When the solar manufacturing company Solyndra went bankrupt last September after receiving a $527 million loan guarantee, it sparked a politically-motivated Congressional investigation into the White House’s handling of the program — an “investigation” that critics admitted would “stop on election day.”

After acquiring 300,000 documents, holding a dozen hearings and official meetings, issuing two subpenas, and spending more than a million dollars on the investigation, members of Congress failed to present any evidence of political wrongdoing.

Congressional critics have “not shown the loan was granted as a result of political favoritism, despite repeated campaign-trail claims,” reported The Hill.

That didn’t stop special interest groups from spending millions of dollars on television ads this campaign season to trump up the Solyndra bankruptcy and spread “over-the-top, ultimately ridiculous” claims about clean energy programs.

According to a ThinkProgress analysis of independent advertisements from Kantar Media’s CMAG system, outside conservative groups spent $10.78 million on presidential campaign ads between April 1 and October 1 of this year specifically attacking the Solyndra loan or mentioning Solyndra as part of a broader attack on clean energy stimulus spending.

The ads were purchased by the American Energy Alliance, the American Future Fund, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, Karl Rove’s Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, and Let Freedom Ring.

However, the impact of those Solyndra ads on American voters mirrored the outcome of the year-long Congressional investigation into the company: minimal to nothing.

Despite the millions of dollars spent on Solyndra-related television spots over the last five months, polls show that a majority of American voters still don’t know about the company or are indifferent.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from early October showed that 58 percent of registered voters are unaware of Solyndra. The poll also found that one quarter of registered voters had a negative view of the company and 15 percent had a neutral view.
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by Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

Nearing the home stretch, the presidential campaign continues to fail to seriously address global warming, although there are glimmers of change in Barack Obama’s corner. The Republican candidate continues to tout climate denial, while the Democratic candidate is still only willing to admit that climate change is a threat to future generations.

In a campaign stop in Van Meter, IA, Mitt Romney joked about the carbon-fueled drought in the middle of a rant against environmental regulation, including action on climate:

The regulatory burden under this administration has just gone crazy. The President’s regulations as it relates to farming are kind of interesting. One is, the EPA tried to get into, er, the government tried to get into regulating rainwater in ditches on farms. It used to be that there was rainwater in Iowa, and people care about that – we hope it’s coming back soon! But in addition, they want to regulate dust, they want to impose duplicate rules on pesticides, there was an effort – you recall this – to prevent teenagers from being able to work certain functions on farms. And then there’s pushing cap and trade. I understand if they push cap and trade, it will not only massively affect income of farms, but it will take millions of acres out of farming. My own view on regulation is very different. You have to have regulation, you need regulation for markets to work effectively. But I’m going to cut back on regulation. I’m going to put a cap on regulation.

Watch it:

Romney’s mindless attacks on environmental regulation require a rejection of scientific knowledge — including the awareness that carbon pollution from fossil fuels is a driver of the terrible drought gripping this nation.

Speaking to college students at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, President Barack Obama reiterated his convention line that “climate change is not a hoax,” telling the young audience that the deadly impacts of climate change are “a threat to your future“:

And my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is not a hoax. More drought and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to your future. And we’ve got to make sure that we meet the moment. That’s why I’m running.

In this campaign, Obama has been careful to describe climate change only as a distant threat, one that will only affect future generations or people overseas. On Monday in San Francisco, Obama told supporters that the climate impacts are “a threat to our kids’ future.”

A careful review of Obama’s statements on climate and energy finds that the last time the president clearly linked climate change to present impacts on U.S. soil was in his Earth Day speech in 2009, in which he described “shifting weather patterns that are already causing record-breaking droughts, unprecedented wildfires, more intense storms.” That speech was also one of the last times he made a detailed call for a hard, scientifically based cap on carbon pollution.

The president’s rhetorical shift from describing climate change as a present enemy in 2009 to a future threat in 2012 goes against the evidence of his first term — a litany of billion-dollar climate disasters, year after year after year.

With the selection of climate denier Paul Ryan as a running mate and carbon baron Harold Hamm as his energy adviser, Mitt Romney’s climate-destroying agenda is unambiguous (even if he dusts off the Etch-a-Sketch in the coming weeks). In contrast, it’s possible that President Obama’s campaign team is beginning to wake up to the political benefits of honesty about the dire climate threat. As Obama said recently, “If you want to be president, you owe the American people the truth.”

Brad is managing the Climate Silence campaign, which demands that the candidates provide climate leadership.

by Luke Morgan

A new report released this week breaks down 223 of the 315 votes the House of Representatives has made against clean energy and in favor of the fossil fuel industry over the last two years.

The report, released by the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee, details 127 votes to block or cut regulations in the coal, oil, and gas industries. For example, even after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill exposed serious flaws in environmental protections in offshore oil drilling, House Republicans voted 47 times to weaken those protections while encouraging the expansion of offshore drilling.

The House of Representatives has solidified itself as “the most anti-clean energy, do-nothing, pro-pollution Congress in history,” said Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee.

Here’s a brief breakdown of the Republican votes:

• 42 votes against clean energy and energy efficiency: Despite GOP attempts to demonize government support of clean energy, 70% of voters say the government should be doing more to promote solar energy.
• 54 votes to provide gifts and subsidies to the Oil and Gas Industries: Meanwhile, according to OpenSecrets, 89% of oil and gas lobbying dollars have gone to Republicans this election cycle.
• 127 Votes to dismantle health, safety, and environmental regulations on fossil fuels: The GOP majority voted 95 times to undermine the Clean Air Act, even though it prevented 160,000 premature deaths in 2010, according to the EPA.

A more detailed explanation of the votes can be found in the full report. The staffers noted that House Republicans wasted 108 hours of floor time voting on these bills, many of which they knew had no chance of passing the Senate or being signed into law by President Obama.

Included in House Republicans’ intransigence on environmental issues is Vice-Presidential Nominee Rep. Paul Ryan, who voted 100% of the time with House Republicans.

The report also details that the House’s failure to extend the Wind Production Tax Credit has led to more than 2,700 layoffs in the sector.  Climate Progress previously reported that this failure could ultimately lead to the shedding of up to 37,000 jobs from the industry.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats keep a running database of all the anti-environment votes taken, available here.

Industries that support a higher number of “green” workers who are making goods and services more environmentally friendly have experienced a higher rate of growth over the last decade than industries with fewer green jobs.

That’s according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed data on the green workforce from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS data, which was released in March, documented 3.1 million green jobs nation-wide in renewable energy, water management, recycling, and various positions that help improve the efficiency and environmental footprint of a company or institution.

BLS defined green jobs as:

Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources; or, jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their establishment’s production processes more environmentally friendly or ensuring that they use fewer natural resources.

The agency’s figures were given little attention in the mainstream press and were ridiculed by Republicans for including a broad array of positions in transportation, manufacturing, and waste services.

However, Ethan Pollack, a Senior Policy Analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, believed there was more to the data set. So he looked at how environmental and efficiency initiatives were impacting job growth in various sectors.

Pollack found that for every percentage point increase in the “green intensity” of a particular industry, annual job growth in that sector increased by 0.034 of a percentage point between 2000 and 2010.

Pollack also compared the green intensity of industries with BLS employment projections through 2020, finding that industries working to make their processes more efficient and their products more environmentally-friendly will likely see a 0.019 percentage point increase in employment over industries that do not.

“The conversation around green jobs has become polarizing,” said Pollack on a conference call today. “But the concept of green jobs should not be polarizing. We’re trying to depoliticize this issue and show that green jobs are all around us.”

The analysis also found that states with a higher penetration of green jobs saw slightly faster economic recoveries after the recession than states with fewer green jobs. However, this trend is heavily influenced by stimulus funding, which played a major role in continuing investment momentum in the clean energy industries.

This is consistent with last year’s Brookings Institution green jobs study, which found that the “clean economy” grew by 8.3 percent during the height of the U.S. economic downturn between 2008 and 2009 — almost double the overall economy during that period.

Traditionally, green jobs been defined strictly within the clean energy sector. But that industry is only one piece of the overall shift toward a more sustainable economy. In their respective reports, Brookings and BLS report tried to define those jobs as providing a broader array of goods and services that make operations more environmentally-friendly — offering a better representation of how businesses and institutions will make the transition.

This latest report from EPI shows that the deeper the “greening” goes in industries, the more jobs are created.

Related Posts:

• Green Jobs Reach 2.7 Million: The “Clean Economy” Starts Delivering on its Promise of High-Wage Jobs, Brookings finds
• Romney Attacks “Environmentally Friendly” Jobs, Ignoring the 64,000 Green Jobs Created in His State
• Republican Congressman Falsely Claims That ‘Almost All’ Clean Energy Companies Go Bankrupt

by Roz Pidcock via The Carbon Brief

A study published yesterday outlines a new way to map the emissions produced by cities. Cities are major contributors to global climate change, so the authors say this could be an important step forward in meeting emission reduction targets.

Cities – as hubs of industry, housing, business and transport – are responsible for more than 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the World Bank. With the global population approaching nine billion and 68 per cent of people expected to be living in urbanised areas by 2050, the way cities develop in the future is set to be critical when it comes to setting and meeting international emission reduction targets.

While all countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are legally obliged to report their national greenhouse gas emissions, different countries use different methods to do so. This inconsistency filters through to the city level. Although a large chunk of the responsibility to reduce national emissions will fall to cities, an international standard for working out how much cities contribute also isn’t settled.

A new study published yesterday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology lays out a new method for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions for individual buildings every hour for an entire city. Professor Kevin Gurney from the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and lead author of the study explains why this is important:

“Cities have had little information with which to guide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – and you can’t reduce what you can’t measure.”

Tracking emissions

Previous research has tended to estimate cities’ emissions on a much broader level, based on data on industrial energy use and average domestic consumption. The new research takes advantage of the growing number of atmospheric measurements made at city level to dig deeper into exactly where the emissions come from.

A still from a video of hour-by-hour changes in carbon dioxide emissions from different building types for the US city of Indianapolis. Credit: Bedrich Benes and Michel Abdul-Massih

The team of scientists collected a range of ‘bottom up’ data about carbon dioxide emissions from air pollution reports, traffic surveys and basic information about building type and size collected for tax purposes. They combined these data with a computer modelling system which calculated energy consumption on a building-by-building basis.

As Gurney explains, users can track the emission intensity for the whole city using colour-coded, high resolution maps and use them to make decisions on where efforts to reduce emissions would be most effective. He says:

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by Jessica Goad

The Department of the Interior announced yesterday that is has approved 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy projects on public lands. This meets a goal expressed by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and reiterated by President Obama in this year’s State of the Union address of authorizing 10,000 megawatts of non-hydro renewable energy on public lands by 2015.

From the Interior Department’s announcement:

Since 2009, Interior has authorized 33 renewable energy projects, including 18 utility-scale solar facilities, 7 wind farms and 8 geothermal plants, with associated transmission corridors and infrastructure that will enable the projects to connect to established power grids. When built, these projects will provide more than 10,000 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power more than 3.5 million homes, and would support an estimated 13,000 construction and operations jobs according to project developers.

The goal was reached after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the next step in the environmental review process for the 3,000 megawatt Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind energy project in Wyoming.  While the project has now been certified as “available” for wind development, it must still undergo broad environmental review and site-specific analysis before it can be permitted and built.

The approval of 33 renewable energy projects on public lands is laudable, especially considering that only a handful of wind and geothermal (and no solar) projects were operating on public lands before this administration took office.  And yet, as some observers have noted, permitting on a project-by-project basis has proven difficult and cumbersome.  A number of projects have been litigated, and others have stalled.

This administration is moving towards a more holistic renewable energy program, as seen for example in its design of a solar program that incentivizes development in zones that have been screened to have high solar resources and fewer conflicts.

But more can be done. For example, the Center for American Progress has called for a “clean resources standard” that would set a more aggressive target for renewable energy projects on public lands. Now that the goal of 10,000 megawatts has been achieved, the administration can begin to think about setting another. A clean resources standard that re-balances renewable energy and fossil fuels on public lands could be the next step.

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

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM)

DENVER, Colorado — Repeating the false claims from Mitt Romney about the track record of clean energy companies, Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) argued last Thursday that “most of those [wind and solar] companies are now bankrupt.”

In fact, the industry is supporting thousands of innovative small businesses, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and leveraging tens of billions in private capital.

The failure rate of green start-ups was a hot topic in last week’s presidential debate after Mitt Romney falsely claimed that half of green firms that had received funding from the stimulus had failed. His campaign later had to walk back that claim.

Speaking with ThinkProgress the day after the debate, Pearce went a step further. “Almost all of them, the wind and solar stuff,” are now bankrupt, the New Mexico congressman claimed.

PEARCE: I don’t think government should be involved [with PBS]. Otherwise they do like they did on the wind and solar. I think the most powerful turning moment of the debate was when he points out, “you want teachers but you gave $90 billion over to the green energies? What kind of a deal is that?” And most of those companies now are bankrupt. Almost all of them, the wind and solar stuff.

Listen to it:

Pearce’s claim is completely false. According to Mike Grunwald, who has written extensively on the stimulus bill, estimated that less than one percent of green firms had failed. The Environment & Energy Daily writes that “the entire program [loan guarantee program] will have a default rate of just over 3 percent and won’t even come close to using up the roughly $2.4 billion that Congress has set aside to cover losses associated with the program.”

Drought damage to corn and soybean fields in the U.S., the world’s top grower and exporter, is eroding supplies of the nation’s two largest crops to below year-earlier consumption levels for the first time since 1974. [Businessweek]

U.S. milk production is headed for the biggest contraction in 12 years as a drought-fueled surge in feed costs drives more cows to slaughter. [Businessweek]

Global clean energy investment looks to be heading for a dip this year following a weak performance over the third quarter of 2012. A total of $56.6bn was invested from July to September, a five per cent drop on the previous quarter and 20 per cent lower than the same period last year, figures from analyst Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) revealed today. [Guardian]

NOAA’s latest State of the Climate roundup shows that September marked the 16th month in a row with above-average temperatures for the lower 48 states of the U.S. [Climate Central]

A large and growing majority of Americans say “global warming is affecting weather in the United States” (74%, up 5 points since our last national survey in March 2012). [Yale]

The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says. [USA Today]

An Alaskan village that claims global warming is eroding its shoreline is asking for a rehearing of their case against several power companies it says are to blame. [Legal Newsline]

A published study by researchers at the West Virginia University School of Medicine and School of Public Health is the first of its kind to suggest that exposure to air pollution particles from mountaintop mining sites may impair blood vessels’ ability to dilate, which may lead to cardiovascular disease. [The State Journal]

Thousands of people have avoided getting skin cancer thanks to Canadian scientists who invented the UV index and the gold-standard tool for measuring the thickness of the Earth’s ozone layer. But now Canada’s ozone science group no longer exists, victim of government budget cuts. [Guardian]

Chevron on Tuesday lost a U.S. Supreme Court bid to block an $18.2 billion judgment against it in Ecuador in a case over pollution in the Amazon jungle. [Mercury News]

Australia switched on its first utility-scale solar farm on Wednesday, bringing the country a small step closer to achieving ambitious renewable energy use targets that traditional coal and gas power producers are now fighting to soften. [Reuters]