by Kiley Kroh

President Barack Obama raised expectations for climate action when he said in his election night acceptance speech that “we want our children to live in an America that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

But in his first post-election press conference, he backed away, implying that climate must take a back seat to dealing with the country’s economic woes – a distinction echoed by his spokesperson Jay Carney shortly thereafter. The President is exactly right in his first statement and dead wrong in his second.

Sweeping action to address climate change faces enormous political opposition, especially when the economy is the dominant issue of the day. But the reality is that they can be approached simultaneously. In fact, this decision to separate the economy and the environment is a marked reversal from the president’s previous statements.

In March, for example, Obama stated quite clearly that environmental and economic prosperity are not mutually exclusive:

“There will always be people in this country who say we’ve got to choose between clean air and clean water and a growing economy, between doing right by our environment and putting people back to work. And I’m here to tell you that is a false choice. That is a false choice. With smart, sustainable policies, we can grow our economy today and protect our environment for ourselves and our children.”

In addition to addressing the urgent need to curb our carbon emissions, the economic benefits of dealing with climate change should merit their inclusion in both short-term policy discussions about deficit reduction and long-term economic growth strategies.

For example, a recent analysis from the Congressional Research Service found that a modest carbon tax of $20 per ton that rises 5.6 percent annually could cut the projected 10-year deficit by 50 percent — from $2.3 trillion down to $1.1 trillion. If designed correctly, a carbon tax could help shift the burden of paying for pollution (and solutions to it) from taxpayers to polluters, as well as generate much-needed revenue that could be used for a variety of purposes, including paying down the debt, incentivizing clean energy, and building our resiliency to climate change.

Climate action through clean energy investment has a variety of economic benefits in both the near and long term, driving investments that put people back to work now and increase our economy’s productivity over time. Such policies simultaneously reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, curb carbon emissions, and mitigate the negative effects of climate change.  A few specific examples:

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by Justin Guay

For the past few years, the Beyond Coal campaign has been working with local activists across the United States to finally move our country off coal.

But now, according to a new report from World Resources Institute, coal companies are in a dead sprint to build 1,231 new dirty coal-fired power plants worldwide. If built, the air pollution from these plants could kill a quarter million people every year, and all but ensure runaway climate change. The dark future this expansion promises must be stopped before it’s too late.

But there is another grassroots success story that you may not have heard of. From Malaysia, to Kosovo , from Turkey to India, communities around the world are standing up, fighting back, and beating this expansion. Take rural India, where villagers stood firm against lethal violence at the hands of police and security forces to defeat a proposed plant in Sompeta. Or Turkey, where residents of the Black Sea town of Gerze set up 24-hour vigils to keep out coal companies.

Wherever you look, communities across the globe are standing up to the wealth and power of the coal industry. And in many cases, they’re winning. These brave activists are often all that stands between the 1,231 planned new coal-fired power plants and the 250,000 people they will kill every year.

You can read about these fights and more in a new Sierra club report: Move Beyond Coal, Now! Victories From The Frontlines. The report details how grassroots campaigns around the globe are fighting against the coal industry’s push to build new plants in developing countries.

This movement undercuts the industry’s narrative of a global “super cycle” used to support a massive expansion in export facilities in the U.S. and Australia. In the U.S., coal producers plan to open new strip mines in the Powder River Basin, transport coal over 800 miles by train (endangering local communities), and then ship over 140 tons per year to Asian markets to offset historic lows in domestic consumption. In Australia, the unscrupulous Gina Rinehart is pushing for an even larger expansion of 330 million tons, a plan that directly threatens the Great Barrier Reef.

But appearances can be deceiving. A rash of media reports cast doubt on the reality of a super cycle. In India, the Reserve Bank has warned the financial industry to freeze lines of credit to new coal plants, which it called a “distressed sector,” as several coal plants declared bankruptcy. In the U.S., a recent $7 billion export deal brokered by the state of Kentucky may be permanently scuttled due to financial irregularities associated with the ‘Coal-Gate’ scandal rocking the Indian government. And in China, unwanted coal is piling up at ports, which coupled with declining U.S. demand, is forcing bankruptcy declarations.

The truth isl that global coal markets are far riskier than you think.

The industry knows that if it doesn’t act now the dominance it has enjoyed will come crashing down. When it does, it will be because rice farmers in Indonesia, fishermen in Malaysia, and parents from Chicago stood up and fought back against seemingly insurmountable odds — showing the world that coal is the problem, not the solution.

Justin Guay leads the Sierra Club’s International Program.

by Tom Wittig

Even as the Obama Administration backs away from making climate change an immediate priority in its second term, the world’s leading companies — some of them fossil fuel companies — are calling for more action.

Last week, Exxon reiterated its support for a carbon tax in order to “address rising emissions.” And this week, Royal Dutch Shell has come out in support of a global initiative to curb greenhouse gas emissions.  The oil giant cosigned a letter with Statoil and 100 other companies asking politicians worldwide to put a predictable price on carbon.

The joint letter will be presented to Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner on Climate Change:

A clear, stable, ambitious and cost-effective policy framework is essential to underpin the investment needed to deliver substantial greenhouse gas emissions reductions by mid-century. As business leaders, we believe that the certainty created by this policy framework and the investment it will unlock offers the prospect of increased business success and job creation in key sectors including energy, transport and the built environment.

Released ahead of the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, the letter points out that “a convincing strategy to reduce emissions… continues to evade the global community,” but warns against considering carbon pricing a “silver bullet.” Instead, the companies advocate combining carbon pricing “with other locally appropriate policies.”

And just today, a group of 80 investors with more than $1 trillion in assets issued a similar letter to world governments calling on them to establish better policies to encourage swifter climate action:

Investors worldwide are currently taking actions to address climate risks and opportunities. These range from considering and addressing climate risks in their investments, directly investing in assets such as renewable energy, low-carbon energy infrastructure, and clean technology, encouraging companies to improve energy efficiency and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, measuring and disclosing the carbon performance of their own portfolios, to persuading regulators to require corporate disclosure of the business impacts of climate change. These efforts are not yet sufficient and must be scaled up dramatically. Governments will need to adopt stronger, more consistent policy frameworks which provide the right market signals to support increased investment.

These calls for action come one day after the World Bank released a new report summarizing the state of climate science. The study concludes that the world will encounter “unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods” if it continues on its path to a 4˚C increase by 2100.

While Shell’s support of carbon pricing is not unprecedented, – it admitted internally pricing of $40 per ton CO2 in 2010 — it does provide new fodder for the dialogue around pricing carbon. Unfortunately, even though Shell, Exxon and the world’s top investors are endorsing this kind of carbon policy, the Obama Administration still won’t touch it.

Tom Wittig is an intern on the ocean policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Trenberth slams new Nature article on drought: “The conclusions of the paper are likely wrong.”

A flawed new article in Nature has a title that sums up its controversial conclusion, “Little change in global drought over the past 60 years.”

I generally judge an article at odds with the broad literature in two ways. How well does it cite and respond to the literature? What do the other leading experts in the field say? This new article comes up short in both areas.

Kevin Trenberth, former head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has sent me a strong critique which is printed below. NCAR’s Aiguo Dai also sent me a critique.

The new article simply ignores or dismisses a considerable amount of the drought literature and focuses instead on one narrow metric of soil moisture. But as I wrote last year in a Comment that reviewed much of the recent literature for Nature, “The Next Dust Bowl” (subs. req’d, full text here), climate change worsens droughts in three synergistic ways:

A basic prediction of climate science is that many parts of the world will experience longer and deeper droughts, thanks to the synergistic effects of drying, warming and the melting of snow and ice.

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temp- erature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. Added to natural climatic variation, such as the El Niño–La Niña cycle, these factors will intensify seasonal or decade-long droughts. Although the models don’t all agree on the specifics, the overall drying trends are clear.

There is simply little doubt that many dry areas have gotten drier and/or warmed up and/or seen earlier snowmelt.

I think it bizarre to claim that there is little change in global drought over the past 60 years when there are so many studies and analyses to the contrary directly linking severe droughts to climate change:

• NOAA Bombshell (Hoerling et al 10/11): Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts
• Study (10/10): Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse
• USGS Expert Explains How Global Warming Likely Contributes to East Africa’s Brutal Drought

The World Bank’s must-read new report, “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided,” gets this right:

One affected region is the Mediterranean, which experienced 10 of the 12 driest winters since 1902 in just the last 20 years (Hoerling et al. 2012). Anthropogenic greenhouse gas and aerosol forcing are key causal factors with respect to the downward winter precipitation trend in the Mediterranean (Hoerling et al. 2012)…. East Africa has experienced a trend towards increased drought frequencies since the 1970s, linked to warmer sea surface temperatures in the Indian-Pacific warm pool (Funk 2012), which are at least partly attributable to greenhouse gas forcing (Gleckler et al. 2012). Furthermore, a preliminary study of the Texas drought event in 2011 concluded that the event was roughly 20 times more likely now than in the 1960s (Rupp, Mote, Massey, Rye, and Allen 2012).

You won’t find any of those studies referenced in the new Nature article. You can find Funk 2012 and Rupp et al 2012 in the The Bulletin of the  American Meteorological Society Special Issue, “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective.”

I find it is especially surprising that Nature would publish this piece when three months ago its sister publication, Nature Climate Change, published a piece by Dai, “Increasing drought under global warming in observations and model” that is utterly at odds with it. There is simply no way both of these papers can be true — and yet the new Nature piece never discusses the Nature Climate Change piece.

Dai’s paper notes:

Historical records of precipitation, streamflow and drought indices all show increased aridity since 1950 over many land areas….

I conclude that the observed global aridity changes up to 2010 are consistent with model predictions, which suggest severe and widespread droughts in the next 30– 90 years over many land areas resulting from either decreased precipitation and/ or increased evaporation.

The new Nature paper dismisses previous work by Dai, unjustifiably according to Dai and Trenberth, but in any case, Dai’s Nature Climate Change goes much further in reconciling models with observations. Nature shouldn’t have published this new paper without a serious effort first to reconcile these two papers.

I think it unlikely that the new paper will stand up. Here is what Trenberth sent me:

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Some weeks, a few news stories come together to illustrate just how dire the situation is for the world’s climate. This week is one of them.

This morning, new data from the World Meteorological Organization showed that carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide levels hit record highs in 2011. As of last year, concentrations of CO2 — one of the most abundant heat-trapping gases — hit 390.9 parts per million. (350 ppm is what many scientists say is the upper limit on “safe” levels of CO2).

According to WMO, we’ve seen a 30 percent increase in “radiative forcing” — i.e. the amount of heat trapped on earth — since 1990.

These record levels of greenhouse gas emissions aren’t a huge surprise considering that other organizations have reported similar findings. The real news is what the world intends to do about it. And according to a new report on the global pipeline for coal-fired power plants — a technology that accounted for 45 percent of CO2 in 2011 — there’s not much hope for slowing the record pace of global warming pollution.

According to a new analysis released today by the World Resources Institute, there are nearly 1,200 new coal plants planned for construction around the world. Most of those plants will be built in China and India, but there are dozens planned for America, Australia, Europe, and Russia.

The report outlines virtually every coal plant announced around the world. That does not necessarily mean that every one will get built. In the U.S., for example, it is highly unlikely that many — if any — new coal plants will move forward as cheap natural gas, growing renewables, and legal pressure from environmental groups trips up the pipeline. (Also, as Justin Guay of the Sierra Club points out in a piece today, local resistance in communities around the world is also hindering many of these projects).

But the tally is still staggering. If all these plants were built, they would amount to generation capacity four times greater than the entire U.S. coal fleet. And to see just how rapidly coal consumption is increasing in Asia, take a look at this animated graphic from the Energy Information Administration.

The interactive map below shows where these plants could be constructed:

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by Jessica Goad

The looming budget crisis and “sequestration” are currently the talk of the town in Washington, D.C.  But often lost in these discussions are the real impacts that Americans will feel if important government programs are cut.

For public lands, January’s massive and automatic budget cuts be will felt strongly in our national parks, some of which could even be closed if a budget deal is not reached.

That’s the message being delivered by the National Parks Conservation Association, a group dedicated to advocacy on behalf of America’s 398 national parks units.  This week, the group is launching an online and print ad campaign to warn lawmakers that slashing the budget of the National Park Service could mean:

…some level of closure at virtually every national park in the system, including reductions in park hours or seasons, closures of campgrounds or visitor’s centers, and even the outright closure of many parks in the next year. And it could eliminate as many as 9,000 rangers who serve the public, protect our parks, and keep the parks running.

NPCA calculates that the cuts could be equivalent to closing as many as 200 national park units.

Like other non-defense agencies, the National Park Service faces cuts under automatic budget sequestration at the beginning of January.  The White House Office of Management and Budget noted that many agencies, including the park service, will see an 8.2 percent cut in funding to critical programs.  This translates to a $218 million cut for national parks in fiscal year 2013.

Slashing this budget so dramatically could be devastating to the park service.  According to OMB, the majority of cuts are to the park operations account, which funds priorities such as law enforcement, visitor education, campground maintenance, etc.  And on top of this, the park service already faces a smaller budget and large maintenance backlog.

While it takes funding to manage national parks, it is important to note the enormous return on investment that they bring.  In addition to preserving our natural and cultural heritage, national parks contributed $31 billion in 2011 and supported 258,000 jobs.  Some have estimated that for every $1 spent on national parks, $4 in economic impacts are generated.

Recent history has shown that voters are willing to spend money on conservation.  Indeed, in the 2012 election, voters in 21 states approved ballot measures that will provide $767 million for parks and conservation.  Since the American public is willing to tax itself for the purpose of conservation, lawmakers should find a balanced approach to the budget crisis that includes revenue increases so as to continue funding important government priorities like national parks.

Whether or not Congressional leaders and the White House reach a budget deal remains to be seen. But it’s certain that we’ll see major changes at our national parks very soon if a deal is not reached.

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

The State University of New York at Buffalo announced Monday that it was closing its newly formed Shale Resources and Society Institute, which was devoted to the study of hydraulic fracturing, citing “a cloud of uncertainty over its work.” [New York Times]

The institute’s first study, released in May, drew sharp criticism for being biased in favor of the oil and gas industry.

In a letter addressed to the “university community,” President Satish K. Tripathi said he was closing the institute after an internal assessment that determined that it lacked “sufficient” faculty presence, that it was not consistent enough in disclosing its financial interests and that the credibility of its research was compromised because of questions over its financing.

Oddly enough, there’s no high-profile leader out there championing a carbon tax, yet it’s the subject of reports, conferences and a flurry of maneuvers by groups for and against it. [Kansas City Star]

In California’s first auction of greenhouse gas pollution credits, companies paid just a few cents more than the minimum price per ton of carbon, generating almost $290 million from the sale held last week. [Los Angeles Times]

If we are to avoid the next major -catastrophe—and it will come—then we have to start paying the bill now. [Newsweek]

One of the most significant energy issues facing President Barack Obama in his second term is whether to allow oil drilling off the coast of the Atlantic, where production has been off-limits for decades. [Wall Street Journal]

The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record 390.9 parts per million (ppm) in 2011, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). That’s a 40 percent increase over levels in 1750, before humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest. [Climate Central]

Water levels on the Mississippi River may drop to historic lows next month in the Midwest, delaying barges carrying everything from grains and coal to steel and petroleum, after the worst U.S. drought in 56 years. [Businessweek]

The Conservative MP Peter Lilley, one of only three MPs who voted against the Climate Change Act, has received share options worth at least $400,000 from an oil company, Guardian analysis has revealed. [Guardian]

China assured its support to tackle the growing problem of climate change in the Maldives, a spokesman said on Tuesday. [China Daily]