America is unique when it comes to giving a platform to climate deniers and skeptics.

According to a new analysis of data released last year, American newspapers are far more likely to publish uncontested claims from climate deniers, many of whom challenge whether the planet is warming at all and are “almost exclusively found” in the U.S. media. The study was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The researchers were trying to answer three important questions: Is climate denial and disinformation as prevalent in the newspapers outside America? Is it mostly right-wing papers publishing these pieces? And what types of skeptics are being published in different countries?

In all three categories, the U.S. emerged as a unique leader in promoting climate denial in the press.

The newspapers surveyed were Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo in Brazil; People’s Daily and Beijing Evening News in China;  Le Monde and Le Figaro in France; The Hindu and Times of India in India; the Guardian/Observer and the Daily/Sunday Telegraph in the United Kingdom; and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in America. The researchers looked at stories between 2009 and 2010, when the so-called “climategate” story was unfolding. They also compared their findings to coverage in 2007, when the IPCC released its assessment of climate science.
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by Catherine Woodiwiss

For years, polling analysis on the environment has been grouped with other policy concerns like the economy and national security, rather than with “culture” issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion. But when the idea of environmental stewardship and care for the earth is articulated as a moral concern, this takes priority with voters above those traditionally listed culture issues. For their part, faith groups on both sides of the aisle are becoming bolder in their commitment to tackling climate change as a moral issue.

All faiths work for a healthier planet

There is no doubt that the economy is the first priority of this election. But a grassroots movement at the nexus of science and faith has been growing across party lines in an effort to tackle climate change.

Due in large part to economic concerns, climate change, energy, and environmental issues had declined somewhat in priority among polled Americans since 2008. But numbers are rebounding, and the organizing energy at the grassroots—especially among faith groups—helps tell us why.

Unified faith-climate activism has recently been in abundance—from the more than 60 religious leaders putting themselves at risk of arrest in Washington, D.C., at the Keystone XL protest in August 2011 to faith groups kicking off the first-ever nationwide antifracking rally in July 2012. Earth Week 2012 boasted meetings, rallies, lobbying, and services from interfaith and multifaith action groups as well as denomination-specific conferences and prayer breakfasts. And new coalitions have sprung up this year—among them the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate—that represent newly energized faith communities and a new willingness to work across different political and religious sensibilities in tackling the common challenge of climate change.

Many mainline denominations have advocated environmental stewardship for decades, but polarizing political rhetoric and misconceptions in some conservative circles arguing that caring for the earth is a substitute for religion has kept this issue highly divisive among America’s faithful. In the past this has often resulted in religious groups attempting to address environmental stewardship while shying away from any hint of partisanship and struggling to agree on substantive policy goals.

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“You’ve got a great boss,” Mitt Romney proclaimed to a crowd of coal miners at a campaign rally in August.

He was referring to Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, one of the largest coal mining operators in the country.

For Romney, that statement was particularly true. According to accounts from multiple coal miners, employees were forced to attend the event without pay. “Just for the record, if we did not go, we knew what would happen,” said one miner in a letter to a local radio station. Weeks later, Romney’s campaign featured images of the coal miners in a pro-coal ad. (The Obama campaign hit back this week with an ad claiming Romney used coal workers as “props”).

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. An expose from New Republic Senior Editor Alec MacGillis shows that Murray Energy is doing far more than requiring employees to spend uncompensated time at campaign events — the company is actually requiring them to donate to GOP candidates like Romney:

The accounts of two sources who have worked in managerial positions at the firm, and a review of letters and memos to Murray employees, suggest that coercion may also explain Murray staffers’ financial support for Romney. Murray, it turns out, has for years pressured salaried employees to give to the Murray Energy political action committee (PAC) and to Republican candidates chosen by the company. Internal documents show that company officials track who is and is not giving. The sources say that those who do not give are at risk of being demoted or missing out on bonuses, claims Murray denies.

The Murray sources, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, came forward separately. But they painted similar pictures of the fund-raising operation. “There’s a lot of coercion,” says one of them. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re compelled to do this whether you want to or not.” Says the second: “They will give you a call if you’re not giving. . . . It’s expected you give Mr. Murray what he asks for.”

This spring, Murray organized a fundraiser for Mitt Romney, eventually bundling more than a million and half dollars for the candidate. According to the New Republic, employees of Murray Energy have donated more than $1.4 million to Republican candidates — with $120,000 raised for Romney this campaign season alone.

While employees say Murray does not explicitly force them to make donations, he makes it very clear what could happen if they don’t contribute some of their salary to Republicans. “We have been insulted by every salaried employee who does not support our efforts,” he wrote in one 2012 letter obtained by the New Republic.

And in a 2011 letter to company managers, Murray alluded to potential consequences if employees did not donate: “Please see that our salaried employees ‘step up,’ for their own sakes and those of their employees.”
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by Bill Becker

If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had been able to look through the television cameras at who was watching their first debate, it undoubtedly would have been more interesting than the debate itself.

Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News team would have been there, looking for red meat for the next day’s broadcasts.  With any luck, Jon Stewart’s crew watched, too. The audience probably included the fraternal oil barons from Kansas who have set out to prove that when it comes to winning elections, things go better with Koch.

More generally, Obama and Romney would have seen an audience very interested in what each of them would do as president, but probably not very enlightened by how either candidate explained it. When he wasn’t changing his positions, Romney said what his campaign commercials say. So did Obama. Obama was the professor giving his lecture for the umpteenth time, while Romney was the CEO making the business case again to close the deal with the electorate.  It was a debate that only policy wonks and political pundits could really love.

If the candidates could have seen their TV audience, they might have talked more about less esoteric topics closer to people’s lives. Each made an obligatory reference or two to the workaday people they’ve met on the campaign trail and to all the middle-class families that are jobless and homeless.

Yet even though the debate was about domestic issues, neither Obama nor Romney mentioned how he might develop a transportation program that actually saved oil. Or how the farm program might be reformed to protect the fertility of our soils for greater food security. They didn’t talk about water, a big issue in the region where the debate was held.

It’s a safe bet that the 30 million people who tuned into the debate included the farmers and small businesses in South Dakota, Texas, Nebraska, and Missouri who are watching their assets and their futures turn to dust because of the worst drought most of them have ever seen. Up and down the Mississippi River valley, some of last summer’s flood victims probably watched the debate, too. So did people along the Gulf Coast still recovering from Hurricane Isaac. The audience probably included families in California, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado who are still homeless because of last summer’s record wildfires, as well as elderly voters whose lives were threatened by this year’s record heat waves.

These are the people who know first hand that something strange is happening with the weather. All year long we’ve heard forecasters, news people and disaster victims describe the weather as unusual, unprecedented, record setting, weird, unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.

These middle Americans, quite possibly America’s first victims of global warming, may have been waiting for Obama or Romney to say what they would do about climate change over the next four years.  What they have suffered is consistent with the predicted impacts of global warming. Some scientists have concluded the droughts, fires, floods, hyper-hurricanes and record heat of recent years are evidence that the damaging impacts of climate change have already begun.

But neither the moderator nor the candidates said one word about climate change and not one word to its victims.  During his introduction, moderator Jim Lehrer alluded to the many requests he received from voters and viewers who wanted to hear about their topics. He didn’t mention they included 160,000 petitions he received from people who wanted him to ask the candidates what they’d do about global warming.

So as a public service, I’m one of the wonks who have read the candidates’ energy policy papers for clues on what they’d do about global warming.  Here is the water cooler version of what they say:

Although he advocates an “all of the above” energy mix that includes oil, gas and coal, President Obama wants to move the United States further down the road to a clean energy economy. He envisions a country that gets 80% of its energy from clean  resources by 2035, that transmits electricity over smart grids, that connects major cities with high-speed rail, that puts 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, and that emits 80% less greenhouse gases by 2050.

In stark contrast, Romney’s position paper calls for the United States to become an “energy superpower” by rapidly expanding its production of coal, oil and natural gas, the fossil fuels that are responsible for climate change. Romney’s 21-page position paper gives only six words to renewable energy and says nothing at all about energy efficiency – the two best hopes for a low-carbon future. His paper doesn’t mention climate change.

As governor of Massachusetts in 2004, Romney issued a climate plan that looked a lot like Obama’s does now. The paper his campaign issued in August, however, looks as though it was written by the same oil executives Dick Cheney invited to write a national energy policy in 2001.

During the debate, the obvious questions about the Romney energy plan hung in the air unasked. How would he sustain America’s prosperity with unsustainable resources? How can he be serious about deficit reduction when he won’t even eliminate tax breaks for oil companies who don’t need them? How can he say he believes in a level playing field for energy (Page 19 of his energy plan), when he favors oil subsidies and opposes subsidies for renewable energy?

Instead, there was a lot of talk about topics like marginal tax rates and who was the better friend of America’s middle class. The candidates apparently felt they had little to gain by talking about climate change, even though the people on the other side of the camera have a lot to lose.

Maybe next time.

Bill Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

by Tom Kenworthy

A national land conservation group has stepped in to save a rugged, isolated corner of northwestern Wyoming from oil and  gas development that had threatened the area prized for its wildlife habitat, mountain scenery and hunting and recreational opportunities.

Under the agreement being announced today, The Trust for Public Land will pay $8.75 million to purchase oil and gas leases on 58,000 acres in the Wyoming Range from Houston-based Plains Exploration and Production (PXP), and permanently remove the threat of drilling by retiring the leases. The trust has raised about half of the purchase price but must secure the remaining funds by the end of the year. The story was broken by the Associated Press.

The area, known as the Noble Basin or Upper Hoback Basin, is part of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and is located about 30 miles south of Jackson, WY.

The threat to the Noble Basin was portrayed in a video report by the Center for American Progress earlier this year:

Much of the region around the Noble Basin was protected by the Wyoming Range Legacy Act, passed by Congress in 2009, that shields 1.2 million acres of the Bridger-Teton from development. But existing oil and gas leases, including the leases obtained in 2005 by PXP, were honored. PXP had planned to drill 136 natural gas wells in the area, which would have involved the construction of 29 miles of new or upgraded roads, and 17 well pads.

The basin, which includes the headwaters of a wild and scenic stretch of the Hoback River, contains vital summer range and birthing and migration areas for mule deer, elk, moose and antelope. Some of the herds that use the area have been severely impacted by development of huge natural gas fields to the south near Pinedale, Wyoming. The basin is also critical habitat for lynx, a threatened species, and two subspecies of native cutthroat trout.

Residents of western Wyoming mounted a furious fight to save the Noble Basin from energy development and preserve the area for hunting, ranching, fishing, horseback riding and other pursuits. They banded together in an organization called Citizens for the Wyoming Range that pressed the Forest Service to block or mitigate the development, and explored ways to buy out PXP’s valid leases.

Dan Smitherman, a former Marine and hunting guide in western Wyoming who serves as a spokesman for Citizens for the Wyoming Range, told the Associated Press, “we always felt like a lease buyout was the cleanest, and a win-win solution. It’s a Wyoming solution to a Wyoming problem.”

Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress.

One of the world’s foremost climate scientists has warned that vulnerable island states may need to consider evacuating their populations within a decade due to a much faster than anticipated melting of the world’s ice sheets. [Guardian]

“We know Arctic sea ice is declining faster than the models predict,” Mann told the Guardian at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas. “When you look at the major Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets, which are critical from the standpoint of sea level rise, once they begin to melt we really start to see sea level rises accelerate.

“The models have typically predicted that will not happen for decades but the measurements that are coming in tell us it is already happening so once again we are decades ahead of schedule.”

“Island nations that have considered the possibility of evacuation at some point, like Tuvalu, may have to be contending those sort of decisions within the matter of a decade or so.”

For an hour and a half Wednesday, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama talked about jobs, the economy, and more jobs—but they didn’t touch on the environment or climate change. A new study suggests maybe they should have: Undecided voters seem to care about global warming as much as Democrats do. [U.S. News and World Report]

Mitt Romney made two particularly lofty claims from the podium, claims his campaign clarified to reporters immediately after, effectively conceding that Romney inserted misinformation into the debate. [Huffington Post]

Shell Oil says it has begun exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s north coast as it continues to drill in the neighboring Chukchi Sea. [Associated Press]

The amount of the continental U.S. in drought has fallen slightly over the past week, but the record dry conditions are still intense in the heartland. And in Texas, two-thirds of the state is in drought. It’s meant tough choices when water is scarce. [CBS]

Iowa’s drought has worsened, spelling concerns for next year’s growing season. The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor map, released Thursday, shows that the epicenter of the drought has moved westward from Indiana and Illinois onto Iowa. [Des Moines Register]

The nation’s worst drought in decades is showing no sign of letting up in several key Midwest farming states, worrying farmers harvesting the summer’s withered corn crop in record time that their winter crops may also be at risk. [Washington Post]

A liquefied natural gas project in Alaska could cost more than $65 billion and would represent a mega-project of “unprecedented scale and challenge,” officials behind the project told Gov. Sean Parnell. [Associated Press]

A court has struck down a moratorium on natural gas drilling in Binghamton, N.Y., yet both sides are claiming victory. [New York Times]

The journey to a cooler, greener planet may start with a breath of fresh air, suggests a battery technology under development that could rapidly solve one of the biggest problems with wind and solar energy. [NBC]

While nine out of 10 people surveyed in a recent Ipsos poll “believe that the climate has changed significantly in the past 20 years,” those polled in Japan, Britain and the U.S. had the highest rates of climate change skepticism. [Huffington Post]

China’s biggest solar panel makers are suffering losses of up to $1 for every $3 of sales this year, as panel prices have fallen by three-fourths since 2008. [New York Times]