something is going on with the climate because they see it in their own lives and on the news. Some are still uncertain about the causes of climate disruption, but three out of four now recognize it is real

Underlying Value: Responsibility

Message: We can’t ignore the increasingly severe weather: It’s already causing billions in damage and looks like it’s only getting worse. We owe it to our kids to protect them and their futures, and that means addressing climate change before it becomes irreversible. Running away from tough problems only makes them worse.  That’s not how America works. We need to implement common sense strategies now. We know what’s right, we know how to implement clean energy solutions, and we know that reducing fossil fuel dependence will make America stronger. It’s time to step up and get it done

Talk about current and recent weather. Spend less time talking about what may happen in the future and more on severe weather and impacts happening now. Use local examples, but also refer to the wildfires, drought, and major storms that have been in the national news.

Introduce “climate disruption.” Begin to use “climate disruption” instead of climate change when speaking about extreme weather and local impacts. “Disruption” makes it slightly harder for people to dismiss unusual events as being caused by natural weather cycles.

Focus on destructive weather, not just heat. Destructive, costly, and unpredictable weather events are more unsettling to voters than just record high temperatures. Voters do connect higher temperatures to destructive wildfires and drought.

Talk about kids and grandkids. In America, we put families first and that means making sure we leave a healthy, secure world for our kids and grandkids.In early August, the nation’s top climate scientist at NASA reported that things are going to get worse and that climate change must be addressed now if we want to make sure our kids have a safe future.

Message Pivot: Use the message triangle to link to messages grounded in the other two core messages of patriotic pride (#2) and accountability (#3). “We have a responsibility to act, and American ingenuity can drive the solutions.  It’s time to break the stranglehold that Big Oil and Coal has on Washington – a stranglehold that is preventing us from taking action on climate change.

Certainly it’s key to focus on increasingly extreme weather since we know linking that trend to climate change is scientifically accurate — see “Trenberth on How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change” – and since it resonates with people:

• Poll: Majority of Americans Understand Global Warming Worsens Extreme Weather and Want Nation to Act
• Poll: Americans’ Understanding of Climate Change Increasing With More Extreme Weather, Warmer Temperatures

Here’s the second finding, on solutions:

Read more

Here’s a little story about wind you might have heard.

First we’ll tell it the way it happened. And then we’ll tell it the way Mitt Romney’s campaign thinks it happened.

*****

Chapter 1: Since 2008, U.S. wind generation has increased 171 percent, bringing in nearly $20 billion in private investment and supporting 75,000 American jobs.

Chapter 2: Partly helped by a bi-partisan tax credit originally crafted by a Republican Senator from Iowa and championed by President Obama, wind accounts for 32 percent of new capacity in 2011.

Chapter 3: That development helps fuel new growth in manufacturing. In 2006, only 35 percent of components for wind turbines came from American companies. Today, with 500 manufacturing facilities operating around the country, 67 percent of components for turbines now come from American companies.

Chapter 4: All that new manufacturing activity helps some struggling Midwestern towns with high unemployment gain back their manufacturing jobs. It even helps Iowa get 20 percent of its electricity from wind.

Chapter 5: But that bipartisan tax credit, which maintained wind’s momentum even while natural gas prices hover near record lows due to a supply glut, is now set to expire at the end of the year. (Author’s note: Much of that new natural gas was made available because of key government support too.) In response, Republican representatives, governors, conservative county commissioners, and the largest companies in the world all send letters to Congress asking for a short-term extension of the credit.

Chapter 6: Congress balks.

Chapter 7: Mitt Romney says he supports killing the tax credit; Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley says Romney’s position is “like a knife in my back.” Soon after, Paul Ryan says he opposes the tax credit. Ryan then goes back out of the campaign stump pushing his “austerity” budget, which preserves $40 billion in permanent tax credits for the fossil fuel industry.

Chapter 8: The wind industry starts frantically reminding people about projections from Navigant Consulting showing a loss of 37,000 jobs if the tax credit expires.

Chapter 9: The projections start playing out. As the expiration date for the wind tax credit approaches, wind companies start cancelling projects and laying off workers due to a slump in demand for 2013. Manufacturers and developers in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania cancel projects, lay off workers, or announce plans to lay off workers.

Chapter 10: On Tuesday, Siemens announces that it will lay off 615 wind workers in Kansas, Florida, and Iowa. The company blames political uncertainty around the production tax credit for wind. At no point does Siemens blame President Obama.

End reality.

*****

Begin Romney campaign version:

Appendix 1: Responding to the Siemens wind announcement, the Romney campaign tries a different approach to the story — oddly blaming the layoffs entirely on Obama:

“Today’s layoffs at Siemens are yet another unfortunate reminder of the Obama Economy where American families have suffered from chronic unemployment, increased poverty and falling incomes.  There is a fundamental disconnect between President Obama’s philosophy of the need for redistribution of wealth and the free market economy which our country was founded on. President Obama has focused on attacking the success of others rather than applauding their accomplishments and urging others to strive for similar success. Mitt Romney’s plan for a stronger middle class will foster the dignity of work, champion innovation, generate new wealth, and create 12 million new jobs in his first term alone in a variety of sectors, including wind.”

Appendix 2: No one notices because everyone is too preoccupied with secret tapes showing Romney calling 47 percent of Americans “dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.”

By Jessica Goad

This morning near Winnesboro, Texas, three protestors chained themselves to logging machinery used to clear trees in the pathway of the Keystone XL pipeline. It is the most recent in a series of protests designed to delay construction of the southern end of the controversial pipeline.

The northern leg of Keystone XL, which runs from Alberta’s tar sands south to Steele City, Nebraska, is under additional review by the State Department. The Department will likely complete its analysis by early 2013. Transcanada, the company behind the pipeline, agreed to reroute the northern section after major concerns were raised about the impacts it could have on Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer.

But construction has already begun on the southern leg of the pipeline, which runs from Cushing, Oklahoma to various refineries in southern Texas.  Construction on the “Gulf Coast segment” of the pipeline began in early August after President Obama directed his administration to “make this project a priority” in March. (A third, middle portion running from Steele City to Cushing is already online).

The group behind today’s protest is Tar Sands Blockade, whose goal is to delay, interrupt, and stop construction of pipeline infrastructure.  The group states on its website that:

We don’t make the decision lightly. The fact is, other tactics – lobbying, petitioning, and packing public hearings – have failed to halt the pipeline. State authorities have bent to every TransCanada desire, and they show no signs of stopping now.

This morning’s protest is the fourth demonstration of civil disobedience by local landowners, climate activists, and young people in Texas. In early September, near Saltillo, Texas, a handful of protesters chained themselves to logging equipment, delaying construction for a day. In August, seven protesters locked themselves to a truck carrying pipe to the construction site, right after Transcanada was allowed to seize private land using eminent domain for pipeline construction. And in early August, organizers hung banners at equipment staging areas in Texas and Oklahoma.

Transcanda has not commented on the protests, although its CEO said in July upon approval of the southern section that “TransCanada is now poised to put approximately 4,000 Americans to work constructing the $2.3 billion pipeline….”

Last September, more than 1,200 citizens were arrested in front of the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. And NASA climatologist James Hansen has warned that exploitation of Canada’s tar sands is “game over for the climate.”

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Public Lands Project.

A coal train, or a load of CDM carbon credits?

In a decision criticized as “unfortunate” and even “insane” by onlookers, the United Nations has decided that new coal plants are eligible for carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The CDM is a trading platform set up by the UN that allows developed countries to obtain verified emissions reduction credits through renewable energy, energy efficiency, power plant fuel switching, and sustainable transportation projects in developing countries in order to meet Kyoto Protocol targets.

Now the UN has added coal to the list of eligible projects. Again.

At a CDM Executive Board meeting last week, the organization approved new rules that allow more efficient supercritical and ultra supercritical coal plants built in developing countries to obtain carbon credits. So theoretically, a coal-fired power plant in Europe could be “offset” by carbon credits not through renewable energy, but through another carbon-burning coal power plant in India.

“This destroys the sense that there is some sanity and rationale to this mechanism,” said Justin Guay, head of the international climate program at the Sierra Club. “The fact that we are defending coal plants as part of low-carbon finance is crazy.”

The Sierra Club and the watchdog group CDM Watch say there are 40 plants in China and India waiting for CDM approval.

It’s uncertain how many coal plants in that queue will qualify. The current system will only be in place until the end of 2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol comes to a close. With only a few months left before the transition of the CDM, there is limited time for plant operators to qualify and sell credits into the largest markets.

“We’ll have to see if these plants rush to meet the deadline. That’s unclear. But the real issue is about how this market sets standards long-term. We now have all these regional carbon market in development, and they’re all going to look somewhere for these standards,” said Guay.

This isn’t the first time the UN has added coal to the list of eligible technologies under the CDM. In November of 2011, the Sierra Club reported on coal plants that were set to receive millions of credits through the mechanism — all of which would have likely been built without CDM funding.

The UN board overseeing the mechanism even warned at the time that emissions reductions from coal plants were overestimated by up to 50 percent, possibly resulting in a net emissions increase.

The methodology was eventually suspended at the COP 17 climate conference in Durban. But the board approved a new standard last week, again allowing higher-efficiency coal plants to gain certification through January 1st.

Supporters of using CDM to encourage higher-efficiency coal plants say the method is no different than encouraging efficiency in any other sector: The end goal is realizing emissions reductions where ever possible. If the mechanism encourages more efficient supercritical coal plants over older subcritical technologies, then it is performing as designed.

But critics say that argument is dangerously flawed for a variety of reasons.

The most obvious concern is the promotion of coal at all. Echoing the view of the world’s climate scientists, Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, warned in 2011 that the world’s chances of combating dangerous climate change would be “lost forever” if countries fail to quickly reduce reliance on fossil fuels :  “If we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”

The other flaws are more specific to the CDM mechanism itself.

One revolves around the concept of “additionality” — a problem that has plagued the CDM in a variety of sectors. In order for a credit to have an impact on emissions, it must prove to bring a new project on line. But in the case of large infrastructure projects — specifically coal, hydro, and industrial gas — a large number would get built even without credits.

In 2011, the Stockholm Environment Institute looked at whether decisions to build supercritical coal plants in China and India were based on CDM credits. It found that most of the projects were going ahead anyway, largely due to new technology standards within the countries:

Read more

Arctic Sea Ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected. The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks. Image via Arctic Sea Ice Blog.

We’ve known for a long time about basic polar amplification. Warming melts highly reflective white ice and snow, which is replaced by the dark blue sea or dark land, both of which absorb far more sunlight and hence far more solar energy.

More recently another insidious feedback has become obvious — as the Arctic ice retreats, big oil companies can drill for more fossil fuels whose combustion will accelerate warming and ice retreat. You might call this the “brainless frog” feedback.

Now Reuters reports on yet another feedback:

Local pollution in the Arctic from shipping and oil and gas industries, which have expanded in the region due to a thawing of sea ice caused by global warming, could further accelerate that thaw, experts say.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said there was an urgent need to calculate risks of local pollutants such as soot, or “black carbon”, in the Arctic. Soot darkens ice, making it soak up more of the sun’s heat and quickening a melt….

“There is a grim irony here that as the ice melts … humanity is going for more of the natural resources fuelling this meltdown,” he said. Large amounts of soot in the Arctic come from more distant sources such as forest fires or industry.

So the direct pollution from shipping and fossil fuel extraction could speed up Arctic melt.

All of these feedbacks combined are likely to have dire consequences (see How The Arctic Death Spiral Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events “Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves” and Why The Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral Matters).

For the sake of completeness, Arctic warming is amplified for several additional synergistic reasons, beyond the change in reflectivity. As the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) explains in their 2004 report, Impacts of a Warming Arctic (see figure here and below):

Read more

by Dana Nucittelli, via Skeptical Science

We have previously criticized the mainstream media for favoring false balance over factually accurate scientific reporting when it comes to climate change.  In one of the worst examples of this unfortunate and counter-productive practice, the US Public Boadcasting Service (PBS), which is funded by both taxpayers and private donations, (for example, from the Koch brothers) aired a climate story on the PBS News Hour which began by featuring the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project’s Richard Muller, “balanced” with a subsequent interview of contrarian blogger Anthony Watts.

Ultimately, Watts’ comments suffered from a double standard, dismissing Muller’s comments as not yet being supported by peer-reviewed research, but offering his own opinions despite the fact that they were not only unsupported, but even contradicted by Watts’ own peer-reviewed research.

Surface Temperature Record Accuracy

When asked to describe his ‘skepticism’ about human-caused global warming, Watts went into a long discussion about his concerns that encroachment of human development near surface temperature stations has introduced a bias into the temperature record.  However, what Watts failed to mention is that the scientific groups who compile the surface temperature record put a great deal of effort into filtering out these sorts of biases.

Watts also failed to mention that there have been many peer-reviewed scientific studies investigating whether these efforts have been successful, and they have almost universally concluded that those extraneous influences on the temperature record have been removed.  For example, Fall et al. (2011) concluded that for all temperature stations classifications with regards to the influence of urban influences, the long-term average global warming trend is the same.

“The lack of a substantial average temperature difference across classes, once the geographical distribution of stations is taken into account, is also consistent with the lack of significant trend differences in average temperatures….average temperature trends were statistically indistinguishable across classes.”

The second author on Fall et al. is a fellow who goes by the name of Anthony Watts.

There are also of course many ‘natural thermometers’ confirming the warming of the globe – rapidly rising seas, melting sea ice, melting land ice, etc. (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Natural thermometers indicating a warming world.

Peer-Review Irony

When asked about the research of Muller and the BEST team, which has also confirmed the accuracy of the surface temperature record, Watts provided a very ironic response.

Read more

by Justin Guay, via the Sierra Club

A few months back I wrote a post about the $80 billion clean energy access opportunity from capturing remittance flows. I thought that was revolutionary given its scale and applicability (especially compared to mechanisms subject to the excruciating dynamics of the UNFCCC like the Green Fund). Now an even bigger, and far more advanced innovation in clean energy access finance has come along — and the $90 billion opportunity it presents is tremendous.

It’s called crowd funding, and it could catalyze clean energy across the developing world.

Crowd funding allows early-stage companies, or projects to “crowd in” finance from lots of small sources over the Internet (you could consider it democratizing finance in a way). A notable non-profit precursor is Kiva, which has helped raise more than $500 million to date (ironically the same amount energy access entrepreneurs requested, but did not get, from the World Bank at Rio+20).

With the passage of the US JOBS Act, crowd funding is now primed to move from a non-profit activity to a legitimate retail investment for the masses. Bloomberg estimates that if even 1% of the retail investment market is captured the opportunity is worth $90 billion dollars — which has energy access entrepreneurs understandably quite excited.

So why is crowd funding so ideal for these entrepreneurs? Because the most effective means of delivering energy access is small scale, distributed clean energy. Crowd funding is a financing model that mirrors this scale and distribution. But far more importantly, it allows entrepreneurs to access funding that traditional institutions have thus far failed to provide.

Plans to open up a new Australian “coal export rush” would turn a single Queensland region into the seventh largest contributor of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet, undermining international efforts to keep global warming below 2C, a new report has warned. [Guardian]

Nine proposed “mega mines” in the Galilee Basin would, at full capacity, result in 705m tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere, according to a Greenpeace Australia analysis. This level of emissions would surpass those of all but six nations in the world. By comparison, the UK emitted 549.3 million tonnes of CO2 from all sources in 2011.

Greenpeace said that the nine mines’ production capacity of 330m tonnes of coal a year for export would represent an “unprecedented” increase in the scale of coal mining in Australia. The mines’ maximum output, primarily aimed at servicing the burgeoning Chinese and Indian markets, would nearly double Australia’s total 2010/11 coal production of 352m tonnes and eclipse its export total of 283m tonnes.

Colorado wildlife officials predicted drought conditions this spring indicated a deadly summer for bears. Now it’s known just how bad the year has been, CBS station KCNC reports. [CBS]

A recent report from “PBS NewsHour” on climate change has drawn sharp criticism from climate groups that feel it provides a false sense of debate around the facts of climate change. [Huffington Post]

A warming trend has contributed to a sharp rise in the number and size of wildfires on forest lands in the U.S. West, where big burns are likely to become the norm, according to a report released on Tuesday by a climate research group. [Chicago Tribune]

Stung by concerns that using Google is bad for the planet, the Internet search giant has revealed exactly how much electricity the company uses and how much greenhouse gases it produces in an effort to show its business model is environmentally friendly. [Associated Press]

The McRib sandwich is traditional McDonald’s fare, appearing on the menu seasonally from late October through early November. But not this year. The McDonald’s McRib is delayed until late 2012, and there is only global warming to blame. [Clarion Ledger]

Inhabitants of Tuvalu, an island country deeply threatened by rising seas, hope to convey their plight to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they arrive on the final stop of their royal tour. [New York Times]