George Mason University and Yale’s Project on Climate Change Communication have released more polling results. Here are the highlights (full PDF here):

• Americans’ belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, from 20 percent in January 2010 to only 12 percent today.

• For the first time since 2008, more than half of Americans (54%) believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 8 points since March 2012. Americans who say it is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment have declined to 30 percent (from 37% in March).

• A growing number of Americans believe global warming is already harming people both at home and abroad. Four in ten say people around the world are being harmed right now by climate change (40%, up 8 percentage points since March 2012), while 36 percent say global warming is currently harming people in the United States (up six points since March).

• In addition, they increasingly perceive global warming as a threat to themselves (42%, up 13 points since March 2012), their families (46%, up 13 points), and/or people in their communities (48%, up 14 points). Americans also perceive global warming as a growing threat to people in the United States (57%, up 11 points since March 2012), in other modern industrialized countries (57%, up 8 points since March), and in developing countries (64%, up 12 points since March).

• Today over half of Americans (58%) say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” – now at its highest level since November 2008.

• For the first time since 2008, Americans are more likely to believe most scientists agree that global warming is happening than believe there is widespread disagreement on the subject (44% versus 36%, respectively). This is an increase of 9 percentage points since March 2012.

Recent polling has confirmed Americans are attributing their increased understanding the planet is warming to their (correct) perception that the planet is warming and the weather is getting more extreme. A Brookings poll from February found that about half of people who understand the planet is warming said that these factors were the primary influence — see Poll: Americans’ Understanding of Climate Change Increasing With More Extreme Weather, Warmer Temperatures.

Related Posts:

• Krosnick: Candidates “May Actually Enhance Turnout As Well As Attract Voters Over To Their Side By Discussing Climate Change”
• Yale Poll: “Large And Growing Majority Of Americans” Say “Global Warming Is Affecting Weather In The United States”

by Justin Guay

The best way to understand the Obama administration’s support for clean energy internationally is to understand the tale of two agencies: The US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and The U.S. Export Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank).

The administration’s biggest success story comes from one of its smallest agencies, OPIC, which under the leadership of Elizabeth Littlefield is punching well above its weight when it comes to supporting clean energy. But for every clean energy dollar OPIC puts on the table, it’s sister agency, the U.S. Export Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank) puts two to three more toward dirty coal. With the clean energy market topping $263 billion globally, and a solar trade war raging, the ending to this tale is crucial for U.S.  competitiveness in the technologies of the future.

Our tale begins with the settlement of an historic lawsuit brought by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and others to limit the emissions of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) these agencies financed. The suit was filed in response to nearly $32 billion in fossil fuel lending that OPIC and the Ex-Im Bank had authorized against intense opposition. The settlement led to the establishment of a low carbon policy at Ex Im Bank and a GHG cap at OPIC; two incredibly fateful policy choices that would determine the divergent paths of each respective agency.

Three years later the OPIC GHG cap, along with President Littlefield’s leadership, has created an exemplary institution. The main driver, its GHG cap, forces a 30 percent GHG reduction across its portfolio over 10 years and 50 percent reduction over 15 years. With past fossil fuel projects eating up precious cap space, the agency simply can’t fund big fossil fuel projects given these constraints. That combined with the fast start finance pledge the administration made in Copenhagen, the rapidly changing clean energy market, and President Littlefield’s leadership has brought about a fundamental shift at the agency.

Pre-2007, OPIC was financing billions in fossil fuels. In 2011, nearly one quarter of its $4 billion portfolio went to expand the clean energy market and provide energy access for the world’s poor. Even more importantly, they are funding no fossil fuel projects. Not one. It’s one of the greatest climate change and clean energy success stories this administration has to tell.

The only problem is that the Obama Administration hasn’t told the story. Which means few policy makers know about OPIC’s achievements, and even fewer are trying to replicate its success.

But to really understand and appreciate what OPIC has done you need to understand how little it’s moribund cousin Ex-Im Bank has done to reign in fossil fuel financing. The low carbon policy the original lawsuit established was meant to discourage Ex Im Bank from investing in dirty outdated coal plants. It did not however, mandate the agency reject such projects, nor did it impose a binding cap on the emissions its finance could generate.

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Photo: Rae Breaux

by Wen Stephenson, excerpted from Grist

It was game time. The Saturday night crowd on the Vermont campus was festive, boisterous, pumped. People cheered and whooped when told that one of their heroes, climate activist Tim DeChristopher — serving a two-year federal sentence for his civil disobedience opposing new oil and gas drilling in Utah — would soon be back on the field.

When the man on the stage, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, said it was time to march not just on Washington but on the headquarters of fossil fuel companies — “it’s time to march on Dallas” — and asked those to stand who’d be willing to join in the fight, seemingly every person filling the University of Vermont’s cavernous Ira Allen Chapel, some 800 souls, rose to their feet.

McKibben and 350, the folks who brought us the Keystone XL pipeline protests, are now calling for a nationwide divestment campaign aimed at fossil fuel companies’ bottom line. Beginning with student-led campaigns on college campuses, modeled on the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, they’ll pressure institutions to withdraw all investments from big oil and coal and gas. Their larger goal is to ignite a morally-charged movement to strip the industry of its legitimacy.

“The fossil fuel industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license — their veneer of respectability,” McKibben tells his audience. “You want to take away our planet and our future? We’re going to take away your money and your good name.”

I was there in Burlington on Saturday to spend some time with the 350.org team, watch their run-throughs, and attend the night’s show, a sort of “dress rehearsal” for the 20-city Do The Math tour, officially launching in Seattle on Nov. 7, the day after the election. The tour builds off of McKibben’s Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which appeared in July and is one of the most widely read pieces in the magazine’s history. Buzz is clearly building, and not just in McKibben’s home state of Vermont. The Seattle show is sold out. The Boston show, on Nov. 15, sold out in less than 24 hours and has moved to a venue three times larger, the Orpheum Theater, with 2,700 seats. (Full disclosure: McKibben sits on Grist’s board of directors.)

Part multimedia lecture — with video appearances by 350.org allies like Naomi Klein, James Hansen, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu — and part organizing rally, with a live musical performance, the Burlington event gave a taste of what’s to come. The tour will “evolve,” with different elements and onstage guests along the way — for example, Klein and filmmaker Josh Fox, of Gasland fame, will join McKibben onstage in various cities. Although it was a little rough around the edges on Saturday night, nobody seemed to mind (McKibben was playing, wisely, to his hometown crowd). The basic structure and central message of the show were well in place — and, just as important for 350′s objectives, the organizing wheels were well in motion.

As 350′s Matt Leonard, serving as “tour manager” for Do The Math, explained it to me, the tour isn’t simply about “getting butts in seats” for a lecture or concert (thus the relatively low emphasis on the musical guests in each city, most of whom are yet to be announced). It’s about getting “the right people” in those seats. “This isn’t just for publicity and outreach,” he says. “We’re putting tremendous effort into making sure students, community leaders, college trustees, and influential decision-makers are a part of this event, because they are the ones that will turn this from a talk into a hard-hitting campaign.”

Sure enough, there in Burlington, students at UVM and other area colleges were already talking up divestment campaigns. Elsewhere in New England, a student-led divestment movement, spearheaded by the network Students for a Just and Stable Future, is off and running — at Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, Amherst, UNH, and a dozen other campuses. Similar campaigns are being discussed on campuses around the country. And on Saturday night, McKibben told the crowd that Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, the first to divest from South Africa in 1977, is the first school in the nation to move toward divestment from fossil fuels.

This is real. And it’s just getting started.

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How insecure is the coal industry?

Enough that coal lobbyists and coal-friendly lawmakers threatened to pull millions of dollars from the University of Wyoming if they didn’t take down an art installation they deemed offensive — reminding school officials of “the industries that feed them.”

According to emails acquired by the Casper Star Tribune, officials from the University of Wyoming received a barrage of threats over the last year from mining officials, coal companies, and lawmakers furious about an art piece installed on campus last July that drew a loose connection between coal, climate change, and pine beetle infestations.

And the threats worked.

The piece, called “Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around,” featured a spiral of beetle-infested pine logs covered in coal. Artist Chris Drury said the installation was not a political statement. “I’m not trying to shove it down everyone’s throat, but I hope people will have a conversation” about climate change, he said when the sculpture was first installed.

It was meant to stay until at least 2013 — and possibly stay indefinitely and slowly decay over time. But due to strong pressure from the fossil fuel industry, the sculpture didn’t even make it a year.

The initial public reaction from industry was frustrated, but tempered. State mining officials called it “disappointing,” but also said they were “very supportive” of academic freedom.

Privately, however, the fossil fuel industry and sympathetic lawmakers were threatening the school. In one email to major donors and fellow fossil fuel executives, the president of Wyoming’s Petroleum Institute even scoffed that the university would try to “hide behind academic freedom.”

The Star Tribune reported on the email correspondence:

The energy industry pays millions in taxes, royalties and fees, he noted. Left unsaid: Those millions flow through state coffers to the university.

“Don, what kind of crap is this?” Loomis asked.

Bruce Hinchey, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, fired off an email to oil and gas company officials and major university donors slamming the university for the sculpture.

“The next time the University of Wyoming is asking for donations it might be helpful to remind them of this and other things they have done to the industries that feed them before you donate,” Hinchey wrote. “They always hide behind academic freedom but their policies and actions can change if they so choose.”

Hinchey sent his message to a number of Wyoming oil and gas business, civic leaders and university donors.

Top university officials, including at least one trustee, worked the phones to answer concerns from coal companies, including Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak Energy. Peabody wrote that the sculpture threatened its willingness to donate $2 million.

It wasn’t just coal companies and associations stepping up the pressure. State lawmakers also jumped into the battle, threatening to cut off funding streams and investigate who allowed the sculpture to be installed:

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by David Turnbull

If there is a statistical correlation between dirty oil and dirty politics, we have yet to fully quantify it – but you can add this to the growing pile of anecdotal evidence that the dirtiest political players are responsible for some of the dirtiest energy on the planet.

William Koch – the “other” Koch brother along with David and Charles – was recently sued by a former senior executive at his Oxbow Carbon & Minerals Inc. for false imprisonment.  The allegations are that Koch lured the former executive to his Colorado ranch and then held him against his will to intimidate him.  The executive was allegedly being pressured not to go public with concerns over an illegal tax avoidance scheme being pursued by Oxbow.

Of course, Koch denies that such an event took place and, rather, claims that the lawsuit is intended to draw attention away from another scandal at the corporation involving the executive in question.  Koch claims that the executive was part of a scheme to defraud Oxbow, by taking bribes from competitors and participating in various other unsavory business practices.

So let’s get this straight:  Either William Koch held an executive hostage in order to intimidate him from exposing an illegal tax scheme…OR…a substantial number of Oxbow executives were taking bribes and colluding with competitors.  Or, perhaps both stories are true.  Either way, there’s some shady business going on at Oxbow.

Now, other than being shady, what kind of business is Oxbow in, you might ask?  Well, it’s about as dirty as it gets. Oxbow hails itself as “the largest distributor of petroleum coke in the world with annual shipments of nearly 11 million tons.”

What is this petroleum coke (or “petcoke”) that Oxbow is distributing all around the world?  Petcoke is a byproduct produced through the oil refining process that is coal-like in composition, yet dirtier and more carbon heavy than coal. In other words, when you refine really dirty oil such as tar sands oil (aka bitumen), what’s left over is petcoke. And it’s extremely dirty.

As the tar sands industry in Alberta, Canada has heated up in recent years, many citizens, communities, and advocacy groups have raised strong concerns about the intensive nature of its extraction and the dirty oil that comes from the tar sands.  Tar sands extraction is destroying huge swaths of pristine and sacred land, and the oil that is produced from the tar sands is as dirty as it gets.  Meanwhile communities in both Canada and the United States are standing up to try to stop the transport of dirty tar sands oil through their backyards and waterways.

But that’s actually only part of the tar sands story – with tar sands oil also comes petcoke, and this stuff is ugly. When it is burned in power plants or factories, it emits 38% more carbon by weight than conventional coal and significantly more toxic pollutants as well.  Essentially, wherever petcoke is used as fuel it generally is making a dirty process even dirtier.  And Oxbow makes its millions in moving this dirty fuel around the world.

Aside from dealing in dirty fuels, Oxbow also deals in dirty politics as well. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Oxbow and its executives have contributed over $3 million this election season – the second most of any energy company, more than $1 million more than even Exxon.  Add that to the $1.6 million in lobbying this Congress, and Oxbow is clearly one of the Beltway heavyweights buying votes and favors left and right.

While David and Charles Koch have received much of the notoriety in recent years due to their overt attempts at co-opting our democratic process, the other brother, William, is no saint either.  For years, he’s been standing in the way of progress up in Massachusetts as one of the key financiers of anti-Cape Wind efforts, to the tune of several million dollars.  It’s no surprise, really, given his stake in dirty energy.

So, what does this all come down to?  Unfortunately it’s the much of the same old story that we’ve seen time and again in the fossil fuel business. We see a picture of a corporation that is profiting from both the destruction of the planet and also our political system.  The product it sells is the dirtiest of the dirty; its business practices are unsavory at best, dangerous and illegal at worst; and they use their money to buy politicians to allow them keep making obscene profits doing all of the above.

It’s time for a cleaner future – one that takes us off of these dirty fuels and separates dirty energy money from our politics.

David Turnbull is the campaigns director with Oil Change International. This piece was originally published at Oil Change International and was reprinted with permission.

“Over increasingly large areas of the United States spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.”

Rachel Carson wrote those words in her classic book, Silent Spring, published September 27, 1962.

It’s an ironic coincidence that just as we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of her warning on the unforeseen harm caused by pesticides, we’re experiencing the unforeseen harm caused by fossil fuel combustion – an even graver threat to humans and the biosphere (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).

If we stay near our current emissions path, by century’s end, the outdoors may be strangely silent in the summer in large parts of this country and the world, as most species may well be extinct and most (remaining) humans and animals stay indoors (see NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable”).

And yet the story of the century gets dwindling media coverage, at most token mention by the president, and, tragically, no mention at all in the highly watched Presidential debates.

Adam Fetcher, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, “defended the president’s silence on climate change during Tuesday’s debate” in an email to The Hill Wednesday:

“Whether it’s on the stump or at the White House, President Obama has long focused on ways to develop clean energy as a core economic pillar. By advocating for the growth of renewable energy, as he did in Tuesday’s debate, President Obama has continually called for action that will address the sources of climate change”….

Fetcher said the differences between Obama and Romney on energy should indicate which candidate is more devoted to mitigating the effects of climate change.

“While Mitt Romney questioned the science behind climate change and mocked it in his convention speech, President Obama will continue to make the case for cleaner American sources of energy that will create jobs and fight climate change,” Fetcher said.

Obama has been widely criticized for this self-imposed gag order on climate. For instance, the great climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert had a piece yesterday in the New Yorker on this:

CLIMATE CHANGE, THE DEBATE’S GREAT UNMENTIONABLE

… the President could never quite bring himself to discuss why it might not be a good idea to burn every gallon—or cubic foot—of fossil fuels we could conceivably bring to the earth’s surface. In the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record [in the U.S.], climate change has become to the Obama Administration the Great Unmentionable, or, as the blogger Joe Romm has put it, The-Threat-That-Must-Not-Be Named.

The problem with the sort of energy debate we saw on Tuesday is not just that it’s fatuous, though it certainly is that. The problem is that you can’t solve a problem if you don’t even acknowledge it exists. The true challenge facing the next President is not how to bring down gas prices, which may or may not come down as a result of global trends. It’s how to move beyond the tired arguments of the past and act as if the future matters.

In the case of climate change, silence isn’t golden, it is fool’s golden!

Hybrid vehicle sales are booming, up 50% from last Model Year, led by Toyota and GM.

by David Friedman, via the Union of Concerned Scientists

Fall is officially here and television lovers are tuning in to the new season of their favorite shows. And, in an annual ritual dating back more than 60 years, we TV viewers are also tuning in to commercials from car companies promoting their 2013 Model Year (MY) line of cars and trucks.  Of course, for me the start of the new model year also means it is a great time to look at all the sales data that’s now out for MY 2012 to see if there are any new plot twists when it comes to hybrid and electric cars.

Here are some top line observations from digging into the sales data at Wardsauto.com. (Spoiler Alert: Hybrids are hot and electric vehicles are on the move.)

Hybrid sales are up almost 50% over last Model Year

A lot of the car talk I’ve been following these last few months has been about plug-in electric vehicle sales, but there’s been big progress on conventional hybrids, and that deserves attention too.

Hybrid sales grew by more than 130,000 between MY11 and MY12. That’s more than 50 percent growth, which is impressive by itself. But, even more impressive: Hybrid sales grew more than four times as fast as the rest of the vehicle market in MY12. We’ll have to see how this plays out over the next few years, but it is a good sign that hybrids are taking up new market share.

GM picks up the hybrid pace

Two companies led the way in expanding the hybrid market in MY 12: GM and Toyota. GM boosted their hybrid sales by almost 30,000 vehicles, capturing about 7 percent of the hybrid market (up from 2 percent last year). This growth relied on their relatively “mild” hybrid system which was included as an option the Buick LaCrosse and Regal and the Chevy Malibu. This system, called e-Assist, delivers up to a 25 percent boost in fuel economy over a comparable 4-cylinder model. For MY13 e-Assist is now standard on the baseline Buick Regal and Lacrosse models, so we should expect further growth in the coming months.

Toyota expands leadership as hybrid king

The really impressive numbers, however, came from Toyota, which boosted their hybrid sales by more than 70 percent this Model Year, compared to only a 23 percent growth in total U.S. sales. Toyota was already king of the hybrids, but this year they actually expanded their dominance, controlling 75 percent of the hybrid market, up from 60-70 percent since 2009. The Prius led the sales growth, but it was quickly followed by expanded sales from the Camry Hybrid and sales of the new Prius c.

I’m sure some of this growth was the release of pent up demand as Toyota recovered from the tsunami that crippled major production lines last year. But, plenty of their other models were affected as well, so this seems like real growth.  Exhibit A is that hybrids now account for 15 percent of all of Toyota’s U.S. sales, that’s more than 1 out of every 7 vehicles Toyota sells here. Their hybrids had been stuck at 10 percent of Toyota’s U.S. sales since 2007 (i.e. both before and during the tsunami year).

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Sea level is rising all over the world thanks to the heat-trapping effect of greenhouse-gas emissions, but according to a new study published in the Journal of Coastal Research, the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada have seen the ocean rise at an accelerating rate in recent decades. [Climate Central]

The Obama campaign defended the president’s silence on climate change during Tuesday’s debate after environmentalists and activists criticized him for not directly addressing the issue. [The Hill]

As TransCanada pursues construction of a 1,179-mile-long cross-country pipeline meant to bring Canadian tar sands oil to South Texas refineries, it’s finding opposition in the unlikeliest of places: oil-friendly Texas, a state that has more pipelines snaking through the ground than any other. [Associated Press]

Lake Tahoe is one of hundreds of lakes around the world in the midst of a warming trend. The effects of climate change are starting to complicate efforts to maintain the lake’s relatively pristine state, putting Tahoe’s sapphire blue water and its overall ecological health at risk. [National Geographic]

As controversy mounts over the Guardian’s revelations that an American businessman conducted a massive ocean fertilisation test, dumping around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate off Canada’s coast, it has emerged the Canadian government may have known about the geoengineering scheme and not stopped it. [Guardian]

Thierry Coste, an expert with the European Union farmers’ union, said Wednesday that France’s grape harvest is expected to slump by almost 20 percent compared with last year. Italy’s grape crop showed a 7 percent drop — on top of a decline in 2011. [Washington Post]

No one knows exactly when these algae first swarmed into the Columbia River. But this year they appeared to be more abundant than ever, and they stuck around, showing up in early September and staying through last week. [The Oregonian]

Europe is considering limiting the amount of food-based biofuels that can count toward its renewable fuel targets while a drought in the U.S. has pushed up food prices worldwide and millions around the world go hungry. [Associated Press]