Gore Derangement Syndrome Lives — But Not Here

The inimitable Dave Roberts of Grist had a good interview with Al Gore this month. The Climate Reality founder discusses “carbon taxes, natural gas, and the ‘morally wrong’ Keystone pipeline.”

Since a carbon price is the sine qua non of reality-based climate policy, and Gore has been way, way ahead of the curve, I’ll excerpt that portion. At the end, I’ll also comment on Grist’s comment policy and Gore Derangement Syndrome.

Q. Did you hear [White House press secretary] Jay Carney this morning?

A. No, God help us, what’d he say?

Q. He said, “We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one.”

A. I don’t think that comes as a big surprise to anyone. Those of us that hold out some hope that we will find a way to get a price on carbon, and know there are multiple ways to do it, have felt that the convergence of the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff could produce some surprising results. And there have been some private comments by some Republicans to that effect. But certainly that’s something you wouldn’t wanna bet money on in Vegas.

Q. What do you think of this idea of a revenue-neutral carbon tax?

A. I have proposed a revenue-neutral carbon tax for a long time, 30 years. I proposed it in my first book, Earth in the Balance.

I supported cap-and-trade because a lot of folks felt that it offered the opportunity for bipartisan consensus. And by the way, it may yet gain altitude globally — China, as you know, is implementing it in five provinces and two cities. They have indicated that they intend to use these pilots as a model for the nationwide program. Many are skeptical, but they often do follow through with what they say they’re going to do. And [cap-and-trade] just started in California yesterday. Australia is now linking theirs to the E.U. system. South Korea’s moving, British Columbia, Quebec — there are a lot of parallel developments that could converge, particularly if China does follow through. It’s premature to write [cap-and-trade] off, even thought it’s has been demonized and so many people are afraid to talk about it.

But from the very beginning, I preferred a carbon tax. (And by the way, I’d be in favor of both; I don’t think they’re inconsistent at all.) And yet, the political environment in the U.S. has not changed to the point where it’s something you’d wanna bet on. But look, we’ve got to solve this. It’s an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, and something’s gotta give. I have enough faith in humanity to believe, against a lot of evidence, that we’re going to solve this.

Q. Does this idea of a carbon/income tax swap make you nervous? The income tax is one of the only places we have progressivity in the U.S. tax code.

A. I have not proposed doing it on the income tax, I have proposed doing it on the payroll tax. I am also friendly to the notion of a rebate scheme, though I doubt they’ll do that. It needs to be progressive — the rising inequality in the country is too serious to run the risk of worsening that.

Q.Do you worry that you getting out in front of this might brand it in a certain way —

A. Well, they come after anybody who speaks up in favor of doing something on climate. It’s not going to surprise any of them that I’m in favor of it. I’ve said it on practically a daily basis for years and years.

Gore’s last answer is dead on. The anti-science crowd demonizes all climate hawks. That is hardly a reason for silence by any hawk on any aspect of climate science, solutions, or policy — quite the reverse. Certainly the public opinion data makes clear that Nobel laureate did not polarize the climate debate – and every leading social scientists in the field I’ve spoken to agrees (see “Public Opinion Study Debunks Claim Al Gore Polarized the Climate Debate“).

Despite the fact that the science continues to support a worse-case analysis than the one Gore advanced in An Inconvenient Truth, the vitriol against him continues to this day, so much so it has its own label “Gore Derangement Syndrome.”

And if you want to see an epidemic of GDS, just go to the comments section of the Grist interview — but put on your head vise first. That may be the best argument I’ve seen in a while for moderating comments, which the overwhelming majority of blogs do. I’m a huge fan of Grist’s — they reprint Climate Progress pieces and we reprint theirs — but I’d urge them to at least put an intern on that job. What really is the point of a comments section if it can be overwhelmed by those spreading disinformation and/or Gore Derangement Syndrome?

by Jackie Weidman

Yesterday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared that his state needs $42 billion to recover from Hurricane Sandy and to protect against future extreme weather events.  Three quarters of this sum is just for damage repair and restoration of homes, businesses, and mass transit.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also announced that Sandy caused $29.5 billion in economic costs there, cautioning that the estimate will likely rise after next summer’s tourism season and real estate values take a hit.

Cuomo urged that mitigating damage from future storms is essential, as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather. “There has been a series of extreme weather incidents,” Cuomo said just days after Sandy’s landfall.  “We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns.”

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) warned that obtaining federal funding for recovery efforts could be difficult, especially during the  fiscal showdown. Schumer said that an emergency supplemental appropriations bill will be introduced in December and that it “will be an effort that lasts not weeks, but many months, and we will not rest until the federal response meets New York’s deep and extensive needs.”

Additionally, the House of Representatives hasn’t been friendly to disaster relief. In both 2011 and 2012, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee proposed cutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budget by $87 million and an additional $182 million, respectively. 

This isn’t the first time that states have asked Congress for disaster funding, and it certainly won’t be the last. FEMA only has $12 billion in disaster aid to provide annually.  Yet in 2011 and 2012, the U.S. experienced at least $126 billion in direct costs just from extreme weather events that caused $1 billion in damages or more.

A recent Center for American Progress report called “Heavy Weather: How Climate Destruction Harms Middle- and Lower-Income Americans,” finds that the vast majority of U.S. counties – 67 percent – were affected by at least one of the 21 billion-dollar extreme weather events in the past two years.   The report found that lower- and middle- income households are disproportionately affected by the most expensive extreme weather events.

Although New Jersey and New York account for the lion’s share of damages from Hurricane Sandy, they aren’t the only states slammed by extreme weather. Sixteen states were afflicted by five or more extreme weather events in 2011-12.  Households in disaster-declared counties in these states earn $48,137, or seven percent below the U.S. median income.  These states were ravaged by hurricanes and tropical storms, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, floods and crippling drought.

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Planning officials monitoring rebuilding efforts in coastal New Jersey towns hit by Superstorm Sandy are getting a little worried.

Will the state make permanent decisions about coastal infrastructure that simply make the problem worse down the road? Will developers construct houses, roads, and sewage systems without taking into account sea levels, which are rising faster than average in the Northeast?

Re-building efforts in New York and New Jersey offer a unique opportunity to think about climate resiliency efforts. But in the aftermath of a storm like Sandy, those hard decisions can get swept aside in an effort to build as quickly as possible and bring life back to normal for residents.

As Governors, planners, and residents start putting their communities back together, it’s helpful to look back at a bit of history.

In 1989 — just one year after NASA’s James Hansen testified before Congress about the looming threat of climate change — New Jersey’s Republican Governor Thomas Kean issued an executive order calling on his state to recognize the “scientific consensus” of climate change and to prepare for rising sea levels, intensifying storms, and other threats posed by a warming planet. (Click to enlarge the documents below).

Recognizing those threats, Governor Keane called on the New Jersey government to begin reducing chlorofluorocarbons and take modest actions to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Most importantly, he called on the state to begin planning for the threat of rising sea levels:

It’s fascinating to see how far backward we’ve fallen. In Virginia this year, lawmakers struck any mention of the phrases “climate change” or “sea level rise” from a report on increased coastal flooding, saying they were “liberal code words.” And in North Carolina, legislators passed a bill this summer preventing state agencies from acknowledging the rise of the oceans — even as the state sees rising sea levels at more than three times the global average.

According to research from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, areas around New York and New Jersey could see 20 inches of sea level rise by mid-century. And as a Climate Central analysis shows, there is a one in six chance that storm surge levels could top eight feet by the end of the century, impacting nine percent of New Jersey’s homes.

New Jersey hasn’t slipped into denial. Over the last five years, the state has implemented some pretty aggressive renewable energy programs and carbon reduction efforts. In addition, state officials have reaffirmed their commitment to acknowledging the impact of climate change on coastal areas, and have rolled out resiliency pilot programs in a few communities.

But Sandy revealed how exposed the state and region really are. And now the building process will reveal how committed officials are to true “resiliency” — 23 years after New Jersey’s Republican Governor first warned of the problem.

(Hat tip to Kevin Kirchner for flagging the documents).

Faithful reader have been waiting more than 6 years for reality to catch up to the name of this blog. So I am delighted to report that despite those doomsayers at the New York Times and New Scientist, the United States of America, at least, is finally making some big-time Climate Progress.

How do we know? Because one of our senior negotiators at the international climate conference in Doha, Qatar, Jonathan Pershing, said so:

“Those who don’t know what the US is doing may not be informed of the scale and extent of the effort, but it’s enormous.”

For the uninformed, here is what “enormous” climate progress — in scale and extent — looks like, according to the US Energy Information Administration:

Woo-hoo! All we need is a ten more years like 2009, and we’ll achieve the catastrophe-averting 80% reduction in carbon pollution by mid-century that Obama campaigned on.

Yes, the administration is touting emissions reductions that were due in large part to the economic collapse and subsequent slow economic growth, coupled with the low price of natural gas (which itself was partly due to the unnaturally warm weather last winter and spring, as the EIA notes).

Not that the U.S. has been a total slacker in climate policy. Obama has put in place impressive fuel economy standards and made major investments in clean energy. States have pushed renewable electricity through portfolio standards. For a detailed breakdown of all the reasons for the drop in carbon pollution, see “Shale Gas And The Overhyping Of Its CO2 Reductions.”

But the “scale and extent of the effort” is minimal, at best, compared to the scale and extent of the problem.

Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe joins the Heartland Institute at the Capitol building this morning to unveil a new campaign to rein in the “rogue” Environmental Protection Agency.

Inhofe is best known for his tirades against established climate science; the fringe Heartland Institute is best known for its billboard campaign comparing people concerned about climate change to the Unabomber.

The Environmental Protection Agency is best known for protecting America’s air and water.

The two partners say they have collected 16,000 signatures from people calling on lawmakers to slash the EPA’s budget by 80 percent and stop it from regulating carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas responsible for warming the planet.

16,000 sounds like a lot of signatures. That is, until they’re compared to the four million comments from people who say they support the EPA.

Over the last two years, as the agency has finalized new regulations for mercury, air toxics, and global warming pollution, groups supportive of such measures have acquired record numbers of comments in favor of the rules.

Earlier this year, environmental and public health groups collected and delivered more than 3.2 million comments supporting EPA’s carbon pollution standard for power plants; in 2011, they collected more than 800,000 comments supporting EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standard; and so far in 2012, groups have collected more than 420,000 comments supporting the EPA’s soot pollution standard.

Environmental organizations say the 3.2 million comments in support of EPA regulation of CO2 is the most of any federal rule, ever.

Once again: that’s more than four million comments in support of new EPA rules versus 16,000 signatures against them.

Considering the outcome of the election earlier this month, that disparity isn’t much of a surprise.

In the two months leading up to the November presidential election, groups specifically touting oil, coal, and gas spent more than $31 million on television ads. Throughout the whole campaign, pro-fossil fuel interests outspent environmental and clean energy interests 4-1.

However, in the end, environmental groups won nearly every single race they targeted, bringing in some key allies to the Senate and keeping President Obama in the White House.

One post-election poll from Zogby Analytics showed that 65 percent of voters say elected officials should act now to reduce carbon pollution. That poll also found that 44 percent of voters believe the government is doing too little to protect clean air, clean water, and other natural resources. Only 14 percent say the government is doing too much in this area.

by Rebecca Lefton and Andrew Light

The next high-level gathering of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change started this week in Doha, Qatar, and will continue until December 7. In this column we provide an overview of the upcoming talks and discuss what the results of U.S. elections may mean for the Obama administration’s positions during these negotiations.

What to watch for in Doha

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Doha will continue the progress made to date toward advancing a series of tracks toward a comprehensive international climate agreement. While none of these tracks alone is sufficient to address global climate change, taken together they have gotten us closer than ever to a comprehensive international solution. The biggest items on the three primary tracks of the Doha agenda are:

• The closing of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action
• Agreement on a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol
• Advancement of a work plan for the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action

Closing of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action

During the 2011 climate talks in Durban, South Africa, parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed that the Long-term Cooperative Action should conclude in Doha. The action, which began in 2007 in order to implement the Bali Action Plan agreed to under the Bush administration, gave rise to the Copenhagen Accord and the Cancun Agreements.

Though many throughout the world hoping for a binding international treaty viewed Copenhagen as a disappointment, it was never likely that the 2009 U.N. climate change conference could have ended in a binding agreement. The United States would not have signed onto an agreement that did not solve the problem of rising greenhouse gases, leaving out major emitters such as India and China—now the largest emitter in the world, the country’s per-capita emissions are on par with the European Union’s emissions. China even objected in Copenhagen to developed countries articulating their own 2050 emission-reduction targets in a formal agreement, presumably because it would mean that rapidly developing countries would be responsible for the remainder of required emissions reductions to achieve some level of climate safety.

But for all its criticisms, Copenhagen was groundbreaking. For the first time countries at all stages of development agreed to put forward pledges for national actions to address global warming by 2020. Over the past three years, 141 countries, including all the major emitters in the developed and developing world—which are responsible for more than 80 percent of global emissions—have made voluntary mitigation pledges. This was an important step forward, given that until then the only articulated pledges for reductions were made by developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol, which now account for less than 15 percent of global emissions.

Perhaps most importantly, the Long-term Cooperative Action allowed a pathway for a bottom-up approach, bringing pledges from both developed and developing countries to the table. The bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down architecture, allows for varying commitments by country. This is significant because it recognizes the different capacities and levels of development of each country. The question is: How do we ensure that the sum of parties’ commitments will keep us on a pathway where it is still possible to hold temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels by the end of the century? This is now the agreed-upon goal of the U.N. process.

Many analyses warn that there is a gap between the total emissions reductions from parties’ pledges under the Copenhagen Accord and where we need to be to meet the 2 degrees Celsius goal by 2020. The current framework allows for parties to start where they are now and assess progress to see what must be done to meet that goal. The pledges—along with agreements on transparency, technology, forestry, and finance—were enshrined in Cancun during the 2010 U.N. climate conference. Parties agreed to report on progress of their unilateral commitments, and the following year in Durban, countries agreed to regular regional reviews beginning in 2013. Work on how to overcome this gap will now move to the new track under the Durban Platform.

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Canada’s ruling Conservative Party government has been leading a slow and systematic unraveling of environmental and climate research budgets, according to local scientists—including shuttering one of the world’s top Arctic research stations for monitoring global warming. [Inside Climate News]

As global temperatures continue to rise — nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000 — the threat of a milder climate looms over the ski industry. In New England, the outlook is worse than in the West, climate researchers say, and independently owned resorts at lower elevations are at the greatest risk. [Boston Globe]

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, making a case for tens of billions of dollars in federal aid, declared on Monday that Hurricane Sandy had been “more impactful” than Hurricane Katrina, the deadly storm that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. [New York Times]

In September, Gov. Paul LePage cited a report that said Maine’s renewable energy mandate would cost electricity ratepayers $145 million and nearly 1,000 jobs by 2017. The study was immediately challenged for its conclusions, and now its motives are under scrutiny. [Morning Sentinel]

Researchers have found that exposure to traffic-related air pollution during pregnancy is associated with autism, according to a new study released on Monday. [San Jose Mercury News]

Lake Lanier is at its lowest level since the historic drought of several years ago, and if much-needed rain doesn’t arrive soon, metro Atlanta could revisit the days of sweeping water restrictions and recreational nightmares. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

Republicans stopped Sen. Jon Tester’s (D-Mont.) Sportsmen’s Act dead in its tracks Monday evening. The Sportsmen’s Act, S. 3525, would have increased access to federal land for hunters and fishermen, while also supporting conservation measures, but Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) raised a budget point of order, saying Tester’s bill violated the Budget Control Act. [The Hill]

China’s position on its rising greenhouse gas emissions may seem contradictory. While the country flaunts ambitious green-tech investments and energy consumption targets, its officials continue to prioritise GDP growth over many environmental concerns. [Guardian]

The meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change this year, which opened Monday in Doha, Qatar, promises to be a more staid affair than the three previous sessions. [New York Times]

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released a report early Tuesday morning that recommended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) address the impact of warming permafrost and the large volume of methane and carbon dioxide that will be emitted from the ground if permafrost continues to melt. [Climate Central]