Barack Obama and Mitt Romney face each other for the final presidential debate tonight. The conversation will focus exclusively on foreign policy — potentially opening up numerous opportunities to talk about climate and energy issues.

If the last two debates are any guide, the candidates and moderator may ignore the issue of climate altogether. But as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly pointed out in a speech last week, clean energy and climate policy will continue to be deeply important to U.S. foreign affairs, and the next president will play a strong role in “shaping the global energy future.”

Indeed, almost every major international issue — energy access, international trade, food prices, technology sharing, military operations — have a deeply embedded climate component.

There are a number of different angles that could be explored in tonight’s conversation. In a preview of the final debate, Brad Plumer of the Washington Post points out the national security implications of a changing climate:

There have been a whole slew of reports in recent years about how global warming could pose a security threat to the United States. The Pentagon even highlighted climate change in its 2010 defense review. There’s the possibility that droughts, floods and water shortages could destabilize key regions, for one. These things aren’t certain—here’s a more skeptical take on the prospect of “global warring” that I wrote a few years ago—but they’re on the minds of plenty of foreign-policy analysts.

Of course, the impact of global warming is, after all, a global issue. After the first debate, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times explained why he thought the final debate was the best place for a discussion around climate, “Global warming, both in its most significant drivers and consequences, remains a global issue.”

Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations touched upon this same issue in a post today. He makes a very important point about why climate change why isn’t just a single issue that can be separated from others:

Climate change is a really big global problem. You don’t need to be convinced of impending doom to believe this – you just need to accept that we’re running some pretty large risks. When the moderator of the last debate half-apologized to “the climate people” for not touching on the subject,  she revealed something important: too many people think about climate change as a special interest issue. It isn’t, and the candidates’ approaches deserve to be debated. This one is simple to tee off: just ask each candidate what he’d do.

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by Bill Becker

While energy got some airtime in the second presidential debate, neither candidate hit at the weakest spots in the other’s positions. Mitt Romney’s energy platform ignores the substantial downsides of fossil fuels and reveals a misunderstanding of how the real world works. President Obama has presided over a national energy strategy that he admits is a  “hodgepodge”.

This is a topic that deserves far more attention before Nov. 6. After all, we all use energy. We all pay for it. We all breathe its pollution. We all depend on it to be there when we need it. If there is one issue that affects every American of every age, place and income level, it’s energy.

Here are the some of the details that didn’t come out in the debate, starting with a look at Gov. Romney’s policies.

The energy paper the Romney campaign released in August presumably is the definitive statement of his energy plans. He proposes that the United States achieve energy independence by 2020 by producing more oil, coal and natural gas. What we couldn’t produce ourselves, we’d import from Canada and Mexico.

Energy Efficiency: There is no mention of energy efficiency in Romney’s plan, even though efficiency is universally regarded as the easiest, cleanest and least expensive way to obtain “new energy.”  According to the American Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy (ACEEE), we waste 86% of the energy we burn in the United States, an inexcusable lack of productivity. Inefficiency means wasted dollars for every energy consumer including our biggest, the federal government. Inefficiency produces pollution, which results in more government regulation.  It makes our companies less competitive.

Energy waste costs jobs. Skip Laitner, an adviser to the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), an economist and senior fellow at ACEEE, estimates that continued energy inefficiency could cost the U.S. economy as many as 15 million jobs in the next couple of decades – five times the 3 million jobs Romney says his energy policies would create.

On the other hand, improvements in energy efficiency would be an economic stimulus that keeps on stimulating. Families, schools and businesses would enjoy the equivalent of new tax-free disposable income that otherwise would have been spent on energy bills.

Competitive Energy Markets: The Romney plan says, “instead of distorting the (energy) playing field, the government should be ensuring that it remains level.” But the governor wants taxpayers to continue subsidizing the same fossil and nuclear power industries that have been on the public dole for generations while he has opposed government support for renewable energy. He wants to confine the government’s role in renewable energy development to basic research, but open more public lands to oil and gas drilling.  There goes the level playing field.

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by Jessica Goad

Arizona has become ground zero for the ideological fight against public lands and national parks during the 2012 election.  This is due to a combination of factors, including a Senate race featuring a former uranium industry lobbyist who has led the fight to mine around the Grand Canyon, a state ballot measure that would turn all federal public lands over to the state, and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s energy plan that would make it easier to mine and drill on public lands.

First, the Grand Canyon has played an important role in the Arizona Senate race between Richard Carmona (D) and Jeff Flake (R).  Flake has led the fight in Congress to roll back a ban on new uranium mining around the canyon, and at one point his efforts were referred to as “the Flake earmark for the mining industry.”

Just this past Saturday, Flake — who was once a lobbyist for an African uranium mine with ties to Iran — continued to attack the Grand Canyon, and referred to the lands around it as “prime mining lands” when he gave the weekly Republican address:

If Arizona is in any way a microcosm for regulatory overreaches — and I think it is — then it is no wonder that the economy is struggling. Whether it’s locking up prime mining lands in northern Arizona to responsible mining…there seems no end to the regulatory appetite of this administration.

Watch it:

The League of Conservation voters has been running ads against Flake on this very issue:

Additionally, Proposition 120 will be on Arizona’s ballot on November 6^th.  This measure would add language to the state constitution, giving Arizona “sovereign and exclusive authority and jurisdiction” over natural resources within its boundaries including air, water, wildlife, and public lands (including the Grand Canyon).  It would also, according to legislative analysis, “repeal Arizona’s disclaimer of all right and title to public lands within the state,” an action which one legal expert says is “almost certainly unconstitutional.”

As Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon further explained this morning:

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No, it’s not news that global warming is melting an ice cap. It’s melting the vast majority of them, especially at the poles.

But Xinhau is China’s major official press agency, and China Daily is a state-controlled daily newspaper (published in English). So it is interesting that this appears to be an official story and that it doesn’t pull any punches:

The spectacular panoramic views of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain have long drawn visitors to capture one of China’s most natural scenic spots.

Located in Yunnan province, the worldwide tourist spot is famed for the snow-capped glacier that has dazzled tourists and photographers for years.

But global warming is changing this once picture perfect site as the southernmost glacier in the Northern Hemisphere is melting away….

Lack of snow in the winter and more rain in summer is accelerating the loss, according to staff with the local weather bureau cited by China News Service.

“The shrinking is speeding. Between 1994 and 2002, Mingyong Glacier has shrunk just 50 meters. But since 2006, it has shrunk 200 meters.”

The China News Service is China’s “second largest state-owned news agency” (after Xinhua). The story continues by making clear both how widespread the problem is and what is causing it.

Dwindling snow on mountains is not just a problem unique to China. The snow line of the Alps has evaporated 100 meters in the past fifty years due to global warming.

Experts believe the speed of the shrinking ice cap is due to global warming caused by a rising world population, increased industrial activities and the growing discharge of pollutants.

Certainly these government-controlled news agencies deserve broad criticism for censorship, but it is remarkable how the Chinese government appears willing to clearly explain the dangers posed by man-made global warming without the wishy-washy language or “false balance” from anti-scientists used by even the best U.S. media outlets.

In fact, China Radio International (CRI), a state-owned radio station, spells out the danger:

… According to a representative from the glacier research institute at the mountain, continual global warming has contributed the most to the shrinking of the glaciers.

… The temperature rise has eventually caused four glaciers to vanish and reduced the total area dramatically.

“The successive melting of glaciers will pose a great threat to the water supply in the region and will lead to the occurrence of geographic disasters and the [ex]tinction of some biological species,” said He Xianzhong, Director of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Maintenance.

Precisely.

It would be great to see the independent press in this country write a piece that is so straightforward and accurate.

Colorado’s flagship newspaper, the Denver Post, is criticizing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for promoting an energy policy that focuses almost exclusively on drilling for fossil fuels.

On Sunday, the Post published an endorsement of President Obama and lamented Romney’s “drill-at-all-costs” energy policy that treats public lands only as areas for resource extraction:

Romney notes correctly that North America is poised to become an energy exporter. But the drill-at-all-costs mantra he is pushing runs counter to the predominant view in Colorado, which is one that balances energy and environment — particularly when it comes to public land. And, unlike the Republican nominee, we believe our nation’s energy portfolio must include government investment in renewable sources such as wind and solar — both of which can become sources of more power and more jobs in the future.

The endorsement comes as Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan campaign in Colorado this week. Polls show that the race is a dead heat in the important swing state.

Since releasing his energy policy in August, Romney has come under fire for his narrow focus on fossil fuel extraction. Energy expert Michael Levi has called it a “pipe dream”; cleantech experts have called it a “political document not worthy of serious analysis; and Obama blasted Romney in the most recent presidential debate for letting “the oil companies write the energy policies.”

One of the pillars of Romney’s energy plan is to transfer federal public lands to the states in order to encourage more drilling and mining. As the New York Times has described, giving states exclusive control over these protected lands makes it very likely that they are used for fossil fuel extraction: “States, as a rule, tend to be mainly interested in resource development.”

The plan doesn’t just ignore renewable energy, it ignores the enormous value of protecting these lands for recreation and tourism. For example, a recent study showed that the newly-announced Chimney Rock monument in Colorado will double the amount of visitors to the site over the next five years, increasing the economic impact from $1.2 million to $2.4 million.

A number of other recent studies illustrate the economic importance of protecting public lands. Headwaters Economics found that Western non-metro counties made up of at least one third public lands saw employment increase 344 percent over the last 40 years; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that homes located near wildlife refuges have higher values; and the Interior Department found that recreation on public lands supported more than 2.4 million jobs and $385 billion in economic activity in 2011.

by Adam James and Whitney Allen

What does ultra-rich timeshare mogul David Siegel have in common with transmission lines?

Both have had trouble with planning.

While we’ll admit that revamping the transmission planning process for the electrical system won’t grab as many headlines as building a 90,000 square foot, 13 bedroom, 23 bathroom home, we do guarantee that it will have a much bigger impact on the majority of Americans.

We know that last week’s announcement from FERC that it will begin enforcement of Order 1000 isn’t a natural-born attention-getter, but read on: because if you care about clean energy this is actually really important.

Turbocharging Renewable Development

So what is Order 1000? Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a Final Rule to reform the “electric transmission planning and cost allocation requirements for public utility transmission providers.”  This ruling is set to, as Bloomberg put it, “turbocharge the biggest transformation of the U.S. electricity market in decades, with far-reaching consequences for the economy, consumers, utilities and investors.” Let’s dig into the fundamental transformation which is being turbocharged here, and why we should care.

Well first, as a starting point: new transmission lines are a catalyst for clean energy development.

Historically, the gap between where energy is available and where it is needed has been pretty easy to overcome, because fossil-fuel burning plants can be placed almost anywhere and then scaled according to the needs of local cities and communities. Transmission is crucial to link the grid together, but isn’t as crucial for developing carbon intensive resources.

However, as we move into an age where the environmental consequences of fossil fuel reliance are untenable, society must move towards alternative energies if we want to maintain a liveable planet. The trouble is that the areas optimal for developing renewable resources sometimes do not match with population centers, and that a much wider dispersal of renewables is needed to ensure reliability. So transmission lines are necessary to meet the energy where it’s at, carry it to where it is needed, and link it into the larger grid.

Changing the Thinking of Planning

The stumbling block has been over who is going to pay for the lines. States that have a heavy reliance on incumbent, centralized fossil fuels are not going to pay for transmission lines to bring renewables across state boundaries, because they have no economic incentive to do so. This insular state-centric approach to energy management disproportionately hurts renewable energies since they are more widely dispersed.

So the importance of Order 1000 is that it changes the planning and valuation process for transmission lines. To use FERC’s language:

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by Kate Gordon

“I like coal.”

Governor Romney’s love note to the coal industry during the first Presidential debate in Denver gave rise to a tidal wave of Tweets and blog posts.  It’s been widely panned by environmental groups and lauded by the fossil fuel industry – in fact, shares in several mining companies actually rose the following day.

Governor Romney confirmed his affections during the second debate, declaring, “I will fight for oil, coal, and natural gas.”

At first blush it seems easy to judge the debates, and in fact the whole election campaign, based on these statements alone.  Like fossil fuels? Vote Romney. Don’t like fossil fuels? Vote Obama.

But of course it’s not that easy.  In actual fact, anyone taking a hard look at the United States’s energy mix would have to conclude that we all like fossil fuels.  Take coal.  Right now, most of our electricity comes from coal.  Even in California, where we like to think we’ve weaned ourselves off coal because we burn so little of it, we still import coal-fired power to our state – enough to generate, as recently as 2005, over 20 percent of the electricity we use.

At the same time, anyone tracking America’s energy mix over time would have to conclude that while we have liked coal a lot, we maybe like it a little less now.  The combination of new natural gas discoveries, the increasing use of renewable energy in many states, and people using less electricity overall has led to an actual decline in coal use in the U.S. to below 40 percent of U.S. power generation, from 42 percent last year and 57 percent in 1985.

And that’s a good thing. We need to diversify our energy sources so we don’t rely so much on just one volatile commodity, whether it’s coal, petroleum or even natural gas.  We need to turn to much cleaner and truly renewable power sources like wind and solar and geothermal, which we now know from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory could provide up to 80 percent of our total electricity generation.  And we need to do all this not just because it’s smart to widen our energy portfolio, but because it’s imperative that we send less carbon into our fragile atmosphere.

So one way to think about this is that in the past, we liked coal a lot, but in the future, we need to look for alternatives.  Making the real question this election season:  do we want an energy policy that takes us into the past, or one that moves us into the future?

The two presidential debates provide a glimpse into the candidates’ intentions. While Governor Romney proclaimed his love for coal in Denver, he also said he likes “green energy” – while cautioning against any government support for it.  The President, for his part, generally spoke in favor of “developing American energy” and of ending tax breaks that have subsidized oil and gas extraction for a century – and helped build up one of the most profitable industries in the world in the process.

These trends continued through the second debate, where the candidates engaged in a spirited debate over drilling, but where the President’s overarching message was that “[W]e’ve got to make sure we’re building the energy source of the future, not just thinking about next year, but ten years from now, 20 years from now.” Governor Romney, for his part, stuck to his guns: “Let’s take advantage of the energy sources we have.”

The President is looking to the future.  The Governor is looking to the past.  That’s a critical difference.

But the debates also highlighted a striking — and disturbing — similarly between the candidates: over the course of two debates, one on the economy and one on a range of domestic policy issues, neither candidate even once mentioned climate change – the single biggest threat to our economy and our current way of life.

At the end of the day, it’s the climate that matters.  For my part, I’m voting for the energy strategy that helps save it.

Kate Gordon is Director of Advanced Energy and Sustainability at The Center for the Next Generation. This piece was originally published at the Emerson Collective and was reprinted with permission from the author.

By Brad Johnson

Click the image to speak out before the debate.

1988. That was the year of James Hansen’s now famous congressional testimony on climate change. It was also the first year that climate change came up in the presidential debate cycle. On October 5, 1988, Chicago Tribune reporter Jon Margolis asked Vice Presidential candidates Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle about climate change and fossil fuels:

We’ve all just finished – most America has just finished one of the hottest summers it can remember. And apparently this year will be the fifth out of the last nine that are among the hottest on record. No one knows, but most scientists think, that something we’re doing, human beings are doing, are exacerbating this problem, and that this could, in a couple of generations, threaten our descendants’ comfort and health and perhaps even their existence. As Vice President what would you urge our government to do to deal with this problem? And specifically as a Texan, could you support a substantial reduction in the use of fossil fuels which might be necessary down the road?

Both agreed that it was time to act.

Watch it:

Today, the science of climate change is incontrovertible. The past 17 years have been hotter than 1988 — the hottest year ever recorded at the time. Crushing impacts like drought, wildfires, flooding, sea level rise, and ocean acidification are now hitting American communities. Instead of a substantial reduction in the use of fossil fuels, consumption and pollution have grown exponentially. And, yet, if Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don’t discuss climate change tonight, it will be the first time since 1988 that the issue was ignored during a presidential debate cycle.

That’s right: in 1992, vice presidential candidate Al Gore shamed Dan Quayle and James Stockdale with an impassioned call to action on climate change as they promoted myths of scientific uncertainty; in 1996 Jack Kemp attacked Gore for sowing “fear on climate”; in 2000 Gore made an even stronger case for action as Bush questioned the science; in 2004 Kerry blasted Bush’s anti-scientific record; in 2008 even Sarah Palin described how climate change was damaging Alaska. In a debate with John McCain, Barack Obama blasted McCain’s efforts on climate change for their insufficiency:

So it’s easy to talk about this stuff during a campaign, but it’s important for us to understand that it requires a sustained effort from the next president.

Watch a compilation:

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More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, coupled with rising temperatures, is making rice agriculture a larger source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, according to a study published today in Nature Climate Change by a research team that includes a UC Davis plant scientist. [Daily Democrat]

“Together, higher carbon dioxide concentrations and warmer temperatures predicted for the end of this century will about double the amount of methane emitted per kilo of rice produced,” said Chris van Kessel, professor of plant sciences at UCD and co-author of the study, published in this week’s edition of Nature Climate Change. “Because global demand for rice will increase further with a growing world population, our results suggest that without additional measures, the total methane emissions from rice agriculture will strongly increase.”

Since 2010, Obama has used his executive powers — including his authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act — to press the most sweeping attack on air pollution in U.S. history. [Washington Post]

The uncertainty surrounding a wind industry tax credit decreased General Electric’s energy infrastructure revenues 5 percent in the third quarter as wind turbine sales dropped, the company said Friday. [The Hill]

On Thursday (Oct. 18), 14 year old Samantha Farb of Lecompton, Kansas, became the latest U.S. youngster to file suit over climate change (District Court of Shawnee County) against her State. [Planet Save]

Scottish Renewables said 15% of the country’s total carbon emissions have been displaced by renewables projects. [BBC]

Rome’s notorious traffic, the high cost of gasoline, shortage of parking, limited metro system and frequent transportation strikes are prompting Italians to explore different ways of getting around. [Wall Street Journal]

Farmers drilling ever deeper wells over decades to water their crops likely contributed to a deadly earthquake in southern Spain last year, a new study suggests. The findings may add to concerns about the effects of new energy extraction and waste disposal technologies. [Associated Press]

Government backing for new forms of gas extraction such as “fracking” are coming under acute scrutiny, after a sacked energy minister warned against “betting the farm” on them and green groups expressed alarm at links between the fossil fuel lobby and the Tories. [Guardian]

An international group of ethical funds with investments in Alberta’s oilsands is concerned the industry’s environmental performance could be creating financial risk. [Canadian Press]