Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced his resignation today. He sent out a remarkable letter to Energy Department employees.

Given that he has not spoken out strongly on the climate crisis since the start of his term, his words on the subject are striking. Here are some excerpts:

• The average temperature of our planet is rising, with majority of the temperature increase occurring in the last thirty years. During the three decades from 1980 to 2011, the number of violent storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, as tabulated by the reinsurance company Munich Re, has increased more than three-fold. They also estimate that the financial losses follow a trend line that has gone from $40 billion to $170 billion dollars per year. Most of those losses were not insured, and the country suffering the largest losses by far is the United States.  As the President said in his recent Inaugural Address, “some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”
• The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity has had a significant and likely dominant role in climate change. There is also increasingly compelling evidence that the weather changes we have witnessed during this thirty year time period are due to climate change.
• Virtually all of the other OECD countries, and most developing countries including China, India, Mexico, and Brazil have accepted the judgment of climate scientists.
• … China now exceeds the U.S. in internal deployment of clean energy and in government investments to further develop the technologies.
• … the risks we run if we don’t change our course are enormous. Prudent risk management does not equate uncertainty with inaction….
• The cost of renewable energy is rapidly becoming competitive with other sources of energy, and the Department has played a significant role in accelerating the transition to affordable, accessible and sustainable energy.
• Ultimately we have a moral responsibility to the most innocent victims of adverse climate change. Those who will suffer the most are the people who are the most innocent: the world’s poorest citizens and those yet to be born. There is an ancient Native American saying: “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” A few short decades later, we don’t want our children to ask, “What were our parents thinking? Didn’t they care about us?”

Chu has been an excellent Secretary of Energy, overseeing a near doubling of U.S. renewable energy capacity and a huge jump in clean energy R&D. You can see a comprehensive list of what has been achieved during Chu’s term in his letter.

My main disappointment with his tenure is that after beginning with such refreshing bluntness on the threat posed  by unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions — see Steven Chu on climate change (2/09): “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”– he was effectively muzzled by the White House.

But that was doubtless not his choice. Team Obama obviously didn’t want him or science advisor John Holdren — or anybody else, for that matter — speaking out strongly on the gravest preventable threat to modern human civilization (see “Team Obama Launched The Inane Strategy Of Downplaying Climate Change Back In March 2009“).

Chu will be missed.

Related Posts:

• Video (11/10): Steven Chu on why China’s bid for clean energy leadership should be our “Sputnik Moment”
• Steven Chu On ‘The Avengers’: We Don’t Need Superheroes To Win The Global Clean Energy Battle

The bad news is that we’re all but certain to end up with a coastline at least this flooded (20 meters or 69 feet):

The “good” news is that this might take 1000 to 2000 years (or longer), and the choices we make now can affect the rate of rise and whether we blow past 69 feet to beyond 200 feet.

Glaciologist Jason Box makes this point in a Climate Desk interview with Chris Mooney, “Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise“:

So what can we do? For Box, any bit of policy helps. “The more we can cool climate, the slower Greenland’s loss will be,” he explained. Cutting greenhouse gases slows the planet’s heating, and with it, the pace of ice sheet losses.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who follows the scientific literature. Just last year the National Science Foundation (NSF) reported on paleoclimate research that examined “rock and soil cores taken in Virginia, New Zealand and the Eniwetok Atoll in the north Pacific Ocean.” Lead author Kenneth Miller of Rutgers University said:

“The natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 70 feet higher than now.”

And that was only slightly less worrisome than a 2009 paper in Science that found the last time CO2 levels were this high, it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher.
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By Bill Becker

There’s no question that when it comes to fixing national problems, Congress has bigger power tools than the President of the United States. But the President is not powerless. He has a variety of authorities conferred by the Constitution, validated by the courts, implied by tradition or delegated by Congress.

Nor does President Obama lack ideas on how to use those tools, especially on the topic of climate disruption. Since he announced in his Inaugural address that confronting climate change will be one his priorities in the second term, Obama has been bombarded with recommendations from outside groups.

He has tools. He has ideas. The next question is how aggressively he’ll use them. Several factors will be in play: his philosophy of government, competition from other issues on how he spends his political capital, his relationship with Congress or what he wants it to be, whether climate disruption has become a gut issue for him, and whether he has the support of the American people. More about that later.

Many of the President’s tools are well known, and the Obama Administration used a number of them on climate and energy issues during his first term. There’s the veto. There’s each president’s authority to appoint the smartest people in the country to lend their expertise in key government posts. There’s the power of the bully pulpit, used so successfully by past presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy to rally the nation to big achievements.

There’s the power of the purse. In aggregate, the government is so big a consumer of goods and services that its procurements can build sizeable sustained markets for green products – the kind of markets that spur investment in a clean energy economy.

But deeper in the President’s toolbox are several authorities whose potential applications for climate disruption and clean energy are not as well known:

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While 2012 might not be a banner year for Big Oil profits, it wasn’t a bad one either. With just BP left to announce 2012 earnings, Big Oil earned well over $100 billion in profits last year, while the companies benefit from continued taxpayer subsidies. Average gas prices also hit a record high last year, showing how a drilling boom may help oil companies’ profit margins, but not consumers’ wallets.

ExxonMobil — now the most valuable company in the world, passing Apple — earned $45 billion profit in 2012, a 9 percent jump over 2011. Meanwhile, Chevron earned $26.2 billion for the year. In the final three months of the year, the companies earned $9.95 billion and $7.2 billion respectively.

Here are the highlights of how Exxon and Chevron spend their earnings:

ExxonMobil

Exxon received $600 million annual tax breaks. In 2011, Exxon paid just 13 percent in taxes. The company paid no taxes to the U.S. federal government in 2009, despite 45.2 billion record profits. It paid $15 billion in taxes, but none in federal income tax.

Exxon’s oil production was down 6 percent from 2011.

In fourth quarter, Exxon bought back $5.3 billion of its stock, which enriches the largest shareholders and executives of the company.

Exxon’s federal campaign contributions totaled $2.77 million for the 2012 cycle, sending 89 percent to Republicans.

The company spent $12.97 million lobbying in 2012 to protect low tax rates and block pollution controls and safeguards for public health.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson received $24.7 million total compensation.

Exxon is moving ahead with a project to develop the tar sands in Canada.

Chevron:

In October, Chevron made the single-largest corporate donation in history. Chevron dropped $2.5 million with the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC to elect House Republicans.

The bulk of Chevron’s federal contributions came from the super PAC donation, for a total of $3.87 million for the 2012 cycle. 85 percent went to Republicans.

Chevron spent $9.55 million lobbying Congress in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Chevron paid 19 percent U.S. taxes last year (half of the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent), and received an estimated $700 million in annual tax breaks last year.

Chevron was fined $1 million for a refinery fire that sent 15,000 Richmond, California residents to the hospital. Though the company faces $10 million in medical expenses, Chevron earns it back in a couple of hours.

With Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips reporting $35 billion in combined profit in 2012, BP is the last company left to announce its profits for the year.

Four foundations run by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch hold a combined $310 million in assets, according to tax filings obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. [Public Integrity]

The documents also show that the brothers, principal owners of the second-largest privately held company in the United States, combined in 2011 to donate $24 million through those foundations with much of the money going to support free-market and libertarian think tanks and academic centers.

A $4.5 million grant to the George Mason University Foundation makes up nearly 15 percent of the university foundation’s revenue for 2011. The school is the largest recipient of Koch foundation money since 1985, and it houses several free-market and libertarian research centers including the Institute for Humane Studies, which received $3.7 million from the Koch foundations.

The D.C.-based American Legislative Exchange Council received $150,000 to help finance its activities, including meetings where corporate representatives draft model legislation with state legislators. The Koch brothers have decades-long connections with ALEC, which gave the brothers the Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award in 1994.

A study suggests the ozone hole over the Antarctic is altering wind patterns, thus weakening the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. [Climate Central]

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday that commercial production of cellulosic fuels would start this year, and proposed requiring refiners to use 11 million gallons of the material this year. [NYTimes]

The Australian government pledged to stop coal shipping developments that would damage the Great Barrier Reef, responding to a Friday deadline amid U.N. warnings that the reef’s conservation status could be downgraded. [Reuters]

The United States taxes fossil fuels less than just about every other developed country, according to a new report from the OECD. [WaPo]

The catastrophic drought in the central United States — which has cost the nation at least $35 billion, according to a report last week — shows no signs of abating as the nation enters the final full month of winter and moves toward spring. [USA Today]

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) plans to reintroduce a bill that offers tax credits for a limited amount of offshore wind projects. Its content would likely mirror the one he co-sponsored last Congress with former Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). [The Hill]

The longest streak of days on record without a tornado-related fatality in the U.S. came to a violent end on Wednesday morning, when an EF-4 tornado struck Adairsville, Ga., killing at least one person in a mobile home park. [Climate Central]