It’s 2013, and the deniers have finally figured out that twitter and other social media are important tools — and that they are way behind.

How big is the social media gap between deniers and hawks?

The world’s most well-known climate science denier, Sen. James Inhofe, has a whopping 13.3 thousand followers. The world’s most well-known climate hawk, Al Gore, has 2.58 million followers on Twitter (subscribe here).

Famous writer-denier James Delingpole (one of the UK Guardian‘s four suggested deniers to follow on Twitter) has 12,900 followers. Compare that to these writer-hawks:

• Bill McKibben: 69,400 (subscribe here)
• Dave Roberts: 28,800 (subscribe here)
• Kate Sheppard: 38,600 (subscribe here)

Grist itself has 97,500 followers (subscribe here).

Climate Progress has 36,900 followers (subscribe here). And, as I noted recently, a key reason our traffic has been growing in the past year is social media, which also routinely brings CP headlines to hundreds of thousands of people.

Let’s compare that to the self-proclaimed “world’s most viewed climate website” (not!)  WattsUpWithThat, with its astounding 6,130 followers. I guess it’s not the most viewed via social media.

Heck, even Watts’ bête noire, climatologist Michael Mann, has 6,800 followers! And you should really follow Mann (here) if you don’t already. He tweets links to the science and to debunkings of deniers. That way you can join the growing ranks of those who don’t read the deniers’ websites. The traffic of WattsUpWithThat, like ever other major denial site, has been flat or declining since Copenhagen (check it out at quantcast.com).

I don’t think it is a big mystery why climate science hawks soar on social media and deniers don’t.

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A new report in The New York Times highlights how biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has produced a rolling food catastrophe in Guatemala.

The country once enjoyed a nearly self-sufficient level of corn production, but domestic producers were undercut by American corn exports subsidized by U.S. agricultural policy. Guatemala’s domestic corn supplies dropped nearly 30 percent per capita between 1995 and 2005.

In 2007, the United States established its expanded biofuel standards, and began relying on corn to meet them. That drove up demand, and the flow of cheap corn into Guatemala dried up. Meanwhile, larger farms and industrial producers took up much of Guatemala’s available cropland and water supplies to produce sugar cane, vegetable oil, and other crops to meet increased global demand for biofuel, due to European as well as U.S. policies.

The result left subsistence farmers with less and less land to work, and the average Guatemalan — whose diet is heavily corn-based — with no where else to turn for affordable food:

In a country where most families must spend about two thirds of their income on food, “the average Guatemalan is now hungrier because of biofuel development,” said Katja Winkler, a researcher at Idear, a Guatemalan nonprofit organization that studies rural issues. Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations. […]

But many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”

In 2011, corn prices would have been 17 percent lower if the United States did not subsidize and give incentives for biofuel production with its renewable fuel policies, according to an analysis by Bruce A. Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. The World Bank has suggested that biofuel mandates in the developed world should be adjusted when food is short or prices are inordinately high. […]

In part because [the United Nations World Food Program in Guatemala's] primary food supplement is a mix of corn and soy, it cannot afford to help all of the Guatemalan children in need, Mr. Gauvreau said; it is agency policy to buy corn locally, but there is no extra corn grown here anymore. And Guatemalans cannot go back to the land because so much of it is being devoted to growing crops for biofuel. (Almost no biofuel is used domestically.)

In short, Guatemala is a microcosm for the damage Western food-based biofuels are doing to food supplies for the global poor. The United States is currently on track to devote nearly 40 percent of its own corn crop, and 15 percent of the world’s corn supplies, to biofuels. By 2020, European standards will mandate that transportation fuels contain 10 percent biofuels. (Although the European Commission “recently proposed amending its policy so that only half of its 2020 target could be met by using biofuels made from food crops or those grown on land previously devoted to food crops,” according to the New York Times.)

Most assessments of the 2008 food crisis found that biofuels played a role. Agricultural production is able to keep up with the world’s growing demand for food; however, the growing demand for biofuels make it more difficult to match that demand in years when weather is poor. As global warming continues to raise the odds of extreme weather, less reliable rain, and less reliable growing seasons, the potential to meet that demand diminishes.

At the same time, most studies have determined that because of the carbon emissions involved in biofuels’ agricultural production, their net effect on greenhouse gases is either negligible or negative. More advanced biofuels, such as the ones based on microalgae, could provide a solution, but they have not been fully commercialized. For the moment, we’re causing severe damage to the world’s food supply with no real benefit to the global warming problem.

by Dan Lashof, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The long run up to the fiscal cliff is finally, and thankfully, over.

Now, it’s time for the president to address an even more serious cliff: the climate change cliff—the one we’re fast approaching as the amount of global-warming pollution in our atmosphere continues to rise.

That’s why today, NRDC and a broad coalition of environmental, civic, labor and healthcare groups urged the president to take bold and decisive action to help protect the nation against climate change’s ravages.

“Dear Mr. President,” we wrote in a letter, representing the millions of Americans who are members of the 69 signatory groups. “Thank you for repeatedly raising the threat of climate change as you have outlined your priorities for your second term…. It is the great challenge of our time and our response will leave an historic legacy.”

In particular, this broad coalition has coalesced around three things we’re asking the president to do, three things that can make the biggest difference on climate right now, three things President Obama can do on his own, without needing the divided Congress to act:

The first of those is to “elevate the issue of climate disruption and climate solutions in the public discourse.”

Why?

Because leadership matters. Because the president has to rally public support for the bold steps he must take to address climate change and to make sure those steps aren’t undone by Congress.

If you think talking about global warming isn’t important, think again. Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle and colleagues have documented how political leaders’s statements about climate have extremely significant effects. In one of Brulle’s recent studies, in fact, statements by political leaders were “found to be the largest single factor in explaining the ups and downs of public worries about the threat of climate change,” Brulle explains.

“If the President starts talking about climate change more, it will get more media coverage, and maybe more statements of support about climate change from other important players will emerge,” Brulle said in an email.

The second thing we’re asking the president to do is to use the EPA’s existing authority under the Clean Air Act to limit global-warming pollution from existing power plants. Right now, America’s fossil-fuel-fired power plants produce a full 40 percent of our global warming pollution, making them by far the largest source. A new proposal NRDC put forward last month shows that EPA can set standards that will achieve big reductions at low cost. In fact, our analysis shows, the EPA can cut power plant carbon pollution by 26 percent by 2020 and 34 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels.

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“It was very well done for showing climate impacts, but doing an hour documentary on climate change and not mentioning fossil fuels is like doing an hour on sexually-transmitted diseases and not mentioning sex.”

That is Peter Dykstra critiquing CNN’s new one-hour prime-time documentary, “The Coming Storms.”

Dykstra — an Emmy and Peabody winner — is one of the best climate journalists around. He is currently Publisher of the Daily Climate (which CP often resposts), and ”During a 17-year career at CNN, Peter Dykstra was executive producer for science, environment, weather and technology coverage.”

The good news is that, as the CNN promo explains, the show discussed how “Global warming continues to wreak havoc on weather systems around the globe.” The bad news is that the show never examines the cause of global warming or how to slow it down (see transcript here).

Here is more from Dykstra, in an email he sent to CNN staff and several reporters/bloggers:

I thought the individual reporting and storytelling on these pieces was strong, and makes a good case for what’s at stake for the future of climate change. I didn’t see a single factual flaw, which is unique and commendable, and the science within the pieces was well done.   I also thought that the resistance to the traditional model of giving equal time to outliers who question the vailidity of climate science was good, and sadly, a little bit brave in the current media climate.  The science is overwhelming, and the on-the-ground evidence is quickly catching up, as your hour demonstrated.

But the sum of the hour focuses on adaptation, implying that society is resigned to dealing with climate change.  I didn’t hear a single mention of what causes climate change, or what can still be done to limit its impacts.   If I ran a TV network that raked in millions of dollars in misleading ads from the oil, coal and gas industries, it would trouble me to go into utter silence about mentioning fossil fuels. Not the fault of the reporters, but you may want to take this up with the Home Office.

The polling makes clear that the (non-Fox-News-watching) public understands the climate is changing and that weather is getting more extreme. What’s needed now are more explanations of why the climate is changing and what we can do about it. CNN can do better!

ClimateProgress is hiring a new Deputy Editor.

The current Deputy Editor, Stephen Lacey, will become an editor at Greentech Media, where he’ll be covering the business of cleantech.

Regular readers know what an awesome job Stephen has been doing and how tough it will be to fill his shoes.

The full job description is here and below.  Please circulate this job description to anyone you know who you think is qualified and interested.

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by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents.  Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk,” insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and… we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.

Even facing undeniably real problems — say, discrimination against gay people — one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe.  There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.

Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.

And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change — the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.

We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets.  Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.

We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible — all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

Unless you understand these distinctions you don’t understand climate change — and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.

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The Noble Discoverer. Photo: Shell

The problems continue for Shell’s Arctic offshore drilling operations.

After getting its Kulluk drilling rig stranded off the coast of Alaska on New Year’s Eve — capping off a series of operational mishaps throughout 2012 — Shell’s other Arctic drilling ship is being investigated by the Coast Guard for pollution violations.

According to CBS, criminal investigators boarded the Noble Discoverer last November to look into safety and pollution problems, eventually grounding the ship for violations. The Noble Discoverer is a 572-foot drilling ship owned by the Noble Corporation and contracted by Shell for Arctic offshore drilling exploration:

The revelation that another Noble ship working for Shell may have been operating with serious safety and pollution control problems bolstered allegations from environmental activists that the oil industry is unable to conduct safe oil drilling operations in the Arctic Ocean.

The Coast Guard conducted a routine marine safety inspection when Noble’s Discoverer arrived at a Seward, Alaska port in late November. The inspection team found serious issues with the ship’s safety management system and pollution control systems. The inspectors also listed more than a dozen “discrepancies” which, sources tell CBS News, led them to call in the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) to determine if there were violations of federal law.

After the Coast Guard’s initial inspection of the Noble Discoverer, on Nov. 30, Capt. Paul Mehler, the Officer in Charge of Marine Inspection in Western Alaska issued a Port State Control Detention for the Noble Discoverer, effectively grounding the ship until safety violations were fixed. By Dec. 19, the ship was released from Port Detention but still remains in Seward for additional repairs.

This is not the first time Shell’s Arctic drilling operations have been targeted for environmental infractions. Last May, an inspection of the Noble Discoverer revealed over a dozen problems, including issues with its electrical system, water management system, and its engine. The Kulluk, a drilling rig owned and operated by Shell, has also received three warnings for excess pollution and nearly 20 warnings for problems with maintenance systems, reports CBS.

Shell also experienced a massive failure with its oil spill response equipment. During testing last September, the company’s oil spill containment dome was “crushed like a beer can” during testing. Just two years before, Shell promised that it had “designed and equipped the most robust oil spill response system in the Arctic known to the industry.”

For the last week, Shell has been dealing with a public relations nightmare after losing control of its Kulluk drilling rig near a remote Alaskan island. The Coast Guard has been working to help Shell tow the vessel back out to sea. And this isn’t the first grounding incident either. Last July, the Noble Discoverer slipped anchor and was beached for a short time in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

Concerned about the range of problems Shell has faced in the region over the last year, environmental groups have called on the Obama Administration to revoke the company’s drilling permits for Arctic waters.

by Andrew Steer, via the World Resources Institute

This year has been one of those worst-of-years and best-of-years. In its failures, there are signs of hope.

An unprecedented stream of extreme weather events worldwide tragically reminded us that we’re losing the fight against climate change. For the first time since 1988, climate change was totally ignored in the U.S. presidential campaign, even though election month, November, was the 333rd consecutive month with a global temperature higher than the long-term average.

A WRI report identified 1,200 coal-fired power plants currently proposed for construction worldwide. The Arctic sea ice reached its lowest-ever area in September, down nearly 20 percent from its previous low in 2007. And disappointing international negotiations in June and December warned us not to rely too much on multilateral government-to-government solutions to global problems.

But 2012 was also a year of potential turning points. A number of new “plurilateral” approaches to problem-solving came to the fore, offering genuine hope. A wave of emerging countries, led by China, embraced market-based green growth strategies. Costs for renewable energy continued their downward path, and are now competitive in a growing number of contexts.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that global investment in renewable energy was probably around $250 billion in 2012, down by perhaps 10 percent over the previous year, but not bad given the eliminations of many subsidy programs, economic austerity in the West, and the sharp shale-induced declines in natural gas prices. And the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy, coupled with the ongoing drought covering more than half of the United States (which will turn out to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history) may have opened the door to a change of psychology, in turn potentially enabling the Obama Administration to exhibit the international leadership the world so urgently needs, as many of us have advocated.

How Goes the Battle?

June 2012, the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit and the Silver Jubilee of the Brundtland Report, encouraged us to reflect on the meaning and track record of progress. We were reminded that, judged by many measures, progress over the past two decades has been unmatched in history. Real incomes in developing countries have doubled, global poverty rates have halved, and life expectancy has risen by four years. Africa, regarded as a failing continent at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, has for the past decade been raising living standards more rapidly than today’s advanced economies did during their industrial revolutions.

But the 70 percent growth in global GDP footprint over the past two decades has come at a high cost in terms of borrowing from future generations. Debts incurred are not only financial, they are ecological. Each year, the world has been losing 13 million hectares of forest – an area the size of Mississippi. A third of the world’s population already faces some form of water scarcity, and this is expected to double by 2050. Global carbon emissions continue to rise when they urgently need to fall. Even the conservative World Bank this November projected a rise in average global temperature of 4 degrees Celsius, with massive costs to humanity, especially the poor.

Profoundly disappointing this year was the inability of international diplomats to make deals with bite to address such problems. At Rio in June, the negotiated text was severely inadequate to the task ahead. Those of us who had participated in the original 1992 Rio Summit were struck by just how much weaker the sense of urgency was, and how unproductively politicized the entire process had become. The Doha climate negotiations at the end of the year just about achieved the minimum required to keep the Durban and Cancun spirit alive. All of us agree that a global deal is more essential than ever, but it will require much greater leadership than is currently evident.

A Club World

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President Obama is about to nominate outgoing Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire as the new head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a very private prediction from a very senior source in Washington’s congressional delegation. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

M.I.T. climate scientist Kerry Emanuel has published an updated edition of “What We Know About Climate Change,” his 2007 book explaining the science of global warming. [New York Times]

Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel. [New York Times]

New solar power installations in Germany hit a record high last year, but tapered off in the fourth quarter as subsidies were cut to curb costs to consumers, Environment Ministry data showed on Saturday. [Express Tribune]

A Canadian company has developed a cleansing technology that may one day capture and remove heat-trapping gasses directly from the sky. And it is even possible that the gas could then be sold for industrial use. [New York Times]

More than 100 homes destroyed and thousands of people displaced on Australian island state of Tasmania due to dozens of wildfires sparked by record high temperatures. [Guardian]

Global warming could result in a significant shift of the North American monsoon, with less rain during the early part of the season, in June and July, and more rain later in the summer and early autumn. [Summit County Voice]

Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) and a salvage crew managed to refloat a drilling rig that ran aground in Alaska in preparation for towing it to a safe harbor. [Bloomberg]